But he delivers those words with grace and ease, giving a showcase to one of the all-time great pop voices. (Do people usually call to say that they love you on Halloween?) None of this is particularly poetic, and it’s also simplistic enough that Wonder didn’t bother to write a bridge. It’s not Christmas or Valentine’s Day or Halloween. On the verses, he points out that this is “another ordinary day.” There’s no special occasion attached. The conceit of the song is pretty obvious: Stevie Wonder just called to say he loves you. But then, a lot of Stevie Wonder lyrics are slight and banal, and these ones come from a good place. Lyrically, “I Just Called To Say I Love You” is slight and banal. On the six-minute album version, Wonder sings a long coda through a vocoder, making himself sound like a particularly sappy alien robot. Wonder produced the track, and he also sang and played everything on the single himself - the lead and backing vocals, the keyboards, the real and programmed drums. Instead, the sound of the song is extremely ’80s, built around glassy synths and hard-smacking drum machines. “I Just Called To Say I Love You” doesn’t sound like anything Wonder wrote in 1976, when he was right in the midst of his insane creative boom period.
The lawsuit raged on for years, and Wonder eventually won. But Wonder testified that he’d actually written “I Just Called To Say I Love You” a couple of months earlier after returning home from a visit to his mother. It’s a 10.) In the lawsuit, Chiate and Garrett claimed that they’d played Wonder a song called “Hello It’s Me/I Just Called to Say” in 1976. (“Signed Sealed Delivered I’m Yours” peaked at #3. Garrett was a childhood friend of Wonder’s, and he and Wonder had co-written Wonder’s 1970 single “ Signed Sealed Delivered I’m Yours” together. Maybe millions of dads were walking into hostile-territory record stores and buying the single for their daughters.Īfter the success of “I Just Called To Say I Love You,” the songwriters Lloyd Chiate and Lee Garrett sued Wonder, accusing him of stealing their idea. In the UK, it was the first solo Stevie Wonder song that ever made it to #1. The song hit #1 in Canada and Australia and Finland and France and Zimbabwe and a dozen other countries. On top of that, “I Just Called To Say I Love You” was a global smash. “I Just Called To Say I Love You” arrived just two years after Wonder and Paul McCartney got to #1 with the far-shittier duet “ Ebony And Ivory.” In the US, though, “I Just Called To Say I Love You” was Wonder’s first solo #1 hit since “ Sir Duke” in 1977. The problem, I think, is that this perfectly OK song, globally speaking, is the most popular thing that Stevie Wonder has ever done. The song didn’t seem great, but it was fine - sweet and pretty, even. When I finally heard “I Just Called To Say I Love You,” it was a little confusing. I started reading music magazines way too young, so I knew of the reputation of “I Just Called To Say I Love You” before I consciously listened to the song. But “I Just Called To Say I Love You” is the sort of song that people loved to complain about for a long, long time. Very few people will dispute the overall greatness of Stevie Wonder, one of the giants of American pop music. If I’m remembering things right, that visceral disgust at the Stevie Wonder song was a pretty stock gen-X opinion.
Stevie wonder i just called to say i love you movie#
The movie sets things up so that we, the viewers, are at least a little bit on Jack Black’s side. But his reaction to the prospect of selling “I Just Called To Say I Love You” is a laugh line. That Jack Black character is supposed to be an asshole - a living symbol of the kind of sociopathy that can result from a lifetime of snobbish nerdery.
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