Day After Day #116: Higher Ground

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Higher Ground (1973)

It's pretty wild to consider that when he released his 16th album Innervisions in 1973, Stevie Wonder was all of 23 years old. What were you doing at 23? I was a little over a year into my career as a journalist at 23, but to say I was anything more than a minor cog in the North Shore newspaper scene would be overstating things. Stevie Wonder was working on his first album at 11. Twelve years later, he was three albums into an incredible run of releases.

Starting out as a blind child prodigy is no easy feat, but Stevie eventually started scoring hits and by the end of the '60s, he was considered a serious artist. His 1972 album Talking Book was a big hit, reaching #3 on the Billboard album chart and featuring "Superstition" and "You Are the Sunshine of My Life." He was using more synthesizers and leaning into funk, which carried over to Innervisions.

Wonder played most of the instruments on the album, which hit #4 on the Billboard album chart. The lead single was "Higher Ground," which Wonder said was about reincarnation.

"People keep on learnin'/Soldiers keep on warrin'/World keep on turnin'/'Cause it won't be too long/Powers keep on lyin', yeah/While your people keep on dyin'/World keep on turnin'/'Cause it won't be too long/I'm so darn glad he let me try it again/'Cause my last time on earth, I lived a whole world of sin/I'm so glad that I know more than I knew then/Gonna keep on tryin'/Til I reach my highest ground."

Wonder's synth exploration paid off with this song, as he used them to come up with the clavinet wah wah sound and the bass line, both of which make "Higher Ground" supremely funky. He also played the drums on the song. It's amazing that one man contained so much funk. The full band live version is pretty incredible, too (see below).

The song got up to #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #1 on the Hot R&B Singles chart, although it only got to #29 in the U.K. The success might have been short lived, because only three days after Innervisions came out in August 1973, he was involved in a car accident that almost killed him. He was in a coma for 10 days. Wonder started playing concerts again in November and continued making amazing albums.  

The '80s found Wonder still scoring hits, but also making less interesting soundtrack songs like "I Just Called to Say I Love You" and participating in charity projects like "We Are the World" and "That's What Friends Are For." He also made appearances on songs by Chaka Khan, Elton John, Eurythmics, John Denver and Michael Jackson. He's remained busy in the decades since, but the sweet spot for Stevie Wonder was the entire decade of the '70s. Just incredible output from beginning to end.

As for "Higher Ground," it found a new audience in 1989 when the Red Hot Chili Peppers covered it and made it the first single from their Mother's Milk album. The song got a lot of airplay on rock radio and the video was popular on MTV, paving the way for the band's breakthrough album a few years later. The Peppers version features a funky bass line from Flea but also a heavy guitar thump. It's one of the better RHCP songs but it doesn't hold a candle to the original.