Wonder's insight into world around him

The Efram Wolff painting that adorns the front cover of Stevie Wonder's 1973 album Innervisions shows the singer surveying the world from his window, a shaft of golden light piercing the spot between his blinded eyes.

Or is it that the beam is radiating outward, a projection rather than a received image?

If there is an answer to be found in Wonder's lyrics, it is that both things are happening.

He is watching with heightened awareness, as able as any man to see the beauty and ugliness that surround him, and is using a pop star's elevated status as a promontory from which to broadcast his vision of a milk-and-honey land.

Innervisions is Wonder at his most confident and self-reliant, a cogent fusion of jazz, soul and funk that was written, arranged, produced and (largely) played by the gifted Motown artist.

It blends observations on the destructive power of drugs (Too High and Don't You Worry Bout A Thing) with commentary on social struggles (Living For The City and Higher Ground) and more characteristic songs of love and desire (Golden Lady and All In Love Is Fair).

If Living For The City, with its tale of a black Mississippi kid chewed up and spat out by big-city life, is the album's angry heart, Higher Ground is its joyful soul, a funky keyboard-driven number about striving for personal progress amid the chaos.

And there's more reassurance to be found in Don't You Worry Bout A Thing, as much in the warmth of its mid-tempo Latin groove is in its promise of unconditional friendship.

While the themes are weightier than most in Wonder's catalogue to that point, the overarching message is that war, crime, poverty, oppression and cynicism cannot exist in a place where love rules supreme, as painted in second track, Visions.

He's not certain that there is such a place, mind.