The Seasons of Stevie Wonder

There are few things in this world that are as certain as the passage of time. We may kick and scream and fight to keeps things as they are but time cranks its wheel and heartlessly marches forward. Things change, just like the seasons. Stevie Wonder has written no fewer than five songs based in and around the seasons and, though you may imagine its difficult to get much variation through a single metaphor, each song (and season) explores the deeper meaning of what it is to love, lose and move on.

While not the most obvious choice, we have to mention one of the more obscure selections in Stevie's catalog, the double album/Soundtrack "Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants." Its an album full of interesting moments worth visiting or admiring from afar but with the instrumental track, ‘Seasons’ we get an opening statement for what the seasonal metaphor can grow and develop into. The track starts with an audio clip of a mother telling her cold child a bedtime story about a garden that children played in and the bright sun that shone above them. The instrumental that follows is light and flighty as we imagine a garden and the blooming flowers as people run and play, and here the seasons act as a celebration of the simpler and happier things in life. The passage of time only growing the fondness of those memories, as life and love complicates the world we know.

While, its easy to boil each season down into a single representation of the life cycle (Spring/Birth, Summer/Living, Autumn/Dying, Winter/Death) with ‘Never Dreamed You’d Leave In Summer’ Stevie alters the expectation, lamenting the seasons past and the broken promises they represent when his love has ended in the time of year when things are most alive.

You said there would be warm love in springtime
That was when you started to be cold
I never dreamed you'd leave in summer
But now I find myself all alone

Promises were given and promises were broken, and betrayal happened when he least expected it. The seasons were a symbol of that promise but in the end, they stand as a reminder that sometimes a promise isn’t enough.

‘Superwoman (Where Were You)’ carries forth that thread and brings us, in its second half, to the struggle to move on. This Superwoman has grander and loftier goals in life, and as a result, she has left our wallowing protagonist behind.

When the summer came you were not around
Now the summer's gone and love cannot be found
Where were you when I needed you-last winter, my love?
When the winter came you went further south
Parting from love's nest, leaving me in doubt
Where are you when I need you, like right now?

Here, unlike our previous track, Summer is just another mark in time when our love was gone. Now the Winter is here, he needs her more than ever, but she has already moved on. The Seasons marking another in a long line of disappointments in an increasingly distant relationship.

What can love bring, though, when its already in full bloom? ‘Summer Soft’ is where you go, to revel in the live giving moments that only a true love can bring. The shock and abandonment from the previously mentioned tracks can only hold so much weight if they weren't preceded by the winds of true love.

Summer soft
Wakes you up with a kiss to start the morning off
In the midst of herself playing Santa Claus
She brings gifts through her breeze

Summer-personified is a graceful and inviting spirit that only brings happiness and joy. You get swept up in her majesty and gentle breeze, so much so that the rose-tinted blinders you’re wearing go unnoticed.

And so you wait to see what she'll do
Is it sun or rain for you
But it breaks your heart in two
When you find it's October

And she's gone
And she's gone
Summer's gone
Taking with her summer's play

Once again, the seasons mark a loss of love but also stand as a cautionary tale that if you get swept up in a temporary love with no intention of sticking around, you’ll only risk the heartbreak when it’s gone and takes with it all that it brings.

For all the nuance and heartbreak the seasons can represent, at some point you have to break through to the other side of the metaphor and see things as they truly are. In ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’ the seasons play a different role.

No April rain, no flowers bloom
No wedding Saturday within the month of June
But what it is, is something true
Made up of these three words that I must say to you

I just called to say I love you
I just called to say how much I care
I just called to say I love you
And I mean it from the bottom of my heart

Here the seasons and the holidays (and he goes through most of them over the course of the song) are special markers of a life lived. A simple map of time spent and nothing more grand than that. When they are set against something as simple as reaching out to someone you love and telling them you care, they pale in comparison.

In the end, we can map out our regrets in the falling leaves; count hours of loneliness in the accumulating snow; wish for a change with the blossoming leaves; hope for the best and stay cool in the summer's sun; But nothing can compare to the feeling when you have the love you deserve. Nothing can match it, and time may as well not exist.