More Stevie Wonder
- A STUNNING copy of this Stevie Wonder classic, with Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound on both sides – fairly quiet vinyl too
- Anyone who has followed the site for a while surely knows how difficult it is to find the pre-Innervisions Stevie Wonder titles with top quality sound and clean surfaces
- This pressing gives you everything you ever hoped for from this music and then some — it’s full-bodied and spacious with plenty of the all-important Tubey Magic that only the right pressings have to offer
- 4 1/2 stars: “Music of My Mind was also the first to bear the fruits of his increased focus on Moog and Arp synthesizers, though the songs never sound synthetic, due in great part to Stevie’s reliance on a parade of real instruments — organic drumwork, harmonica, organs and pianos — as well as his mastery of traditional song structure and his immense musical personality… his first truly unified record…”
We had a good number of copies for this shootout and sadly many of them weren’t fit to list on the site at any price. You can go down to your local store and pick up a copy with noisy surfaces and mediocre sound, but we don’t want to be in the business of selling records like that. I don’t know too many audiophiles who want to put up with dull, recessed, congested and compressed sonics no matter how good the music is, and that’s just what you can expect to hear on most copies of this album.
This copy is an entirely different story, which we recognized immediately when we dropped the needle on each side. There’s real immediacy and plenty of extension up top. The soundfield is open, spacious and transparent with lots of analog tubey magic. I don’t think you could find a better sounding copy no matter what you did!
This vintage Tamla pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound.
If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.
What the Best Sides of Music Of My Mind Have to Offer Is Not Hard to Hear
- The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
- The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1972
- Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
- Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
- Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space
No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.
What We’re Listening For on Music Of My Mind
- Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
- Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
- The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
- Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
- Tight punchy bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
- Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
- Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.
Vinyl Condition
Mint Minus Minus and maybe a bit better is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)
Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of other pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don’t have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful recordings.
If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that’s certainly your prerogative, but we can’t imagine losing what’s good about this music — the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight — just to hear it with less background noise.
TRACK LISTING
Side One
Love Having You Around
Superwoman (Where Were You When I Needed You)
I Love Every Little Thing About You
Sweet Little Girl
Side Two
Happier Than the Morning Sun
Girl Blue
Seems So Long
Keep on Running
Evil
AMG 4 1/2 Star Review
With a new contract from Motown in his hand, Stevie Wonder released Music of My Mind, his first truly unified record and, with the exception of a single part on two songs, the work of a one-man-band. Everything he had learned about musicianship, engineering, and production during his long apprenticeship in the Snakepit at Motown Studios came together here (from the liner notes: “The sounds themselves come from inside his mind. The man is his own instrument. The instrument is an orchestra.”)
Music of My Mind was also the first to bear the fruits of his increased focus on Moog and Arp synthesizers, though the songs never sound synthetic, due in great part to Stevie’s reliance on a parade of real instruments — organic drumwork, harmonica, organs and pianos — as well as his mastery of traditional song structure and his immense musical personality. The intro of the vibrant, tender “I Love Every Little Thing About You” is a perfect example, humanized with a series of lightly breathed syllables for background rhythm. And when the synthesizers do appear, it’s always in the perfect context: the standout “Superwoman” really benefits from its high-frequency harmonics, and “Seems So Long” wouldn’t sound quite as affectionate without the warm electronics gurgling in the background.