journey through the secret life of plants lyrics

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The Secret Life of Plants

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Stevland Hardaway Morris (born May 13, 1950 as Stevland Hardaway Judkins), known by his stage name Stevie Wonder, is an American singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, a child prodigy who developed into one of the most creative musical figures of the late 20th century. Blind since shortly after birth, Wonder signed with Motown's Tamla label at the age of eleven, and continues to perform and record for Motown to this day. more »

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# Race Babblin
#4 Same Old Story
#5 Venus' Flytrap and the Bug
#6 Ai No, Sono
#8 Power Flower
#9 Send One Your Love [Instrumental]
#10 Race Babbling
#9 Send One Your Love
#11 Send One Your Love [Vocal Version]
#12 Outside My Window
#13 Black Orchid
#15 Kesse Ye Lolo de Ye
#16 Come Back as a Flower
#17 Seed's a Star/Tree Medley
#18 The Secret Life of Plants
#27 A Seed's a Star/Tree Medley

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The Secret Life of Plants Lyrics

I can't conceive the nucleus of all Begins inside a tiny seed And what we think as insignificant Provides the purest air we breathe But who am I to doubt or question the inevitable being For these are but a few discoveries We find inside the Secret Life of Plants A species smaller than the eye can see Or larger than most living things And yet we take from it without consent Our shelter, food, habilment But who am I to doubt or question the inevitable being For these are but a few discoveries Wwe find inside the Secret Life of Plants But far too many give them in return A stomp, cut, drown, or burn As is they're nothing But if you ask yourself where would you be Without them you will find you would not And some believe antennas are their leaves That spans beyond our galaxy They've been, they are and probably will be Who are the mediocrity But who am I to doubt or question the inevitable being For these are but a few discoveries We find inside the Secret Life of Plants For these are but a few discoveries We find inside the Secret Life of Plants

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Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants

By Andy Beta

Pop/R&B

August 4, 2019

A journalist might have found themselves one autumn morning in 1976 eating a luxurious breakfast at Essex House before boarding a private jet to a farmhouse in Worcester, Massachusetts, to have a first-listen to Stevie Wonder’s masterpiece, Songs in the Key of Life . Wonder himself introduced the album, decked out in a cream-colored cowboy suit and hat, with a leather gun belt whose holsters were festooned with the cover art and the message “#1 WITH A BULLET.” Universally beloved, it shipped gold, entered the charts at No. 1, and stayed there until January of 1977.

When a journalist could next chat with Wonder, it was nearly three years later. They could just take the 2 train uptown to the New York Botanical Garden, where critics were instead served vegetarian fare as they listened to another double album, the follow-up to his magnum opus. Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants was years in the making, a soundtrack based on Walon Green’s documentary based on the bestselling book about how plants can be lie-detector tests, how the fern in your house reacts to your emotions, and how mustard seeds can communicate with distant galaxies.

October 1979 was a particularly auspicious month for double albums like Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk and the Who’s Quadrophenia soundtrack (Pink Floyd’s The Wall and the Clash’s London Calling would soon follow). Secret Life of Plants entered at No. 4 on the album charts its first week but quickly plummeted. After Wonder collected 12 Grammys in a four-year span, Secret Life of Plants only garnered one measly nomination. An incredibly ambitious tour—boasting over 60 musicians, singers, sound crew, staff, a computer to synchronize his synthesizers, a screen projecting scenes from the film, and a recording truck—hemorrhaged money and was truncated to six dates. Stevie couldn’t even sell out his hometown of Detroit.

Motown Record executives and fans alike did not know where to begin this Journey and critics were merciless. “May Be His Worst Yet,” read one headline. “More than being awful pieces of music, [they] reek of automation and transmit no sincerity,” went a review. Rolling Stone likened it to Karo syrup and called it “a strange succession of stunted songs, nattering ballads and wandering instrumentals,” while Robert Christgau equated it to “[an] anonymous Hollywood hack at their worst...ardently schmaltzy instead of depressingly schlocky.” The Village Voice equated it to “the painful awkwardness of a barely literate sidewalk sermon.”

It’s a reversal of fortune without equal in pop music. In nearly any appreciation of Stevie Wonder’s profound run of music, Secret Life of Plants serves as a page break, a bookend, the arid valley after the vertiginous peak of the beloved Songs in the Key of Life . In almost every assessment, it marks the end of the greatest run in pop music history. “If Alexander wept when there were no more worlds left to conquer,” critic Jack Hamilton said when Slate ran their “ Wonder Week ” feature, “Stevie happily composed 90 minutes of largely instrumental music for the soundtrack to a documentary about botany.”

Favoring slowness as well as quicksilver mood shifts, spare balladry and additive composition, acoustic guitars and two $40,000 Yamaha GX-1 synthesizers, whimsical experimentation and near invisible incremental movement, an album with six credits for “special programming of synthesizer” and Wonder with almost all other instrumentation, it’s a flummoxing and charming album wherein Wonder sings about seeds, leaves, and ecology as he himself embodies the traits of his botanical muse. The best insight into Plants may lie in the original Times review, where, in the midst of meditating on self-indulgence and Wonder’s sentimental mysticism, John Rockwell notes: “He has also managed to make an album that in its own idiosyncratic way may seem an oasis of peace and calm amid the bustle of the rest of the pop-music business.”

When Wonder accepted the challenge of providing a soundtrack for the documentary, even he was surprised: “I’d always figured if I did one it would be for a film that raised society’s consciousness about black people.” Originally, the film was to use a soundtrack made in part from plants with Wonder contributing “Tree” for the end of the picture. It didn’t fit with the rest of the film, but producer Michael Braun asked Wonder to instead score the entire film. So Wonder would go in with a four-track recorder and headphones. In the left channel was Braun explaining what was happening on-screen while engineer Gary Olazbal would count down the number of frames in the sequence in his right, leaving Wonder to sketch out the score.

Six studios would ultimately be used. It was only the second album to ever be recorded digitally (Ry Cooder’s Bop Til You Drop beat it by a few months) and the first album to use a sampler in the form of the rudimentary Computer Music Melodian, which perhaps explains the special thanks given to the air traffic controllers at Dallas-Fort Worth airport and the Los Angeles Zoo.

Its scope is difficult to convey, not just because a blind musician provided a soundtrack for a film that he himself could not see. Wonder probably saw about as much of the film as the general populace did, as The Secret Life of Plants never got a wide release in theaters and was never put out on VHS, DVD, or made available on streaming services. The opening movement of “Earth’s Creation” is ludicrously bombastic all on its own, full of Phantom of the Opera -style high-frequency shredding and chord-bludgeoning. With the film though, it pairs perfectly with intensely dramatic images of spuming lava, crashing tsunami waves, flapping seaweed, and dancing plankton. The first side of the album remains wildly uneven, but how else to convey the Godlike act of creation without being by turns chaotic, messy, lovely, whimsical, and a little cruel?

“The First Garden”—with its lullaby chimes, sampled bird songs and crickets, acoustic bass, and harmonica line (all played by Wonder)—provides the underlying motif of The Secret Life of Plants and it works magically with the time-lapse images of sprouting acorns, spores, and new shoots. And while “Voyage to India” might seem willfully exotic on the album, mixing together themes that appear later into an array of wineglass drones, symphonic strings, and sitar, it works with the film and its introduction of Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, the Indian polymath and botanist. Later on, Wonder folds in a Japanese children’s choir and a crackling duo of African kora and djembe drum.

It’s nearly 15 minutes into the album before Stevie Wonder’s voice appears, telling the story of both Bose and George Washington Carver on the plaintive “Same Old Story.” It scans as the first of many songs overtly about plants, as well as one of Wonder’s most forced biographical efforts. But the stories of Bose and Carver are far more painful than that. Bose was an Indian subject of the Queen, his work discovering the electrical nature of plants largely ignored by the Royal Society in London during his time. Across the ocean, the slave-born botanist Carver struggled most of his life to rise to the descriptor of “ Black Leonardo .” But as brown- and black-skinned men—“Born of slaves who died,” as Wonder puts it—their genius was discounted and dismissed outright in white society. There’s a tactile resignation in the chorus: “It’s that same old story again.”

In exploring the neglected, ignored, seemingly inhuman aspects that society affixes to the plant kingdom, Wonder finds resonance between his botanical subject matter and the black experience. “A Seed’s a Star” states in its first line: “We’re a people black as is your night/Born to spread Amma’s eternal light.” Reaching back to the Dogon tribe of Africa and their worship of the distant star Sirius B, also referred to as “Po Tolo,” that name in their language signifies at once the immensity of that heavenly body as well as the smallest seed, a paradox that encompasses the interconnectedness of all life.

Stevie introduces many voices other than his own. Children’s voices and overheard conversations hover at the periphery of several songs. Wonder deepens the dimensions of the album with these intimate, everyday sounds, drawing correlations to childhood, memories, and the connections between people, not just between plants. It suggests that the album could seemingly arise out of anyone’s daily life. While the book and film could be esoteric, Wonder insisted that the album was in part about down-to-earth black life and love, telling The Washington Post that year that this music “comes just from my life.” Perhaps that’s why he had his ex-wife, Syreeta Wright, come to lend her soft vocals to the indelible piano ballad, “Come Back as a Flower,” wishing to spread the sweetness of love and envisioning “that with everything I was one.”

Human as it can be, The Secret Life of Plants is big and wide enough to be decidedly other , too, as when Wonder warps his platinum voice with a wide array of electronics. There’s the Brainfeeder funk of “Venus’ Flytrap and The Bug,” maybe the closest he ever got to the sound of his contemporary, George Clinton. And then there’s the femme falsetto he adopts to sing as Pan for one of Journey ’s sweet delights, “Power Flower.” A woozy, low-key gem in the Stevie Wonder songbook (check the stretched taffy of his coos-and-drums solo 3:30 into the song) and one of Janet Jackson’s favorites , Wonder utilizes his synths to make himself sound something other than human.

That strange, neutered, warbling, alien voice that arises on the astonishing “Race Babbling” is as visionary a sound as anything Stevie ever created. It’s a techno odyssey that resembles the likes of Carl Craig and Juan Atkins and the hazy, ethereal feel of Solange’s When I Get Home (she explicitly credited this album’s influence on her own approach). In the context of the film’s collage of sped-up urban scenes, it even anticipates Philip Glass’ groundbreaking score for another nature documentary, Koyaanisqatsi . Unfurling, clenching, spiraling, and mutating across its nine minutes, it’s the longest song on the album and approaches the sort of gender destabilization of something like the Knife’s Shaking the Habitual . Wonder’s voice morphs and merges with the timbres of trumpet and saxophone (his manically high-pitched vocal hook is a freakish delight), and later blurs into the harmonies of Josie James until it’s hard to parse who is who. It’s a disorienting effect in more ways than one, a queering of the biggest African-American male pop star of the era that’s still without precedent.

Rather than attempt to carry on with Key of Life ’s trajectory and his own heritage, Stevie had the rare cache to wander down every path, in effect making Motown his own private press label. No longer rooted to the traditions of soul, gospel or the sound of Motown that he built his legacy upon, Wonder literally branched out, reaching upward towards an undetermined new destination, exploring intuitively and fearlessly in a manner that few artists have ever managed to do in the history of pop music.

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The Road to Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions

Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants: Issue 4

Peauxdunque Album Highlight

In this recurring feature, Emily Choate considers the life of an album that’s gone overlooked.

Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants

By Emily Choate, Peauxdunque Review Fiction Editor/Music Editor

A sprawling, experimental double album will always make something of an easy target. For critical scorn. For baffled dismissal. These responses tend to expose a paradox that lies at the heart of our culture’s relationship to artistic ambition. We laud and lionize the idea of creative risk-taking, while seizing upon the results. We seize upon the vulnerability such risk requires. It provides us a chance to assert our own cleverness. We point to cracks and imperfections, thrown by the arrival of something we hadn’t expected to hear. Perhaps something we cannot quite explain or categorize. The very something we’d asked the artist to attempt in the first place.

After Stevie Wonder’s masterful album, Songs in the Key of Life , brought him widespread critical and popular success in 1976, he entered a period of experimentation which included new compositional challenges—like scoring the soundtrack for a documentary, “The Secret Life of Plants.” Directed by Walon Green, the film is based on a 1973 book by the same name. Authors Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird sought to challenge common beliefs by exploring theories that revolved around the conviction that Earth’s plant life is sentient.

Listeners who had eagerly awaited work from Wonder for three years may well have been puzzled to learn of his new album’s focus. Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants arrived in the fall of 1979, buoyed in sales by Wonder’s massive popularity but dividing and perplexing critics. Though Secret Life quickly became overshadowed by the streak of enduring classics that Wonder released throughout the 70s—powerhouse albums like Innervisions and Talking Book —this adventurous, eccentric treasure deserves broader reconsideration now.

Watching the documentary now is something akin to opening a time capsule full of 1970s fringe experimentation and holistic optimism. The theorists featured in the film are all in various ways seeking evidence that plants display sentience, show empathic responses toward animals and humans around them, and perhaps even communicate beyond Earth itself. We learn about experiments involving the polygraphing of plants and attempts to give plants literal voices. In a scene titled “Can plants think?”, Soviet researchers claim to detect and measure a plant’s responses to abuse. Lab techs blow cigarette smoke directly onto a plant’s leaves or destroy a fellow plant in its presence. According to the scientists, such plants can even succeed in “correctly identifying the assailant.”

Forty years on, the question of whether or not the results of these particular experiments would pass academic peer review doesn’t really seem to be the point. Rather, what comes through is a palpable spirit of creative exploration underpinned by the fond care with which these theorists approach their questions about the subtle, hidden possibilities our world might contain. But what shines through most vibrantly is Wonder’s generous, idiosyncratic work.

Secret Life unfurls a rich and playful sonic ecosystem. Over the course of twenty tracks, Wonder engages the specific subjects and ideas of the film, but the expanded vision of the album also heightens and, ultimately, transcends them. By diving into its alternative world, we find a joyful but discerning encounter with the sacredness of all life’s interconnectivity.

The album opens with a suite of instrumental tracks that accompany the film’s extensive opening montage of nature footage. “Earth’s Creation” advances with deliberateness and bombast—almost “Boléro”-like, but with synthesizers—playing over images of the fiery (then watery) origins of life on Earth. During “The First Garden,” a more intimate piece layered with nature sounds, the film’s narrator describes the evolutionary shift that made plant life possible, “spreading across the planet a matrix of green, allowing life to flourish.” “Voyage to India” foreshadows “Come Back as a Flower” and then stretches into an ethereal mood, adding sitar to the album’s soundscape.

Wonder begins to sing twelve minutes into Secret Life , with the subdued “Same Old Story.” This song describes Indian scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose and American botany legend George Washington Carver, both profiled in the film. Wonder sings fondly of Carver and Bose, enfolding their attempts to “take science itself by surprise,” into a larger narrative about suppressed voices who are discounted by “non-believers.”

“Venus’ Flytrap and The Bug” gives us Wonder’s playful side at its wittiest. This saucy but deadly encounter between predator and prey unfolds in boozy jazz trio style. The Bug’s voice creeps in: “Hello flower / Boy, do you look juicy.” When the moment turns, and Wonder’s voice drops into a growl: “Don’t eat me / Please don’t eat me / I’m trapped in your love / Save me, don’t hurt me.” The track escalates into the sound of a loud bite, followed by a laughing exchange between Wonder and young child.

After a dreamy instrumental piece called “Seasons,” which the film pairs with time-lapse sequences of opening mushrooms and green shoots, the tone shifts again with “Power Flower.” This song, co-written with Michael Sembello, hands the story of nature’s quicksilver changeability to Pan, who offers cool assurance about our seemingly chaotic world: “It’s not magic it’s not madness / Just the elements I style.”

Rounding out the first disc is “Race Babbling,” a futuristic dance epic that runs close to nine minutes. The track revolves around its repeated central lyric, “This world is moving much too fast.” It swirls together ancient stories like the Tower of Babel with the problems of an accelerating, uncertain future: “They’re race babbling / This world is moving much too fast / They’re space traveling.” No matter how fast we move, or what marvels we invent, future progress doesn’t exonerate us from our oldest, deepest troubles. But we’ll keep dancing, too.

Secret Life ’s second half kicks off with the album’s sole hit single, “Send One Your Love.” The film uses this mellow, breezy love song to accompany a languid sequence depicting a sunny garden filled by well-dressed white people perusing cultivated gardens and prize roses, a scene meant to convey the domesticated ways in which people often choose to relate to nature.

“Outside My Window” follows—a more dynamic love song that arguably boasts one of Wonder’s warmest, most affectionate melodies. During this song, the film runs a joyful sequence of a diverse group of people growing their own vegetables. With the perfect back-up of Wonder’s lyrics—“My love lives outside my window / Clouds burst to water / So send love can grow”—these gardeners express the emotions brought out in them by nurturing their gardens and working the earth with their hands.

The ballad “Black Orchid” pays tribute to Black women. In the film, “Black Orchid” plays against shots of a solo dancer in a field intercut with extreme close-ups of various orchids. The song’s lyrics, written by Yvonne Wright, entwine images of nature with the loving strength of a woman who is “a rushing wind that’s asked to wait / For the promises of rain.” Wonder follows “Orchid” with the eccentric instrumental piece, “Ecclesiastes,” which draws us into a formal moment of classic pageantry, gone slightly cockeyed with the addition of an odd, high-pitched warble. It’s the kind of detail that divides listeners. Is it kooky? If so, is that a problem? But the moment is pure Secret Life .

“Come back as a Flower” captures a longing to experience the early-morning stillness of a garden. Sung by Syreeta Wright, who also wrote the lyrics, this song seems to distill the essence of the album’s spirit: “As I awoke to greet the coming dawn / The sun was hardly peeking through the garden / Then I wished that I could come back as a flower.” The lyrics’ tender clarity and the lush but nuanced arrangement make it one of the most graceful and affecting tracks on the album.

A pair of songs focus on a complex central concept: “A Seed’s a Star.” Among the musicians on “Kesse Ye Lolo De Ye” is Senegalese kora player Lamine Konte. The lyrics (which translate to “A Seed’s a Star”, “A Star’s a Seed”) are sung in phoneticized Bambara, Konte’s native language. Wonder draws inspiration from the Dogon tribe of Mali, known for their astronomically based cosmology. The film ties the Dogon’s celestial insights and beliefs to an esoteric experiment run by a scientist who hoped to prove that mustard seeds might share observable communication with a distant star.

Wonder threads these ideas about the interconnectedness of life throughout the rest of the album, expanding his sound to match. The sole live track, “A Seed’s A Star / Tree Medley” reflects an expansive, joyful vision that celebrates the stories and wisdom of long-ago ancestors—both human ancestors like the Dogon and non-human ones like old-growth trees. The materials from which we are made contain the entirety of the universe—but forget nothing they’ve learned. “In myself I do contain / The elements of sun and rain / First a seed with roots that swell / I gradually burst through my shell / Pushing down into the ground / The root of me is homeward bound.” But lest the message come across too ponderously, Wonder slaps an wild effect onto his vocal during these lines, to indicate that he’s playing the “Character of Tree.”

Before the album’s instrumental finale tracks lead us into synthesizer overload, Wonder gives us the title song—a gentle ballad that retraces the album’s ecological steps. Wonder himself appears solo onscreen to sing this song in the closing scene of the documentary. Slowly, he passes through lush green landscapes, the base of a waterfall, a field of sunflowers, crowds of lily pads on a pond, and a stand of tall trees. He sings as he wanders, recalling the wondrous lifegiving power of our natural world. But he also warns against taking nature’s generosity for granted. (“And yet we take from it without consent.”) But this warning is a humble one. Everything we are able to observe about nature pales in the face of what we don’t know, “For these are but a few discoveries we find inside / the Secret Life of Plants.”

When it comes to our ecological outlook, much has changed in the forty years since Secret Life first appeared. Climate crisis continues to escalate rapidly, and its darkest implications often seem to dominate depictions of nature found in any artform or genre.

We need permission again to set to page (or song or canvas or screen) visions of nature that do not dwell in destruction only. English naturalist Helen Macdonald has written powerfully about the devastating impact of habitat loss and decreases in biodiversity. But in her recent book, Vesper Flights , she argues against climate fatalism: “Apocalyptic thinking is a powerful antagonist to action. It makes us give up agency, feel that all we can do is suffer and wait for the end.” Macdonald writes that “In its earlier senses [the word “apocalypse”] meant a revelation, a vision, an insight, an unveiling of things previously unknown.”

Macdonald exhorts us to keep working toward a new way forward for our world, “even if we don’t believe it. Even if change seems an impossibility. For even if we don’t believe in miracles, they are there, and they are waiting for us to find them.”

When artists push past all the well-worn knowns and givens, they open a space within us when we receive their work. From there, we can hear the thrumming edge of our own vulnerability. From there, we can begin to imagine new possibilities.

Now more than ever, we must find our way back to a joyful, non-apocalyptic way of depicting nature again. Doing so is vital for sustaining long-term commitment to the fight against climate crisis. During this time of multiple crises, as we endure buffeting blows from all sides, we must discover hopeful ways to re-engage with the world.

We need to bring our hip-sway back to the natural world, to find new rhythms that help us keep moving through global predicaments that tempt us to give in to paralysis. We need a creative language that does not become mired in a funereal dirge. Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants offers the perfect antidote.

Emily Choate’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Shenandoah, The Florida Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Chapter 16, Late Night Library, Yemassee , and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and has earned several residency awards, most recently from Virginia Center for Creative Arts and The Hambidge Center. She lives in Nashville, where she’s working on a novel.

Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants (Soundtrack)

By Ken Tucker

Begin at the end. Stevie Wonder ‘s Journey through the Secret Life of Plants is so uneven, so full of tiny pleasures and bloated tedium, that for some assurance that Wonder hasn’t lost his touch, you ought to start by listening to the LP’s last cut. “Finale” commences with a quick, slapstick keyboard fill and then expands into an undulating instrumental whose billowing bass and synthesizers evoke a quivering field of flowers in bloom. Not only that, but the song works on an additional level as a sly parody of the kind of sweet bombast associated with silent-film melodramas.

After the delights of “Finale,” however, you’re on your own, since plucking the exhilarating moments from Journey through the Secret Life of Plants is a harrowing, highly subjective task. One person’s nectar is another’s Karo syrup, and the stamens of Wonder’s Plants are bursting with both.

The most problematic aspect of this album is the way it’s been presented: as Stevie Wonder’s first major studio release since Songs in the Key of Life in 1976. Well, yes and no. Most of the music here is from the soundtrack for a three-year-old film, The Secret Life of Plants , which was, in turn, based on a best-selling book.

As movie music, the LP succeeds, sometimes to mesmerizing effect. The entire first side, for example, coheres as a musical-botanical Talking Book of Genesis. The opening cut is called “Earth’s Creation,” and for once such a presumptuous title doesn’t overreach. Out of a cool, primordial silence emerge the wet, squeaky sounds of seeds thrusting up and out, like one of those Walt Disney nature documentaries in which stop-action photography shows a tulip blossoming in seconds.

Stevie Wonder creates sounds that are impossible to identify: the high, wafting trills that float through Journey through the Secret Life of Plants ‘ four sides might have been made by synthesizers, a string section, clarinets, any combination of these or none at all. Wonder’s technical mastery (he produced the disc and plays almost every instrument) works well in the service of the all-suggestive mysticism at the center of both the film’s subject (plants’ secret lives as a key to human knowledge) and his own career.

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But Wonder is caught in a dilemma. He’s too passionate to follow fully the old adage that good movie music stays in the background, repeats itself and guides the observer from scene to scene in an unobtrusive, reassuring manner. Sometimes he will and sometimes he won’t. The result is a strange succession of stunted songs, nattering ballads and wandering instrumentals that relies on the tiresome reprises of the most desultory soundtrack albums, the kind you buy for fond memories of the film but then never play. There’s “Send One Your Love” — a serenade built around a thin, quavering keyboard riff — given to us first as an instrumental orchestrated with a synthesized zither straight out of The Third Man , and then later as hit-single product adorned by woozy lyrics. Check out the ridiculously obvious theme song about the “discoveries we find inside the Secret Life of Plants.” And the wincingly ponderous mock-disco of “A Seed’s a Star and Tree Medley.”

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But there’s one entrancing, astute theme burrowing under Journey through the Secret Life of Plants that I’m sure is all Wonder’s because of its recurrence in his previous work: the comparison of plants and children. “Venus’ Flytrap and the Bug” climaxes with a child’s beseeching voice, while “Seasons” begins as a bedtime story to a wide-awake little inquisitor. A chorus of Oriental children sings a verse of “Ai No Sono.”

Like the radicalized Rousseau he is, Stevie Wonder presumes nature to exist in a state of pure innocence. Thus, the presexual condition of children is equated with green, tender sprouts — a neat, bold leap. Less neat and bold is the sad fact that, probably for the same reason, Wonder’s longtime musical representation of sensual awareness — tough, terse R&B and rock & roll — never penetrates Journey through the Secret Life of Plants. For a double-LP’s worth of music, we’re left with a few lovely but overwrought pop melodies, a renewed respect for Wonder’s technical prowess and an even fiercer desire to hear what he’ll create when he’s unfettered by the bana! restrictions of a movie-soundtrack assignment. And oh, yes: a gorgeous, funny “Finale.”

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Stevie Wonder Lyrics
Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants (OST) Album

Stevie Wonder - Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants (OST) Album

Artist: Stevie Wonder

Album: Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants (OST)

Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants (OST) Lyrics Stevie Wonder

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