Talk:Talking Book

Removed nonsense

Apart from removing some non-encyclopedic stuff and adding fact tags, have removed the references to a) taking charge of production - it was co-produced by Wonder, Cecil & Margouleff, who were a major influence on Wonder, and b) playing most of the instruments - a quick glance at the personnel shows that is not correct. Let's see if we can make this encyclopedia (not fan blog) article better - both the album and the artist deserve it.--Technopat (talk) 11:15, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Actually a "quick glance" at the personnel yields the following: Instrumental credits Stevie Wonder = 33 And Others = 10. So that means he has 77% of the instrument credits. I think this surely counts as having played most of the instruments. I don't know that this fact needs to be added back into the article--not because it is "not correct" as Technopat claims above but rather because it is redundent.Jwhester (talk) 15:19, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

Eh?

"His swinging clavinet and harmonica embellishments on "Big Brother", though, defy categorization."

Does this sentence actually mean anything?Matthau (talk) 05:46, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Macy Gray

...made a cover album of "Talking Book." 12.162.122.5 (talk) 14:07, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Barack Obama's First Album

Wonder's album "Talking Book" was the first Obama bought with his own money at 10 or 11 years old. I am not that familiar with the sorts of things that are documented for albums, but this seems to be significant to me.

References

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Involvement of Margouleff and Cecil

IP Special:Contributions/72.208.178.248 has been labeling Margouleff and Cecil as "assoc." producers in the infobox. We have a guideline of WP:NOEXEC such that executive producers are not listed, unless they were in the studio making musical decisions. If Margouleff and Cecil were just associate producers, as they are credited on the album, then we would remove them from the infobox. But I don't think they should be removed.

The instructions at Template:Infobox album#producer says:

Enter the name of the person(s) credited as the actual record producer(s). Do not include those listed as executive, co-, additional, vocal, etc., producers, unless a reliable source identifies their contribution as substantially the same as the main producers. These should be included in the article body or track listings rather than be listed here.

The thing about Margouleff and Cecil is that they were critically important to this album, as described in books about Wonder's classic period. Margouleff and Cecil basically locked themselves in the studio together with Wonder to make Music of My Mind during Memorial Day weekend, May 28–31, 1971, as described by Bob Gulla on page 318 of his book Icons of R&B and Soul. Gulla says they repeated this pattern for Talking Book and Innervisions and Fulfillingness' First Finale. The two producers were pushed out of Wonder's inner circle after the Fulfillingness sessions, and that was the end of their teamwork. Zeth Lundy agrees, writing in his book Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life that "Cecil and Margouleff suddenly found themselves elbowed out of the picture... most likely by Wonder's increasingly protective entourage." Lundy says that Cecil and Margouleff had been Wonder's "two most objective confidants, collaborators whose discerning sensibilities championed economy over indulgence." Margouleff and Cecil kept copious notes of Wonder's song experiments during 1971–74, writing them down in the so-called "Blue Book" containing hundreds and perhaps a thousand song ideas. All of Wonder's biographers write about how Margouleff and Cecil were extremely intimately connected with the music production of the four albums they completed with Wonder. John Swenson writes about this in Stevie Wonder (1986), Steve Lodder writes this in Stevie Wonder: A Musical Guide to the Classic Albums (2005), and Zeth Lundy says they were "creative catalysts" for Wonder. Lodder describes how Margouleff and Cecil were just businesslike and professional with the production of The Heat Is On for the Isley Brothers, but they jumped in the deep end and lived every note with Wonder. The two production styles were like night and day, but they were credited the same way in the album liner notes. In the book The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, Will Fulton writes in the chapter "Stevie Wonder's Tactile Keyboard Mediation" that Cecil and Margouleff would even twist knobs and change synth filter settings as Wonder was playing the synths, in an interactive process of music production. Fulton says that Wonder is listed as producer on the album because he had fought Motown to gain "control over the creative process", but that Margouleff and Cecil were integral to that creative process. Of all the "associate producers" in the world, Margouleff and Cecil were the most closely connected to making the music.

I think they should be listed in the infobox as producers, without any labels such as "assoc." We can and should tell the reader about the partnership and collaboration between these three, using prose descriptions in the article body. We can say they were credited as associate producers but their contribution was very much more. Binksternet (talk) 04:57, 13 May 2021 (UTC)