Innervisions is the sixteenth studio album by American singer, songwriter, and musician Stevie Wonder, released on August 3, 1973, by Tamla, a subsidiary of Motown Records. A landmark recording of Wonder's "classic period", the album has been regarded as his transition from the "Little Stevie Wonder" known for romantic ballads into a more musically mature, conscious, and grown-up artist. On the album, Wonder continued to experiment with the revolutionary T.O.N.T.O. (The Original New Timbral Orchestra) synthesizer system developed by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff, and Innervisions became hugely influential on the future sound of commercial soul and black music.
The album peaked at number four on the Billboard Top LPs & Tapes chart and number one on the Billboard Soul LPs chart, eventually finishing at number four on the magazine's Top Pop Albums chart for 1974. At the 16th Grammy Awards, it won Album of the Year and Best Engineered Non-Classical Recording, while "Living for the City" won Best R&B Song. Innervisions is widely considered by fans, critics, and colleagues to be one of Wonder's finest works and one of the greatest albums ever made. It was ranked number 34 on Rolling Stone's list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time", and, in 1999, it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
Recording
As with many of Wonder's albums, the lyrics, composition, and production of Innervisions are almost entirely his own work, and he also played all, or virtually all, of instruments on many of the album's tracks. He made prominent use of synthesizers throughout the album.
The nine tracks of Innervisions encompass a wide range of themes and issues: from drug abuse in "Too High", through inequality and systemic racism in "Living for the City", to love in the ballads "All in Love Is Fair" and "Golden Lady". The album's closer, "He's Misstra Know-It-All", is a scathing attack on then-US President Richard Nixon, similar to Wonder's song "You Haven't Done Nothin'" from the following year. "Living for the City" was one of the first soul music songs to deal explicitly with systemic racism and to incorporate everyday sounds of the street, such as traffic, voices, and sirens, in with music recorded in the studio.
Post-release car crash
On August 6, 1973, three days after the commercial release of Innervisions, Wonder played a concert in Greenville, South Carolina. Afterward, he was asleep in the front seat of a car as his friend, John Harris, snaked along a road just outside Durham, North Carolina, behind a truck loaded high with logs. Suddenly, the trucker jammed on his brakes, and the two vehicles collided. Logs went flying, and one smashed through the windshield of Wonder's car and hit him in the forehead. He was bloody and unconscious when he was pulled from the wrecked car and lay in a coma caused by severe brain contusion for ten days.
It was Wonder's friend and tour director Ira Tucker who first elicited some response from him:
When Wonder regained consciousness, he discovered that he had lost his sense of smell (which he later largely recovered), and he was deeply afraid that he might have lost his musical abilities, too. Tucker said:
Wonder's climb back to health was long and slow. He had to take medication for a year, tired easily, and suffered severe headaches. The crash also changed his way of thinking, as his deep faith and spiritual vision made him doubt that it was "an accident". He stated: "You can never change anything that has already happened. Everything is the way it's supposed to be...Everything that ever happened to me is the way it is supposed to have been." In an interview with The New York Times, Wonder commented that "the accident opened my ears up to many things around me. Naturally, life is just more important to me now...and what I do with my life." He also said:
Confirming Wonder's belief in destiny, Michael Sembello, Wonder's lead guitarist at the time, said:
Before the crash, Wonder had been scheduled to do a five-week, 20-city tour in March and April 1974. It was postponed, with the exception of one date in Madison Square Garden in late March. That concert began with Wonder pointing to his scarred forehead, looking up, grinning, and giving "thanks to God that I'm alive." 21,000 people in the crowd roared with applause, and, as a Post critic noted, "it was hard not to be thrilled."