Stevie Wonder - People Move, Human Plays - Non-Album Tracks (1982-1983)

Stevie Wonder had an incredible musical career up through the year 1980. For most of the 1970s, he was on fire with creativity. Some people, such as some of his backing musicians, say there are entire albums worth of unreleased material from that time that remain unreleased and mostly unbootlegged.

Then the 1980s happened. Wonder still had some very big hits, but the critical consensus is that his albums weren't nearly as good as before, and it's been like that ever since. I believe he still was a genius talent, although his creative output slowed down and lessened some, which is typical for most musical artists as they get older. But he was steered wrong by bad song selection for his albums, bad production, having the songs usually go on too long, chasing trends instead of being an innovator, getting too sappy, and other such problems. 

His 1984 album "The Woman in Red" is a case in point. It was a soundtrack to the movie of that same name, and some of the songs aren't his, or are duets with Dionne Warwick. In my opinion, it's very sappy and generic, and pretty embarrassing compared to everything else he'd done up until that point.

But! It turns out he had another album all ready to go around that time, that was going to have the name "People Move, Human Plays." I have no idea what that grammatically strange title means, but it was definitely the title, since he mentioned it in multiple interviews. Apparently it was all finished by early 1984, but it was canceled at the last minute in favor of releasing "The Woman in Red" instead. Little is known about which songs were going to be on it. There are at least a couple dozen or more still unreleased songs from the early 1980s, so it could have been any of those. In my opinion, it was a terrible mistake not to release that, and to still keep it in the vaults until this day.

This various songs collection is called "People Move, Human Plays," but I'm sure it only has a few songs that would have been on that album, if even that many. However, I'm naming that since we know that's the name of a lost album from that time period.

What actually is on this album is something different, a grab bag of released songs and unreleased ones from concerts. Of the released songs, "Do I Do" and "Front Line" come from the 1982 hits collection "Stevie Wonder's Original Musiquarium I." "Used to Be" is a 1982 minor hit duet by Wonder and a singer named Charlene that had some unusual social commentary lyrics. 

"What's That You're Doing" is a collaboration between Wonder and Paul McCartney that appeared on McCartney's 1982 album "Tug of War." In my opinion, I always thought the song was flawed because it went on too long without enough to justify the length. Since this is my album to do whatever I want, I cut it down from six minutes to four minutes. I think it's much better that way.

I made an even more drastic edit to the song "The Crown." This was a hit single by musician Gary Byrd in Britain in 1983, but it didn't make the charts in the US, apparently due to some record company problem. It made it to the Top Ten in Britain despite being ten and a half minutes long. Note that I said "musician Gary Byrd," not "singer Gary Byrd," because he rapped and talked in his songs instead of singing them. However, there were a lot of backing vocals too, and Wonder sang a verse. So I made a Wonder-centric version. It took out pretty much all of the Byrd rapping but kept the backing vocals singing the chorus, the Wonder-sang part, and an instrumental section. Voila, it turned into a pretty great Wonder song that's four minutes long. My apologies to Byrd for cutting him out!

The other six songs here are all unreleased versions from concerts. However, some of them have studio released versions; it's just that I prefer the live versions better, because one can largely dodge the bad production and overproduction that way. "Ebony and Ivory," of course, was a huge Number One single duet between McCartney and Wonder in 1982. Since that gets overplayed way too much, I chose a concert version that's interesting because Wonder takes center stage singing it without McCartney there at all. It has "[Edit]" in the title because I edited out some sonic flaws.

"Redemption Song" is the classic Bob Marley song. Wonder did a studio version of this for a movie soundtrack in 1996, but it has the usual bad production issues. This version was done in concert with the reggae band Third World. I edited it considerably because it was a rough version with lots of mistakes. I'll bet it was a spontaneous thing and they hadn't practiced together at all. There are a couple of points where Wonder forgot the lyrics that I couldn't fix since he mumbled or didn't sing anything at all. But those are pretty brief.

"Stay Gold" and "Overjoyed" are nice Wonder originals that suffered from the usual bad production issues. But they sounded very different, and much better, in concert. The studio version of "Stay Gold" never appeared on any of Wonder's albums (until best of collections later), and instead first appeared in 1983 for the soundtrack to the movie "The Outsider." "Overjoyed" was a hit song from Wonder's 1985 album "In Square Circle," but it was played in concert as far back as 1980. The album version was good, but he played a version on "Saturday Night Live" in 1983 that featured just Wonder on piano. I like that much better, so I've used that version. Finally, "Taboo to Love" is a nice original song that he only ever did in concert.

I only used the best sounding bootlegs for the live versions, and generally wiped out the audience noise wherever I could. I believe they all come from soundboards.

So that's it. As I said, this album is a grab bag of all sorts of random things, including a lot of collaborations, and they don't always flow well together. This definitely isn't the lost album version of "People Move, Human Plays," and he never would have released an album similar to this. But, in my opinion, it's the best of what's publicly available by him from 1982 and 1983, and it shows he had more enough material to release a good album then if he wanted to. And that's not even counting the two dozen or more unreleased songs from that time that haven't been bootlegged yet!

This album is 47 minutes long.

Oh, by the way, when putting this together recently, I also found one unreleased song I'd previously missed that actually is from 1980, "Don't Make Me Wait Too Long," So I put it on the 1977 to 1981 stray tracks collection "Ribbon in the Sky."

01 Do I Do (Stevie Wonder)
02 Front Line (Stevie Wonder)
03 Used to Be (Charlene & Stevie Wonder)
04 Ebony and Ivory [Edit] (Stevie Wonder)
05 What's That You're Doing [Edit] (Paul McCartney & Stevie Wonder)
06 Redemption Song [Edit] (Third World & Stevie Wonder)
07 What You Don't Know [Edit] (Stevie Wonder)
08 The Crown [Edit] (Gary Byrd & Stevie Wonder)
09 Stay Gold (Stevie Wonder)
10 Taboo to Love (Stevie Wonder)
11 Overjoyed [Live Acoustic] (Stevie Wonder)

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I didn't find any great photos of Wonder from 1982 or 1983. So I used a publicity photo from 1984 for the cover.