Stevie Wonder is heading out on a short tour that will bring him to Madison Square Garden on November 6, performing his landmark classic album, Songs in the Key of Life, from start to finish.

The album is an emotional juggernaut, an immensely generous gift from the heart of a genius, and a masterpiece by almost any measure. Mr. Wonder set forth to cover the breadth suggested by the album’s title, nothing less than the “key of life.” And if he did not quite hit it all, his aim was true. It was the culmination of a four-album run (astonishingly released in just a 39-month timeframe) of sustained excellence unmatched aside from the Mt. Rushmore of 1960s-1970s giants of popular music—the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and maybe Van Morrison. Over the course of the sprawling record, two full-length LPs and a four-song 7-inch EP, he makes nary a misstep. From the musical compositions, to the lyrics, astonishing performances and sterling production, it has to be counted as one of the greatest records of all time. If simply judged as an album of vocal performances, I can think of none better. Here is one of the greatest singers of the 20th and 21st centuries at the prime of his abilities, commanding our attention for 22 songs spread over three slabs on vinyl.

Retailing for $13.98 in 1976, it was a gargantuan hit record, debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard Pop Albums chart. It spent 13 weeks at No. 1 and 35 weeks in the Top 10, yielding four Billboard Top 40 singles, two of which went to No. 1. It was the first album released under Mr. Wonder’s staggering new seven-year, $37 million contract with Motown Records.

I was 10 when it came out and after being swept away by the unrelenting groove of the single, “I Wish,” I marched right down to the record store and plopped down my allowance money. It was the first album I bought on my own. I knew Stevie Wonder’s music already from the radio. Funky singles like “Superstition,” “Higher Ground” and “Boogie on Reggae Women” were all big hits. As the oldest kid in my Long Island family, AM radio was my main exposure to music in the early 1970s. I had already amassed a collection of Top 40 singles I had purchased, plus some key LPs and ’60s singles I had inherited from neighbors. But “I Wish,” a song by a 26-year-old man waxing nostalgic for the time when he was the age I was right then, propelled me to commit to my first significant musical investment. I wanted that record like most of my friends coveted a 10-speed bike.

I think if I had been my adult self and bought the record on the basis of the hard R&B heard on “I Wish,” I would be initially let down by how the album opens, enigmatically on a kind of mellow note. As a kid, though, my mind was open. In fact, while I loved those funk-infused singles, I was also a big fan of Stevie’s smooth ballads. “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” and “My Cherie Amour,” also spoke to me. That chorus change of “My Cherie Amour” (“Oh Cherie Amour, pretty little one that I adore…”) in particular buckled my knees.

Here are some of my personal faves, the songs that are the most representative of the album and those I most look forward to hearing performed live:

Love’s in Need of Love Today

Songs in the Key of Life opens with a rich a cappella ensemble of male voices introducing “Love’s in Need of Love Today,” which could be all layered overdubs from Stevie. It’s hard to tell. While the album came with a 24-page booklet with lyrics and liner notes, with an extensive personnel list—and a gratitude page that nods to everyone from Kareem Abdul Jabaar, to David Bowie, on down to Frank Zappa—the credits listing who does what on each song is as haphazard as the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street. Mr. Wonder, though, plays much of the instrumentation on the album himself, including drums, and is surrounded by a core band that forms the backbone of the album. The stellar bass player, Nathan Watts, is a standout among an impressive group, and remains a steady sideman with Mr. Wonder to this day.

You don’t want it to end. It takes you by surprise. You thought the guy was just warming up. He is already out-singing anyone you have ever heard.

Mr. Wonder enters softly, “Good morn or evening friends/Here’s your friendly announcer.” All at once, we get a glimpse of some of the strengths and perhaps one of the few faults in the record. We get the warmth and a bit of the humor that remain themes throughout the record. But we also have a bit of the clumsy syntax that peppers the text of the songs. Stevie is one of those songwriters who will make an end run—at times, more like a flea-flicker double reverse—to complete a rhyme. In that regard, he is less like Cole Porter and more like Bob Dylan and who can complain about that? Like Mr. Dylan, the words are submissive to the master rhythm. So consistently does Mr. Wonder reimagine syllabic accents and leave us hanging on rhymes, that it appears to be by design and has become a lovable trademark of sorts.

The song’s message is simple. The Beatles sang that “all you need is love.” Ten years later, here is a dire warning that love itself is in need of love. In the voice of a broadcast news anchor, it serves as a perfect introduction to the album, which in addition to intimate moments, offers a wide-lens view of the state of the world during the mid-1970s, subject matter as broadly ambitious as the extensive scope of musical styles it contains.

The sonics, the warmth of the track itself, draws you in. You surrender yourself to the overall sound, rich and with a crisp presence. But then you also get all this ear candy put together like Brian Wilson’s layered work for the Beach Boys. It’s a classic headphone record, with perfectly placed percussion and thoughtful overdubs.

The song stays fairly restrained for the bulk of the arrangement. But as with many songs on the album, Mr. Wonder adds an improvised vamp over a repeated chorus ad-libbing with a call-and-response gospel style. His vocal starts to climb up in octaves. The slow-burn arrangement takes on a new layer of excitement, then another. Before you know it, you are completely swept up in it. The trust you showed in Stevie Wonder when you went and plopped down $14 on the LP based on “I Wish” turned out to be well placed.

“Love’s in Need of Love Today” goes on for over seven minutes. And you don’t want it to end. It takes you by surprise. You thought the guy was just warming up. He is already out-singing anyone you have ever heard. Inspired singing. Technically brilliant singing.

Village Ghetto Land

The Beatles are as much an influence on the album as Sly Stone, Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye. And not just in scope and ambition, but musically speaking as well. Indeed, “Sir Duke” sounds like it could have been written by Paul McCartney, and the Hare Krishnas who sing on the song “Pastime Paradise” is an idea out of the George Harrison playbook. “Village Ghetto Land” is a sort of 1970s synth “Eleanor Rigby.”

Herbie Hancock, who played on the song “As,” says he admired Stevie’s “orchestral use of synthesizers … Stevie doesn’t fall into the trap that I do” in trying to duplicate the sounds of acoustic strings. “Stevie lets the synths be what they are, something that’s not acoustic.” These parts, from an ARP synthesizer, sound just enough like strings to let you know the faux minuet vibe is satirical, a tip-toe tour across the typical 1970s American urban ghetto. The lyric was written by Gary Byrd, who spent months on it only to have Wonder call him during the recording with the urgent need for a new verse, which Mr. Byrd provided in about 20 minutes. The song is directed at out-of-touch, and presumably white, fellow citizens who look the other way or even disparage the poor. “Some folks say we should be glad for what we have.’” Meanwhile, families eat dog food while “politicians laugh and drink, drunk to all demands.”

Mr. Wonder takes us off the course set by the first two songs. “Loves in Need of Love Today” contains a warning but is ultimately a hopeful message that we can turn around “the force of evil plans.” The groovy slow funk song, “Have a Talk with God,” offers one source of that hope via devotional faith. “Village Ghetto Land” has a bite, though. It is not a Dylan-esque finger-pointing personal indictment; Mr. Wonder and Mr. Byrd merely offer a realistic litany of what life is like in America’s urban ghettos during a particularly low ebb for the country’s cities. It asks simply, if not naively, “Tell me, would you be happy in Village Ghetto Land?”

Sir Duke

The track that leads into “Sir Duke,” the fusion workout “Contusion,” was about the new direction jazz was taking in the 1970s. “Sir Duke,” though, is a direct tribute to the “pioneers that time will not allow us to forget.” Mr. Wonder had started the album around the time of Duke Ellington’s 1974 death. The song was the second single off the album and a second No. 1 smash.

A blast of brass opens the song with the riff that serves as the first of three main hooks. As a pop-jazz number, it reaches back to the early days of the big band era, with a jaunty 1930s-era hot jazz rhythm, something along the lines of “Diminuendo in Blue,” rather than the sexy languid swing heard on, say, “Jeep’s Blues,” both of which can be heard on Ellington’s big comeback record, Live at Newport 1956. The throwback vibe and the soaring melody of the chorus line “you can feel it all over” (the second hook) has Paul “Your Mother Should Know” McCartney written all over it. But the third hook of the song, which comes with the breakdown and syncopated bass, brass, keyboard and guitar lines also tips to the modern influence Earth, Wind & Fire was having on Mr. Wonder. At the time of the recording, that band was reaching its zenith with effervescent horn-driven pop-flavored R&B recordings like this one. “Sir Duke” is a remarkable ensemble arrangement, which makes it even more astounding to notice how Nathan Watts stands out with a staggering bass part. If you think you’ve heard the song enough, try listening one more time with your headphones while concentrating on the bass.

We also get more than a small bit of Stevie’s color-blind philosophy. This is not some pedantic lesson in the significance of African-Americans’ contributions to American music meant to induce guilt (as maybe “Village Ghetto Land” is); it is a celebration of all—white, jewish, black, male and female—who have helped build that quintessentially American art form of jazz.

I Wish

Eric Clapton said in 1974 that Stevie Wonder is “the greatest drummer of our time.” As music journalist Eric Sandler rightly points out, this was “hefty praise coming from a man who played with Ginger Baker.” A true musical prodigy, Stevie had become proficient on drums, piano and harmonica by the age of 9. By his late teens, he was not only a pop star himself, but he was writing and producing for others, including “It’s a Shame” for the Spinners, on which he plays the delicious drum groove himself. (Here is the backing track without vocals.)

“I Wish” is unmistakably a Stevie Wonder drum pattern. Aside from having an innate sense of groove, there is a musical inventiveness that might stem from being a well-rounded multi-instrumentalist, as opposed to someone who strictly defines themselves as a drummer. There is a consistent thread that runs from that Spinners track, through “Superstition,” and can be heard yet again on “I Wish”; a trademark Wonder bouncy beat. It has something to do with the way Mr. Wonder works the hi-hat cymbals. On “I Wish,” for example, notice how on the doo-wop-influenced post-chorus breakdown, he opens and closes the hi-hat in a wholly unexpected and unorthodox way, creating a rhythmic hook under the actual melodic hook. And that hi-hat gloss is there right from the top of the track. While the kick and snare drum beat asserts itself as the backbone of the track, the flossy triplets and accents he plays on the hi-hat, so prominent in the mix, is the excited heartbeat that makes our own pulses race.

Which brings us to that groove, one of the most famous in funk. As a musical colloquialism, “groove” is hard to define but we know it when we hear it. A groove is achieved when a drummer lays back in a rhythmic pocket and keeps the band from letting excitement mess with the tempo that was set at the top of the track. It provides a comfortable and predictable spot for the ensemble, knowing they can lean into the beat, or back away from it as musical choice, as in the jazz-coined term, “swing.”

On “I Wish,” as demonstrated in the Classic Albums documentary about the album, Stevie started the recording on the Fender Rhodes electric piano, which is the instrument on which he started almost all the songs on the album. His left hand played the continuous walking bass line, which was later doubled and embellished with growling slides by bass guitarist Nathan Watts. Then Mr. Wonder went in and laid down that drum track, followed shortly by what sounds like pizzicato chicken-scratching guitar parts, which are actually two competing synth parts playing countermelodies.

It’s an infectious, badass track that’s made even badder by a hard-hitting brass attack. Mr. Wonder spins a nostalgic lyric that’s at once witty and poignant. Can we still laugh at a line like “Trying your best to bring the water to your eyes/Thinking it might stop her from whooping your behind/I wish those days could come back once more/Why did those days ever have to go?” If not, we can still smile at the famous “Smoking cigarettes and writing something nasty on the wall,” followed by Mr. Wonder’s own sister, Renee Hardaway’s admonishing answer “You nasty boy!” And many of us recall the same reply we made to younger siblings who claimed they were going to tell on us: “Just don’t tell I’ll give you anything you want in this whole wide world.”

Mr. Wonder recorded the song the day after a Motown picnic. The label and studio served as a sort of middle school and high school for the boy genius, which might partially explain the wistful look back at his childhood.

Pastime Paradise

Mr. Wonder built this track up from a prototype polyphonic (ability to play multiple keys/notes simultaneously) Yamaha synthesizer, which he dubbed “the Dream Machine.” Gary Olazabal, who was one of the main engineers on the record told SoundonSound.com that Mr. Wonder was interested in using equipment that nobody else had. “Stevie’s still trying to get the next new thing,” he says. “He’s just like a kid that way.”

It is important to understand that this was still the very early days of synthesizers. Analog synthesizer sounds, pioneered by the Moog company, were first starting to be heard on popular records around the time of the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun.” But the technology that enabled fairly reasonable facsimiles of acoustic sounds like strings was still in its nascent stage. Digital technology would revolutionize it even further, but that was years away. With tracks like “Pastime Paradise,” Mr. Wonder was blowing our minds as we strapped on Radio Shack headphones in our parents’ living rooms in the same way the Beatles did a decade earlier for slightly older music fans.

It is easy to take a track like “Pastime Paradise” for granted now, when any kid with Garage Band can quickly dial up a wide variety of sonic textures. And yet rapper Coolio lifted the whole track as a sample to form his own variation of the song with the hit “Gangsta’s Paradise” in 1995, long after the digital tools were available to easily create new sounds. In 1975, to even achieve something as simple as the reverse gong sound that opens the track meant cueing up a reel of tape, turning it over, and meticulously locating just the right spot—just as Mr. Wonder starts to sing the first line—to drop the sound into what would make up the final master. A few years later, the same trick would literally be a push of a button.

In the Classic Albums documentary, Mr. Wonder points to “the whole Earth, Wind & Fire groove that was happening back then,” as an influence. He illustrates it by tapping out a rhythm that sounds like the band’s “Can’t Hide Love” from 1975, the year Mr. Wonder was in the thick of recording the album. The tension of the “Pastime Paradise,” ratcheted up by Afro-Cuban percussion and Hare Krishna bells, reaches an apotheosis when a chanting Krishna chorus, literally brought in off the streets, meshes with a gospel choir singing “We Shall Overcome.”

The title is a play on words about being trapped in false nostalgia and not facing the harsh realities of the present. While one might reasonably ask if that is not what Mr. Wonder himself does with “I Wish” and “Sir Duke” from the same album—after all, wasn’t he “living in some pastime paradise” in the amber of nostalgia, where even “whoopin’ [his] behind” was recalled wistfully?—it is a matter of application.

Sure, we all enjoy looking back. But a few years before the election of President Ronald “It’s Morning Again in America” Reagan, “Pasttime Paradise” warns of political manipulation of such sentimentality. “Glorifying days long gone behind/They’ve been wasting most their days in remembrance of ignorance…” While Southerners looking fondly back at the time of segregation are one target here, Mr. Wonder also takes a swipe at those who are so faithful that they accept living in poor conditions with some future promise of salvation.

Though the song takes on some hefty subjects in its lyric, Mr. Wonder gets a bit bogged down in the litany of “-tion” words, as Bono would a decade later. “I remember, when he was writing that song in the studio, he was struggling to come up with all of those ‘-tion’ words like ‘dissipation,’ ‘segregation,’ ‘exploitation,’ ” engineer Mr. Olazabal said. “He was trying to come up with enough of those lyrics that would actually mean something and make sense.”

Ordinary Pain

The next song, “Summer Soft,” serves as a breezy antidote to “Pastime Paradise” and the light mood continues into the next song of the album, “Ordinary Pain.” But it is a short-lived respite. This Al Green-flavored song starts with the voice of Stevie-as-naif, continuing the “Songs of Innocence” thread of the album, which can be divided along the lines of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The melancholy tune that forms the first part of the two-part “Ordinary Pain” suite is not without its humor. The truly Wonderously phrased “Tell her you’re glad/It’s over in fact/Can she take with her the pain she brought back” is perhaps his most gymnastic maneuver to finish a rhyme.

Lessons one should learn at age of 20s.

1.Avoid going on a dating spree. You will have plenty of time later on. In your 30’s especially. Crushes and random dates will only waste your time and energy. Period. Date once a while but don’t get too hooked on it. The probability of you spending the rest of your life with your Tinder date is    lesser than 10%                                                                                                                                2 .Have a purpose/ goal/ interest you are holding on to. Don’t live a life like a tree bark without having no passion or life goals. It could be anything simple like knitting to becoming a millionaire. Hold on to your purpose. You are tied to it.

3.apply 10, 000 hours rule practice. Read it somewhere that in order to excel the field you are passionate about you need to dedicate 10k hours and effort into it. Additionally, 8 hours per day for 1 year is more fruitful than 3 hours for 3 years.

4.Online Start ups. Recently, I’ve started venturing into online platforms like Etsy and eBay. Its a good head start to market merchandises online even if you have not managed to make much.

5.Long distance relationships are hard and often doesn’t always work. Especially when your mornings are his nights and her nights are your morning. It requires dedication and persistency to evolve. Proceed with care. Never fall in love with someone you meet online before knowing him or at least meeting him few times.

6.Learn to groom yourself. Change your hairstyle, dress according to your age, trim your nails, take care of your skin and treat your acne scar. Find the suitable style you rock, perfect blend of make ups and skin cleansing regime. Additionally, don’t try to look drop dead gorgeous but look presentable.

7.Ditch the emotional vampires. Could be your manipulative friends. Or douchebag relatives. Anyone who sucks the energy out of you and drives you nuts should be cut off your life. They are toxic. They are shitty. You DON’T need them. Ditch and run.

8.Build networks. Make new friends, attend seminars , volunteer at your local community, talk to strangers, attend seminar and conferences. That way, you will have the chance to interact with different people and exchange viewpoints. You will be surprised of how much you could learn from others.

9.Take up a hobby. Could be anything complex like designing rockets or learn baking. Apart from keeping yourself busy, it distracts you from the daily agenda and boring life. You could also develop your writing skills by writing to others.

10.Silence your thoughts. Through meditations, It helps to keep your conscience clear, and your thoughts calm. Alternatively; silence yourself for an hour day. No phone calls, no talking to anyone, no food or drinks and no deep thoughts for an hour.

11.Get adequate sleep. I am sleep deprived now, I perform less and I couldn’t focus on any tasks easily. Sleep is essential in order to increase your body’s efficiency. Your body needs to rest in order to function more efficiently.

12.Keep a diary. I like this particular habit because I could rewind time and review my past. The incidents in it. What I learnt. And the mistakes I did. Basically everything that happened a year, a month or a decade ago. Your learn about your past self too, ultimately.

13.Additionally move to big city like New York. That way, you would be exposed to various cultures and people from different background. As a diverse place, so far I have met people from over 10–15 countries in just a week. You will be exposed to different culture and learn more about people of other countries. If you can survive in New York, you can survive anywhere.

14.Social media is a waste of time. If its not put to good use. Use social media to propagate your start ups. Facebook, Snapchat, WhatsApp, and Messenger are crappy apps that’re waste of space and time. Limit the time spent on social media.

15.Time waits for no one. So stop wasting it on useless people, fake friends, temporary relationships, etc. Here’s a trick:- spend 16 hours per day on yourself, for you solely. Be with your family and do your own shit. Making time for others should be no more than 8 hours.

16.Experiment with jobs. Sometimes you should always get out of your comfort zone, experiment and learn your working style. Know which one might suit your best. Weight down pros and cons and change your job once every 3 years or so. Don’t just stick with one job for your entire lifetime.

17.Learn swimming. I’d like to say swimming should be an essential survival skill taught for kids. You never know when you will head up to the beach nearby, get drowned and die. Secondly, don’t swim without a life jacket or if you have no swimming experience.

18.Life goes on. With or without someone. Even if you have no one by your side. Get comfortable with your own solitude. Learnt to survive alone with nobody by your side. Life just goes on and you need to start moving on and do what needs to be done in order to move on.

19.Take care of your body and health. Health is wealth. Practice clean eating, avoid junk. Even if junk tastes like heaven and healthy food tastes like shit, you gotta do what’s best for your body. Start running or jogging. Hit the gym and work out on intense cardio. Start sweating, sweat is just your fat cells crying. That’s the motivational quote posted on the gym I’m frequently heading to.

20.Develop reading habit. You just can’t pick a few books, be it classics, inspirational or peppy and hope to inculcate a habit. Not unless, you’ve been reading for quite a while now and decided to resume that pleasure. you need to reach a stage where you can look past the actual material and delve more into the art form.

21.Get a mentor and ask them to coach you. Preferably mentor in the field that you want to pursue or that you are trying to perfect yourself at. Paid mentors are better than free serviced ones. Reason? They will put in more effort to coach you for good since its not a free service. Additionally people with lots of experience in a particular field should consider taking up mentee and passing down their knowledge to them. Talent unused and retained is talent wasted.

22.Wake up early. Get your stuffs done early, solve harder tasks first then move on to the hard ones. One step at a time. 20 minutes per task followed by 5 minutes of break. Repeat till you’re done for the day. If you have accomplished your tasks, reward yourself with an cup of hot chocolate.