Credit: Far Out / Alamy / George Michael / Allen Beaulieu
Sat 10 October 2026 17:00, UK
No one, and I truly mean no one, does it like Stevie Wonder. For one man to tear up the music industry and leave all other artists gawping, that takes some might.
After all, there aren’t many people who could create an album so seismic that it stunned Elton John, George Michael, and Prince collectively into silence, if only for a second before they burst into rapturous applause. But Songs in the Key of Life harnessed that magic, that majesty, and that legacy so much that they really had no other choice.
Everyone should have been thanking their lucky stars that Wonder even released his 18th studio album, let alone at a point where we are celebrating its 50th anniversary. The whole point was that it was dangerously close to never happening in the first place. The Motown icon had grown tired of the music industry and was almost bidding his final farewell.
But a twist of fate led him to change his mind, and thank God, Songs in the Key of Life was therefore born. It is quite simply one of the greatest albums ever made, and well and truly cemented Wonder as an icon of his times and beyond. You don’t just have to take my word for it, though: let’s let John, Michael, and Prince do the talking.
“Let me put it this way: wherever I go in the world, I always take a copy of Songs in the Key of Life. For me, it’s the best album ever made, and I’m always left in awe after I listen to it,” Elton John said in 2003, and you could never get more of a ringing endorsement than that. Whatever far-flung corner of the planet ‘The Rocketman’ travels to, that orange soul opus has to be by his side.
That praise might have been understandable in the sense that Wonder and John were chart contemporaries at the height of the 1970s, but Michael was a different kettle of fish. When it boiled down to it, he was a big-haired ‘80s pop star of a completely separate disposition. But then again, his experience of performing with the soul master spoke for itself.
You could see that clearly when the pair performed ‘Love’s in Need of Love Today’, the opening track of Songs in the Key of Life, at the 1985 Motown at the Apollo concert. “It was amazing,” Michael later recalled, “I was there in a daze, I just couldn’t understand why they had invited me.” This was his favourite song from his favourite album, and his hero was right there, singing it with him.
Further reading: From The Vault
For Prince’s part, he emphatically declared that the Wonder 1976 opus was the greatest record ever made, which wasn’t far wrong as far as assessments go. But it just makes you think: with all of these artists potentially vying for similar claims themselves, what made Songs in the Key of Life the point where they stopped, bowed down, and hailed the king behind it?
Well, perhaps Wonder himself sums it up best with the sentiment of one of the album’s most tender tracks. He said back then that his love “knocks me off my feet”, but the same theory could be applied to the music he created in its midst. For John, Michael, and Prince, there was no greater trio who could vouch for that feeling of being completely blown sideways.
