Overview
Between 1963 and the end of 1971, Wonder placed over 25 songs on Billboard Hot 100. [5] Twenty-four of those — including "Fingertips, Pt. 2", "Uptight (Everything's Alright)", "I Was Made to Love Her", "For Once in My Life", "My Cherie Amour", and "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours" — appear on Looking Back. In his early years, Wonder was often produced by Clarence Paul and/or William Stevenson and later by Henry Cosby. In 1970, Wonder started producing himself, beginning with Signed, Sealed & Delivered . Most of his singles were written by Wonder himself in tandem with a variety of others, or by Ron Miller.
This triple-album LP contains every major Wonder hit and many other singles from 1962–1971. A compilation which included material from this period was not again released until At the Close of a Century (1999). This compilation marks the first release of Stevie Wonder's 1967 original recording of "Until You Come Back To Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do)," which was a 1973 hit for Aretha Franklin.
Critical reception
In a contemporary review, Russell Gersten of The Village Voice wrote that, although it suffers from some poorly chosen material and omissions, the album is ultimately an "essential record" that "requires a bit more imagination and knowledge to appreciate than most anthologies, but the raw ingredients are there. Wonder worked in an era of excesses, and his fight to find meaning is—in its own modest way—uplifting." [2] The newspaper's Robert Christgau shared a similar sentiment and said that Looking Back is at the same time "flawed, long overdue, and essential." [6] He later included it in his "basic record library" of 1970s albums, published in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies . [7]
In a retrospective review for AllMusic, writer Rob Bowman gave Looking Back five stars and said that Wonder's songs from the 1960s were unique from most other Motown artists because he had a hand in writing them and his producers rarely collaborated with acts such as the Temptations or the Supremes. [8] J. D. Considine, writing in The Rolling Stone Album Guide (1992), gave the album four-and-a-half out of five stars and felt that it is a significantly better compilation than Greatest Hits Vol. 2 (1971) because of how it highlights both his studio albums up to that point and several non-LP singles. [9]
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