Stevie Wonder "Music of my Mind"

"Music of My Mind" is Stevie Wonder's 14th studio album, released on March 3, 1972, by Tamla Records. This album was the first recorded under a new contract with Motown that gave Wonder full artistic control over his music, allowing him to recruit electronic music pioneers Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff as associate producers.

The album features their custom TONTO synthesizer on several tracks. Stevie Wonder played all of the instruments himself, except for the trombone on "Love Having You Around" and the guitar on "Superwoman". The album was a modest commercial success, but critics found it representative of Wonder's artistic growth, and it is considered by modern critics to be the first album of Stevie Wonder's classic period.

Stevie Wonder became interested in using synthesizers after hearing the music of electronic group Tonto's Expanding Head Band. He began utilizing Arp and Moog synthesizers after a meeting with the group's members, Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff, in May 1971. Cecil and Margouleff associate produced, engineered, and handled Moog programming for the album, and would collaborate with Stevie Wonder on his next three albums.

Upon its release, "Music of My Mind" charted at number six and number 21 on the Billboard R&B and pop charts, respectively. Contemporary critics viewed it as Stevie Wonder's final step into artistic maturity. The album was praised for showcasing the ambitious use of Stevie Wonder's newfound artistic control and maturity as a songwriter, although some critics found the studio and vocal effects gimmicky and self-indulgent. In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked it number 284 on the magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, and in 2020, it was ranked number 350 on the same list.

The album was re-released in the UK in 2008 to coincide with Stevie Wonder's European tour. Two songs from the album, "Sweet Little Girl" and "Evil", were featured prominently at the beginning and end of "Teddy Perkins", the sixth episode of the second season of the FX television show Atlanta.