Three Strikes and Still Swinging: What Stevie Wonder Knows About Refusing Limitation

Stevie Wonder

I've been sitting with hours of Stevie Wonder interviews this week, and I keep coming back to one moment. A teacher told young Stevie he had "three strikes against you: you're blind, you're black, you're poor." His response? "Well, you missed one. I'm bow-legged."

That's not just a joke. That's a complete philosophical rejection.

The teacher is trying to protect him through limitation, narrowing his world to match her imagination's ceiling.

And Stevie?

He adds a fourth "strike" to reveal the absurdity of the whole framework. If we're counting reasons you can't make it, why stop at three? Why not include bow-leggedness, left-handedness, being from the Bronx, having a gap in your teeth?

The joke exposes the game. And then he went and built one of the most important musical legacies of the 20th century anyway.

What gets me is how Stevie contextualizes her limitation: "She [was] not understanding the significance of what could happen for me... she said what she thought in her mind as being best in her thinking for me." He doesn't get angry. He doesn't frame it as malice. He recognizes it for what it was: protection through restricted vision. She couldn't imagine the possibility, so she tried to save him from the disappointment of reaching for it.

But here's the thing: her inability to imagine his future didn't determine whether that future could exist. It just determined whether she could see it coming.

The Mother's Catch: Love as Accountability

Here's what I can't stop thinking about: Stevie tells this story about being nine years old, jumping off a shed roof to impress girls. All the boys did it; whoever jumped furthest was cool. The girls are watching, cheering on the sighted boys, then saying "that boy can't do that, he's blind."

Stevie: "Yeah I can do it. Y'all want to see me do it? Here we go. Get on your mark. Get ready. Ready? Jump."

One particular day, he's mid-jump when he realizes his mother is standing right there. He jumps directly into her arms. She catches him. Then, as he puts it, she "beat that ass." He remembers "falling asleep going, you know, like you're crying asleep."

That moment contains everything you need to know about how real love actually works. She didn't stop him from jumping; he needed to test himself, needed to prove he could do what sighted kids could do. But she also didn't let him think there were no consequences for dangerous choices that could genuinely hurt him.

Support AND accountability.

Safety net AND standards.

Most people only give you one or the other. They either catch you with no follow-through, enabling every reckless decision in the name of "support." Or they refuse to catch you at all, standing back with arms crossed saying "I told you so" when you fall. Stevie's mother did both, and that dual commitment shaped how he moves through the world.

She made him a space: the basement where he could experiment, make noise, work on his craft. She didn't say "go down there." He commandeered it for himself. But she was present enough to know when to intervene, when to catch him, when to discipline him, when to let him figure it out.

When asked if he taught his mother things inadvertently, if he surprised her, Stevie reframes it: "I prefer just to say I shared what I discovered with my mother." Not teaching from above but rather sharing discoveries laterally. That's the relationship dynamic that creates artists: mutual respect, reciprocal learning, space to fail, consequences when necessary.

Blindness as Strategic Advantage (Not Compensation)

Multiple collaborators say the same thing in different words: Stevie's blindness gave him creative advantages sighted people don't have.

Not "he compensated well" or "he overcame his disability." Actual advantages.

How?

First, he never internalized visual-based social hierarchies. Ray Charles told him about schools for the blind in Florida that segregated blind children by race. You literally cannot see race, but they still categorize you by it. That's how you learn the categories are imposed from outside, arbitrary, and therefore less real than people pretend.

Stevie's take: "It's ignorance, it's stupidity, and you know I really don't entertain either one of those things." The absurdity collapse. Some things don't deserve intellectual engagement— they're just that simple, that stupid.

Second, he never learned the "rules" of music the way formally trained musicians do. Gary Byrd, who wrote lyrics for Songs in the Key of Life, explains it: "He wasn't so jaded by the rules that a teacher might tell us. They teach you rules but they don't teach you that the rules are just guidelines and they can be broken."

Stevie stumbled into innovations "out of ignorance" because he wasn't bound by what you're "supposed" to do. The backwards gong on "Pastime Paradise"?

That required turning the tape upside down, calculating where to start so it ends where it should begin. Not a standard technique—an experiment that worked.

Third, his way of knowing the world wasn't constructed through visual abstraction but through direct physical participation. He didn't need to see the jump to execute it. His entire musical approach follows this logic—melodies arrive already formed in his mind as felt sound, not visual notation.

In one interview, he breaks down how "Loves in Need of Love Today" came together. He hears the chorus first, complete, in his mind. Then he's thinking about radio programs—church shows asking for offerings, asking you to send blessings. He makes the connection: "Love is in need of love today. Bring your love because that's what the world needs."

The melody comes first. The chords arrive simultaneously with the melody. Then the concept finds the melody. He's not building brick by brick; he's receiving the whole structure and then figuring out how to capture it.

One collaborator describes it perfectly: "He sees so many more things that people with sight don't see... he sees things of the soul more than things of the world of our quote-unquote reality."

What looks like limitation from the outside becomes strategic advantage from the inside. That teacher couldn't see it because she was working from a deficit model. Stevie was working from a different epistemology entirely.

"Stevie Wonder Time" vs. Industrial Clock Time

There's a running joke throughout the Songs in the Key of Life documentary. Everyone complains they became vampires working with Stevie. "Steve will go for three four days and then take a nap." One collaborator: "We all have this dysfunction where we can't sleep anymore because our bodies don't know how to."

Mike Sembello: "I went to the Betty Ford Center, I went to the sleep center... I said look I got this problem, I seem to want to stay up and record music all night long, can you help me?"

But this isn't dysfunction: it's refusing the industrial clock's tyranny over creative process. Creation doesn't happen 9-5. The work dictates the schedule, not the schedule dictating the work.

Motown wanted Songs in the Key of Life done in a year. It took two and a half years. They had cash flow projections, marketing timelines, budgets. Berry Gordy: "When you do your budgets and you do all of your cash flow projections and you have an album coming off of three big albums like that, then you are in a lot of trouble when it's a year later."

Stevie: "I didn't want to finish it as much as I wanted for it to be a representation of how and what I was feeling at that time." The feeling can't be scheduled. The double album exists because faith-based decision-making can be sound business, not in spite of it.

When it finally released? Number one immediately. Berry Gordy: "Then I thought what a brilliant negotiator you are." Faith vindicated by commercial success; but the faith came first, and the faith wasn't about commercial success. It was about honoring what needed to be made.

Gary Byrd tells this story about writing "Village Ghetto Land" lyrics: took him three months to get it right. Then Stevie calls at 5:20 AM saying he's ready to record. Gary doesn't have the lyrics at the studio—he's at home. He reads them over the phone. Stevie loves it, tells him to give them to the secretary.

Then Stevie calls back 15 minutes later: "Oh I forgot to tell you I added another verse to the arrangement. Write the other verse and call me back in 10 minutes. I'm recording it now."

What took three months, Stevie wants in 10 minutes. And Gary delivers. This is the demand of real collaborative practice—you rise to the impossibility or you don't participate. The urgency isn't cruelty; it's the gift demanding to be born right now while the spirit is moving.

"I'm Three Times 25": Refusing the Arrival Myth

At 75 years old, Stevie tells an interviewer: "I'm three times 25. I'm still young. I'm still a baby to this thing called life. I always feel like there's so much more that I want to do and I know that God wants me to do."

This isn't cute humility. It's philosophical stance about mastery.

Later in the same interview, he does the Duke Ellington thing—when asked what his greatest song is, he responds like Duke did: "I haven't written it yet." Then he clarifies: "As much as I'm sure all of us feel that Songs in the Key of Life was a very high point in our life, it is not the highest point."

This is the refusal to peak. If you've peaked, you're done. The work in front of you is always the most important work because it's the work you can do. Past accomplishments are evidence you're capable; they're not destinations.

People asked him which of his songs means the most to him. His answer: "They all mean the most to me." Not because he's being diplomatic. Because songs are like children (his words), and songs are lived experiences that can't be ranked. Each song emerged from a specific moment, captured something that needed capturing. "For Once in My Life"—he heard it at 13 or 14, then revisited it decades later with Tony Bennett. The song accrues meaning through the life lived between encounters.

Even his own songs teach him when he returns to them. "Songs are like taking another breath of a new day." They're not finished products you move past. They're living material that keeps revealing.

When asked about retirement, he's unequivocal: "For as long as you breathe, for as long as your heart beats, there's more for you to do. I love playing music—that's like my mantra. I'm not going to stop the gift that keeps pouring through my body. No one's worth me doing that."

Retirement is ontologically incoherent when your practice is perceiving. An artist doesn't stop drawing just because they got old. As long as you can imagine, you're creating. As long as you're creating, you don't retire.

But then he balances it: "Even though I love music tremendously, you have to give yourself time to rest and get it together." He's planning to go to Tanzania and Ghana—not Cabo, not the Bahamas. African continent. Cultural grounding. Pilgrimage. This is 1977, post-civil rights, during Black Power era. Going to Africa isn't just vacation; it's reconnection.

The gift keeps pouring through your body AND you need rest. Both are true. Rest isn't interruption of practice; it's part of practice. The gift doesn't stop when you rest—it refills.

Ego Dissolution as Revolutionary Practice

Here's where Stevie gets politically radical in a way people miss because he's framed as the "nice" one, the uncontroversial legend.

In a Larry King interview, he's asked about gun violence, North Korea, war. His answer? "Man has to get beyond his ego, that's our problem. The ego situation."

He's not talking individual psychology. He's talking structural analysis. Ego is what creates the false separation between my security and yours, my nation and yours, my right to weapons and your right to live.

The ego problem scales: individual ego → national ego → imperial ego. Same mechanism at every level.

Then he says: "I wish that the women of the world would say listen, until you get out of your spirit war and destruction you can't get no love." Women withholding intimacy until men stop making war.

It's simultaneously feminist intervention and possibly essentialist gender script—but he's gesturing toward something real about gendered relationships to violence. The move is strategic: women control access to something men want (intimacy), therefore women have leverage to demand behavioral change (stop war). Whether this holds up under scrutiny is debatable, but the impulse is right—use the power you have to shift systems.

On gun control: "How can you talk about so-called third world countries having nuclear weapons when people right here have guns killing as many people as would be killed in a war?" The contradiction reveals the priority. Bodies can't cross borders but weapons can cross into bodies. What matters isn't safety: it's who gets to enforce their will.

The theological frame runs through everything: "It's a gift I've been given by the Most High, and so I'm just very thankful." Not "I'm talented." Not "I worked hard." I was given this, and my job is to honor it by using it well.

Artist as vessel, not origin. Terminal, not source. Multiple collaborators use this language independently: "A great terminal... the higher power appreciates the person that's willing to become a huge terminal like that because the cup will be filled up when you surrender."

This isn't false modesty; it's a fundamentally different ontology of creativity. You don't retire from being a vessel. You don't "own" what moves through you. Your responsibility is to stay open, stay worthy, keep letting it flow.

The $13 Million Deal as Spiritual Practice

In 1976, Stevie negotiated a $13 million contract with Motown—unprecedented at the time. Berry Gordy says he was "extremely unhappy about 13 million dollars... until Songs in the Key of Life was released and it came in at number one. Then I thought what a brilliant negotiator you are."

But here's what matters: Stevie didn't frame this as "getting paid." He framed it as "being in control of your own destiny." Quincy Jones nails it: "A good businessman is one that understands the dynamics of win-win."

Quincy also says something crucial about why it mattered: "It's a terrible feeling to think that you get to be 70 years old, you know, you still have to go out and talk to some 24-year-old executive to get a gig, man. That's not happening."

The deal wasn't about wealth—it was about structural power. Who controls your timeline? Who determines what gets released? Who owns your masters? Stevie figured out what Picasso figured out: you have to control your own destiny because otherwise you're beholden to other people's limited imaginations forever.

And he went out on faith to make a double album when everyone said it was commercially unwise. Faith as business strategy. Spiritual conviction as market success. No contradiction. The sacred doesn't exist despite the material; it exists through it.

The Oscar Speech Nobody Wanted

1985. Stevie wins Best Original Song for "I Just Called to Say I Love You." That morning before the Oscars, he's watching the news and there's a segment about how long Nelson Mandela has been in prison. "Damn, you know, it's like 25 years or whatever. It was horrible."

      
      

He goes to the ceremony, sits in the back "because this is a lot of stuff." Diana Ross sings his song. They announce his name. He walks up to accept.

And says: "I accept this award in honor of Nelson Mandela."

The audience starts turning off. Controversy. People upset. Why is he bringing politics into this?

Stevie: "It was from my heart. It's like that made me think about something in prison as long as he had been and me getting this Oscar."

Then he jokes: "They banned my music and they cut me out. Yes, my money. They took my driver's license and what?" Laughs, clarifies: "I'm just messing with you, see how focused you are, see where you at."

But seriously: South Africa banned his music. He didn't care. "Ban it, I don't care, whatever, do what you do." He continued making songs like "Apartheid's Wrong" and "Dark and Lovely" because "when you're in a place where you know something's wrong, you got to speak on it."

This is the move: he doesn't separate the art from the politics. The Oscar moment wasn't him "ruining" a celebration with unnecessary commentary. The Oscar moment was him being consistent; if you're going to honor me for a song, you have to know I'm the same person who uses music as political weapon.

Years later, Mandela gets released. The prophecy fulfilled. The artist who spoke when it was unpopular, vindicated by history.

Collaboration as Reciprocal Learning, Not Hierarchy

Stevie insists John Fischbach and Gary Byrd should have gotten Grammys for Songs in the Key of Life. "They opened up so many different avenues to me... if you don't have someone to capture that emotion to take all that you have that you're expressing and put that on tape, you know, you're lost."

This collapses the artist/engineer binary. The engineer isn't documenting pre-existing art; they're creating alongside. The mixing choices, the decision to use Hari Krishna bells for "universal theme," the neutron filters on the drums—these aren't technical decisions, they're artistic decisions.

Same with Quincy Jones: "He has been my producer in that he's inspired me so much." Redefining production as inspiration rather than technical control. The real producer is whoever shapes your creative possibility.

On younger artists influenced by him, like Kanye West citing Songs in the Key of Life: "However I may have inspired them then they inspire me with what they do, and it sort of..." He trails off but the point lands. Influence isn't unidirectional. Kanye takes from Stevie, then Kanye's work feeds back into Stevie's creative ecosystem. No terminal point. No final authority. Just continuous circulation.

"For the most part what I do is I listen to radio a lot and from the radio I hear everything. I like to change the stations and listen to many different kinds of things because other people do influence your ideas musically, it's like again feeding off of each other's energies."

All genres, all stations. News programs. Church shows. Pop. Jazz. Classical. Continuous input feeding continuous output. No authentic core that gets diluted. Just continuous addition and integration.

When asked what artist he'd like to work with, his answer is perfect: "Any artist that loves music the way that I do, they would love to collaborate with me in whatever way that is, whether it be singing and writing and producing of any genre. It would be great to me because I'm just a lover of music."

Not "artists at my level." Not "the greats." Any artist who loves music the way I do. That's the only qualification. The relationship to the practice, not the commercial success or critical acclaim.

What This Means for You (And Me)

Most of us are walking around with some version of that teacher's voice in our heads. "You've got three strikes against you: you're [too old / not connected / from the wrong background / don't have the right degree / starting too late / wrong gender / wrong race / wrong class / wrong body]."

What if, instead of arguing with the strikes, you added more strikes to reveal how absurd the counting game is?

What if the thing you think is your limitation is actually your angle?

I keep thinking about Stevie discovering African braiding in 1972. "Kind of by accident heard about it and I was impressed with it because of it being a part of my culture." Not dogmatic, not performative—genuine discovery and connection. He names the woman who does it: Malakia. "Boy she's going to love this." Making it about her, the practitioner, not himself as recipient.

Cultural reclamation without purity politics. Just: this is part of my heritage, I discovered it late, I'm incorporating it now. No shame about the lateness. No performance of having always known. Just openness to learning what you didn't know.

What if "student's mind" isn't a phase you graduate from but the permanent condition of real mastery? Stevie at 75 saying he's "still a baby to this thing called life"—that's not humility performance. That's epistemological stance. The more you know, the more you know you don't know. The mastery is staying open.

What if retirement from your calling is incoherent because the calling doesn't stop calling just because you turn 65? Or because you haven't had a hit in a while? Or because the industry changed? "For as long as you breathe, for as long as your heart beats, there's more for you to do."

What if the highest point isn't behind you but ahead of you, always, because the work you can do right now is the only work that matters?

Stevie Wonder built a legacy by refusing every binary the industry and culture tried to impose: sacred/commercial, student/master, confident/humble, political/artistic, limitation/advantage, rest/work, individual/collaborative. He just kept doing the work, honoring what moved through him, surrounding himself with people who could help him execute the vision, and trusting that faith-based decisions could also be sound business.

The teacher couldn't imagine what he'd become. Not because she was cruel, but because she was limited by her own framework. Your limitations aren't the problem. Other people's limited imaginations aren't even really the problem.

The problem is if you let their framework become yours.

The gift is already pouring through your body. The question is: are you worthy of it? Are you doing everything you can with the time and space you have? Are you surrounding yourself with people who can help you capture what's in your head? Are you resting when you need rest? Are you speaking on what's wrong even when it's unpopular?

Are you refusing to peak because the best work is always still ahead?

Until next time,

Tricky Sol