There's a specific pleasure in hearing the material that didn't make a canonical album — not because it's better, but because it shows you the shape of the decision-making. Four songs from the Songs in the Key of Life sessions, recorded in 1974–76 and unreleased until now, land today as a self-titled EP marking the album's 50th anniversary. Wonder has been sitting on these for half a century. The four tracks map cleanly onto the album's emotional and sonic spectrum without being redundant. It's Easier is bossa nova-inflected, a questioning number about whether love itself is worth the cost — lighter on its feet than most of the album's centerpieces. My Life Story of Love is the most conventionally Wonder of the four: bucolic imagery, a blossoming-relationship arc, and a co-writing credit for Susaye Greene, who also co-wrote Michael Jackson's I Can't Help It with Wonder. The album's version of Wonder is all over it. I Can See the Sun in Late December is the most interesting of the four — a slow jazz ballad about determined optimism that sits closer to the album's introspective mode than its celebratory one, and shows Wonder working a more spacious, less maximalist arrangement than the double album's signature everything-at-once approach. I'm Into Livin' closes with squelchy funk and a personal renunciation narrative — the womanizing past, the pledge to one lover — and features two singers who would go on to significant careers: Thelma Houston and Deniece Williams, both audible in the backing vocals alongside Shirley Brewer, who appeared on the album's Ordinary Pain. John Fischbach and Gary O Adante, the original recording and mixing engineers, recently remixed the tracks for release. This matters more than it might seem: it means the sonics weren't handed to someone tasked with modernizing them, but rather to the people who understood the original sound architecture. The arrangements — psychedelic soul with funk and jazz detailing, keyboards and synth bass fleshed out with organic instrumentation — are intact and period-appropriate. The EP arrives as Wonder prepares a full live performance of Songs in the Key of Life on an arena tour beginning 13 October in Birmingham, UK, moving through Europe, then back to London, Manchester, and Glasgow before five US cities: New York, Chicago, Washington DC, Detroit, and Los Angeles. The new material gives the tour a reason to exist beyond nostalgia — a genuine addition to the canon rather than a repackaging of it. Wonder's most recent new single was Can We Fix Our Nation's Broken Heart in 2024; his last studio album was A Time to Love in 2005. A project titled Through the Eyes of Wonder was announced in 2020, with no update since. The honest frame for these four songs: they are not lost masterpieces. They are what the best session material usually is — evidence that the creative environment was rich enough to produce more than could fit. That is not a small thing. The question of why they didn't make the album is interesting, but probably has a mundane answer: the album was already 21 tracks across two discs with a bonus EP. There was no room, not because the songs failed. Who these tracks are for is fairly specific: listeners who already know the album well enough to hear where these songs would have sat, and who find value in that kind of contextual listening. For everyone else, the better recommendation is still the original album.
