Living for the City

This Stevie Wonder classic is an iconic blues-based groove combined with some very non-blues-based harmony.

Stevie sang all the parts and played all the instruments, including the sumptuous analog synth sounds designed with Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff. Stevie’s brother Calvin Hardaway is the main character in the spoken interlude. Ira Tucker Jr of the Dixie Hummingbirds is the drug dealer, Stevie’s lawyer plays the judge, and a studio janitor is the corrections officer. 

Here’s a live version:

There’s plenty of commentary out there about the lyrics. This essay by Rowan Ricardo Phillips is an especially good read on the line “New York, just like I pictured it, skyscrapers and everything.” But there isn’t much out there about the music.

Here’s my transcription of some key parts of the song:

The main groove feels like a familiar funk/blues trope, though maybe that’s just because I’ve heard so many people quote it. It’s three chords: F#, G#m and A, all over a steady F-sharp pedal in the bass. The rhythm is not complicated, but it’s superbly hip. The bass taps out steady quarter notes, except for the small walkup in the last beat of the bar. The piano almost follows the bass pattern, but not quite. The second G#m and the first A are both anticipated by an eighth note. That’s just enough asymmetry to make a bottomlessly compelling groove.

It is hard to place the tonality of this chord progression. It seems like it starts and ends in F-sharp Mixolydian mode. The F# is the I chord, and the G#m is the ii chord.

But then there’s A, which is the bIII chord in F-sharp Dorian mode (or maybe F-sharp natural minor, but Dorian is more characteristic of blues and funk.)

Is this just constant modal interchange, flipping back and forth between F-sharp Mixolydian and F-sharp Dorian? That’s plausible. In the long groove section, listen to the repeated line, “believing just enough for the city.” On “-lieving”, Stevie is singing A-sharp from F-sharp Mixolydian, but in the rest of the phrase he’s singing A natural from F-sharp Dorian. However, the vocal melody elsewhere suggests a unified blues tonality. We’ll get to that in a minute.

The chords in the refrain are a surprise: B and C#6 chords from plain-vanilla F-sharp major.

Let’s take a close look at Stevie’s vocal melody in the opening lines of the song using Melodyne.

This is all clearly in F-sharp Mixolydian, Stevie’s expressive pitch swoops notwithstanding. But then check out the next line:

Is he singing major thirds (A-sharp) or minor thirds (A natural) in here? The word “walls” swoops up to A-sharp but barely grazes it; most of the note is on A. The words “ain’t so” glide around between G-sharp and A. The second syllable of “pretty” lands precisely on the boundary between A and A-sharp. It sounds to me like Stevie is singing a lot of blue thirds here, exploring the pitch zone between G-sharp and A-sharp. (I colored these notes blue in my chart.) This is a very different effect from the groove section when he makes a clear distinction between major and minor thirds. 

Now let’s talk about the crazy synthesizer break. Wenatchee The Hatchet hears that as the chorus of the song. I hear the “living just enough, just enough for the city” refrain as being the chorus, but I don’t know what to call the synth break. So I just labeled it “synth break”. What is happening in the harmony there? Wenatchee squints at it and sees the F-sharp half-whole diminished scale. This guy on Reddit thinks the passage is based on the F-sharp altered scale. The D chord doesn’t fit into either of those scales, though. Both of these analyses hear the third measure of the passage as G resolving to D. I disagree; I hear one beat of Dsus4 resolving to D, with an unambiguous D triad in the melody. Anyway, the point is that I don’t think Stevie had any systematic idea in mind when he came up with this passage, I think he was just feeling his way around the keyboard until he found things that sounded good.

Let’s talk about that second chord, which is a D-sharp diminished triad. It’s not a fully diminished seventh chord; that would include a C natural, and if you play C on top of the chord it sounds terrible. It could be a D#ø7 without the seventh, I guess. I labeled it as a B7/D# because even though there is no B in the chord, it does sound good if you add B to it, and B Mixolydian mode sounds good against it. As a funk/blues musician, Stevie would be naturally inclined to go to B7 from F#7.

Here’s another take on this section:

https://twitter.com/NineStringEric/status/1475579899293302791

At the end of the tune, the synth break gets to the G chord and stays there, rather than resolving back to F#. This is an extraordinary idea! It doesn’t come completely out of the blue, though. Listen to the spoken word part, when the drums exit and the synth is tootling around in an unstructured way. I always heard this as being vaguely atonal, but on closer listening it is clearly in G major. Stevie is using the extremely tense sound of the bII chord for this young Black guy’s unjust imprisonment, which makes sense. But then when the song ends on this same chord, it’s a majestic, gospel-like sound. The symbolism is extraordinary, and it tells the story of Stevie’s protagonist more eloquently than his lyrics.

Update: Wenatchee responds with some clarification of his thoughts on the synth break. He thinks someone should write a book-length analysis of Innervisions. I agree.