“Love's in Need of Love Today” by Stevie Wonder

Songs in the Key of Life, Stevie Wonder's sprawling 1976 album, doesn't open with a bang. It opens with "Love's in Need of Love Today", a slow, soulful R&B ballad that works like a sermon before the service. Wonder had the title before he had the rest of the words, and he started on it in late 1974 in a New York hotel room, while his partner Yolanda Simmons was expecting their daughter Aisha, cutting a demo on a Fender Rhodes into a portable cassette recorder.

The finished track is close to a one-man show: Wonder arranged and produced it, plays drums, Rhodes, clavinet, synthesizer and bass synth, and stacks his own backing vocals under the lead, with Eddie "Bongo" Brown on percussion. The message is that love goes hollow unless somebody keeps feeding it, and one listen to the playback told Wonder it had to go first.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.