Stevie Wonder – “Send One Your Love”

TOP 40 DEBUT: November 10, 1979

PEAK POSITION: #4 (January 5, 1980)

Imagine spending two decades in the music business before releasing your first flop. That’s the quick summary of Stevie Wonder’s charmed, brilliant career. The most famous child prodigy since Mozart, Stevland Hardaway Morris signed with Motown Records at age 11. Two years later, with “Fingertips (Pt. 2),” he became the youngest artist ever to hit #1 on the Hot 100. ("Fingertips" is an 8. Say yeah!) For his 21st birthday, Wonder fought his label for complete artistic control… and won. The resulting string of albums—Music Of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, Fullfillingness’ First Finale, Songs In The Key Of Life—might be the greatest sustained artistic triumph of any R&B artist not named Prince. And the hits he produced during this period are, by any metric, absolutely untouchable. (“Uptight.” “Superstition.” “You Are The Sunshine Of My Life.” “Sir Duke.” Countless others. All 10s, obviously.) Quite simply, the man couldn’t miss. But after 1976’s Songs In The Key Of Life won four Grammies and gave Wonder the artistic clout to do anything he wanted, he responded by taking a three-year hiatus from releasing new music. And when he finally broke his silence, Wonder returned with…. a double album of songs about flowers.

Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants was many things: a soundtrack to a nature documentary from filmmaker Walon Green, the second all-digital recording in history, and (thanks mostly to Wonder’s reputation) an initial commercial success, peaking at #4 on the Billboard 200. It was also, to put it kindly, polarizing. Publications of the time called it “pointless,” “foolish” and “nerdy.” Grammy voters, who'd rewarded Wonder for every one of his releases since 1972, passed. Public reaction was equally mixed, and the album fell completely off the charts within months. Even as late as 2000, when Universal remastered Stevie Wonder’s 1972-1982 back catalog, Journey was notably excluded. The album’s one lasting legacy? “Send One Your Love,” a gorgeous wisp of a song and a disarming, straightforward entry into the most head-scratchingly odd release of Wonder’s entire career.

To put Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants into proper context, we need to talk about Wonder’s contemporaries. Other artists had equally amazing runs in the ‘70s, but none came close to achieving his same combination of critical and commercial success. Led Zeppelin? Blasted by critics during their entire tenure. David Bowie? Ignored by American radio with the exception of three singles. Pink Floyd? Basically a very large cult band before The Wall. But Stevie Wonder? His albums sold millions, five singles got to #1, and he won the Album of the Year Grammy three times in four years. (Paul Simon got a big laugh during his 1976 acceptance speech for that same award by thanking Stevie for “not making an album this year.”) Like Pixar during the 2000s, Wonder was seen as a barometer of quality, the one force consistently producing crowd-pleasing hits that never compromised on artistic integrity. So Journey—a languid, half-instrumental record of quasi-spiritual lyrics with barely a backbeat in sight—wasn’t just a left-field diversion. For many of Wonder’s impassioned fans, it must’ve felt like a betrayal.

“Send One Your Love,” then, becomes the album’s lifeline, a callback to the Wonder of old amidst a twenty-track sprawl of baffling, challenging music. Its lyrics are simple, elegant, almost purposely old-fashioned: “Show him your love/ Don’t hold back your feelings/ You don’t need a reason/ When it’s straight from the heart.” Wonder’s vocal delivery is warm and direct, while a gentle backing track envelops him like a cocoon. It’s the musical equivalent of gossamer; listening to the song on repeat feels like mainlining pure sunshine. And on an album where (literally) three-fourths of the lyrics reference flowers in some fashion, “Send One Your Love” is, pointedly, the only track to use them in a romantic context. “Send her your love/ With a dozen roses/ Make sure that she knows it/ With a flower from your heart.” It’s a fair assumption that everyone who attended a wedding in the summer of 1980 heard Wonder croon that chorus. Probably multiple times over.

My one quibble with “Send One Your Love” is a weakness it shares with the rest of its companion album: The song is simply too gentle for its own good. Wonder’s best ballads—masterworks like “My Cherie Amour,” “As,” and “I Believe (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever)”—have their own sense of interior propulsion. They’re gorgeous, and they groove. By comparison, “Send One Your Love” seems content to simply float down the river. There’s nothing wrong with luxuriating in a mood, of course, but this is Stevie Wonder; we expect more. On its own merits, the song sparkles, but compared to the highs of previous singles, “Send One Your Love” can’t help but feel disappointing.

Disappointment works both ways, of course. Stung by his first true critical rebuke, Wonder retreated back to safer territory for successive albums, to be warmly embraced with platinum certifications and chart-topping singles. Journey eventually enjoyed some measure of critical reevaluation as well. Wonder’s use of an early digital sampling synthesizer was later regarded as groundbreaking, the album’s bits of electronic weirdness (“Race Babbling”) contextualized as a brave sort of experimentalism. (As with other “challenging” works like McCartney II and Prince’s The Rainbow Children, it’s now a cult favorite.) But the Imperial phase of Wonder’s career was over. He would remain a pop mainstay for another half-decade, thanks to four more massive (if mostly terrible) #1 singles to come, but Stevie Wonder never seized the zeitgeist again. Another Motown child prodigy and an enigmatic weirdo from Minneapolis would be fighting over his crown soon enough.

GRADE: 7/10

BONUS BITS: Not surprisingly, “Send One Your Love” has become a bit of a smooth-jazz/R&B standard in recent years. Boney James’ cover is the best-known one, but you can also track down vocal versions from Brian McKnight and Vanessa Williams, among others. All feel like poor substitutes for the Wonder original.