STEVIE WONDER – "I Just Called To Say I Love You"

When I was learning this for the keyboard aged 7 or so, I was struck by how depressing the lyrics sounded – no holidays, no sweets, no spring, no *music*. How awful! To me Stevie was painting a bleak Mother Hubbard/Tiny Tim/Little Match Girl moral tale of the type designed to remind well-off children how lucky they are. How exactly was a phonecall meant to make a situation like that all better?

Even now I know that sometimes a phonecall *does* make things better, this song still remains miserable.

I actually don’t mind this. It’s a great melody – I can imagine a jazz player going to town on this like Coltrane and Miles did on a variety of show tunes back in the day. It’s a pleasant sentiment – not as grandiose as ‘Ebony and Ivory’ or one of his next contributions to this project. Stevie’s vocals are good although as has been noted rather melancholy.
It’s a bit repetitive – it might have benefitted from a middle eight or something – and the drum machine contributes to the unvarying quality – had Stevie been playing the drums himself, as on earlier hits, it might well have swung a bit more
The video is absolute pants – even worse than ‘Hello’ which at least has a compelling car crash quality.

Stevie Wonder might have been impressive in the 1970s, but his mastery of the keyboard and instinct for timeless lyrics are displayed to their best effect here, alongside vocals full of the passion and power we had come to expect from the performer of “Higher Ground”. An undeniable 10.

…is what I might have written if I actually liked this song, which I oh-so-definitely don’t. I could only handle two minutes of re-watching this tedious plinkety-plonk before I had to click across to a studio performance of “Superstition”. No change in the past 25 years, then; I loathed it then and loathe it now. 1.

Male, syrupy: I just called to say I love you.
Female, sharply and suspiciously: What have you done?

This is the exact point that pop music ceased to be great in the 80s. Stevie’s genius ended with Hotter Than July and his decline couldn’t have been steeper. There are no redeeming features to this song. A score of three is ridiculously generous.

“This is the exact point that pop music ceased to be great in the 80s”

Does not compute.

The ‘no this no that’ of the verses really bugged me at the time and sure a song this melancholic and sentimental wasn’t going to hold much interest for a 6 year old. I’m trying to think of the first non-dancing song I did like on that basis – is tough!

Liked a couple of his singles after this tho (altho of them ‘Go Home’ is probably the best and I didn’t hear that until recent years – shame it didn’t make top 40).

for consensus sake, this is terrible. i don’t dislike the melody and i agree with the person above who said that perhaps a different arrangement might be more bearable. as it is, the sound and mood are extremely sterile and the omnipresence of that monotonous keyboard make me feel claustrophobic. a three is about right.

I’ll say right away that this is a Stevie Wonder a long way from his best. Stevie Wonder at his best was a thing of wonder, after all, as is the fact that until this point he never had a solo number one (and the one he shared was sui generis). So my feelings about this are coloured by my delight that at last he’d got one, even if it was as a kind of lifetime achievement award. He’s not the first act by any means to be remembered in Popular by something well short of his best.

And having said that, I actually rather like it. So there! I like its jauntiness. I like its “I’m in love and nothing else matters” air. I’ve sung it down the phone more than once. Maybe I deserve to be locked up for that, but you had to be there, in those particular circumstances. Maybe to this old fogey (I’m thirty now, did I mention that or shall I go back to Two Tribes to tell that tale?) an old-fashioned soppy love song felt like a breath of fresh air in a culture that seemed increasing just to want to take its clothes off and get ion with it. If this hadn’t been Stevie, would the brickbats be flying as thick and fast?

And this point I should say to those young turks who are no doubt thoroughly fed up of the deeply uncool old bat linking her life to the pop charts that my time with Popular is nearly up so just humour me for a little bit longer! Because I’m living a double life now. I catch the train to St Neots on a Monday morning (change at Hitchin, warming mug of steaming tea from the urn between trains) and return to London on Friday evening, taking the Victoria Line to Oxford Circus and wandering through the maze of tunnels to the Central Line, all the time feeling like it was all a dream (here I am living in LONDON!). Those tunnels along with my general end-of-week tiredness just added to the dreamlike quality, and they were covered in posters for a Gene Wilder film called “The Woman in Red”. Which featured this song. (The film, not the poster). Actually I probably couldn’t have cared less about the film were it not for the film reviewer in terribly comme il faut listings rag City Limits who declared that all women would be offended by this film. Now there’s a red rag to an old cow!

Well, here I am, going against the tide yet again. 6.

oo wonder who that reviewer was? i probably know them! (it’s not me)

And plus what Tom said: plz to visit at least!

i always put this in the same category as ‘seven tears’ and ‘save your love’.

it said nothing to me about my (9 year old) life.

There’s something about the specific synth sound on this record. It’s very close to the one the Tweets used for The Birdie Song four years earlier, and which meant that weirdly this record actually felt a bit nostalgic to me at the time, even though I was only 9. It reminded me of another record which was HALF A LIFETIME away, back in the past.

Course, that only makes it even more unforgivable, in retrospect – not only is he using synth presets, they’re not even contemporary ones.

Relistening, I was leaning towards a fairly generous 3. And I made it to the end, only to be disgusted by that CHA-CHA-CHA ending, which I’d totally forgotten about. So, 1 from me.

Doh, I should have got here earlier – my withering “presets” put-down has already been done, twice! And has there ever been a worse ending to any song than that perfunctory CHA-CHA-CHA? (To say nothing of that maddening bass line, which sounds like another machine-installed preset.) So, yes, I agree with others that this is an efficient – if corny – melody, clobbered by a deadening arrangement. It’s almost as if the whole tenor of the record is to bludgeon the listener with a particular aesthetic, over and over again, e.g. those hymn-like resolutions at the end of each chorus, which always get my back up. As such, it reminds me of awkward slow dances at family occasions, and of bored cabaret bands with bills to pay.

If Stevie had produced and written this aged 8, I’d have been disappointed with him.

My Mum likes it though – I assume a lot of mums liked it, because I don’t know anyone else who likes the damn thing.

Stevie always had his mawkish tendencies but by the time of this one he seemed to have shot his talent bolt (post-Hotter Than July as was said above) and it has none of the genius for melody that made the likes of ‘You Are The Sunshine of Life’ so easy on the ear. Even though that one is just as soppy this sounds like a cheap birthday card in comparison.

I saw him live at Earl’s Court just before this came out and he played a tune which he said was from the soundtrack of a new movie. Can’t remember if it was this song though. His Jekyll and Hyde tendencies were on full display at that gig too. One minute the band were playing the hottest, funkiest version of ‘Superstition’ you’ve ever heard, the next Stevie was getting the ladies in the audience to singalong to ‘All I Do’ as if he was some naff cabaret act.

There also was a horrific episode of “The Cosby Show” in which Stevie got the whole family to sing along to this song–the low point being Stevie coaching Claire Huxtable to sing the opening verse, line by line. Torture.

wichita @ 33: Don’t you dare paint my face up in the sky!

I remarked a few days ago that this login had magical powers. I have plans for using them. Just be patient!

When I saw him for the first time last year, he kept this to a less than a minute snippet, which is, as Tom suggests, probably the ideal length. I just checked to see if I owned this and discovered that the last Stevie 7″ I bought was 1982’s undistinguished (but OK), ‘Frontline’.

Stevie wonder did write worse songs you know. (it’s taken as a given that he wrote some excelent songs too).

Try listening to “lately” and then say how bad “I just called” sounds.

I don’t have any numbers for it but Motown was HUGE in the 1960s in the UK so I can’t imagine a handful of chart toppers in the 80s would beat that.

Would saying that he’s phoning this in be a really bad pun?

You know what, I actually rather like this. The construct of the year running through the length of the song is quite a neat one and the blankness and doom of the rituals and consolations of the seasons being confiscated or banned stops it from becoming too syrupy. And I really like the blip-blip, blip-blip-blip-blip pattern that’s hidden quietly in the mix.

Until the last 90 seconds, when the thing has run its natural course, but still limps onwards with some very routine emoting and unwanted climaxes.

I’m sure that somewhere I’ve read that this was written for Nelson Mandela, or perhaps Stevie just dedicated it to him on Mandela day. It certainly works better as a song to an incarcerated man than as a rather overworked communique to a loved woman, anyway.

I didn’t like it at the time of my twelfth birthday, though, and amused myself by imagining the recipient of the call telling the singer to shut up. Perhaps unexpectedly, this was generally popular among my peers though, maybe because of some residual Wonder kudos.

Popular is now entering one of the worst periods of my life as I start five years at a top London public school. I’m a awkward, inward and rather priggish boy, bullied to tears most days, and the bottom pupil of the bottom class for much of the time. So far too many of these songs have bad personal overtones to them. But I’ll try not to be too swayed by that.

Parody watch: Ronnie Corbett, in blackface, on the two Ronnies in 1985! Part of a musical routine in which they also impersonated Status Quo.

“It works better as a song to an incarcerated man”

Aren’t there UN conventions on this kind of thing?

Re 40: Maybe not his finest moment but “Lately I’ve been staring in the mirror, very slowly picking me apart” trumps every ounce of IJCTSILY. “Very slowly.” Gosh.

Ray Parker Jr, held at bay with Ghostbusters, had previously played guitar on Talking Book.

Which reminds me that, shockingly, I have no Stevie Wonder lps apart from Uptight (featuring the fabulous, cynically ‘swinging’ Love A Go Go)*. So, if anyone had to point me to THE Stevie Wonder lp, which one would it be? I’m guessing it won’t be The Woman In Red OST.

*did have Talking Book on cassette as a kid, but long gone.