Side three opens on a cry he would not edit
Isn’t She Lovely opens the third side of Songs in the Key of Life, the double album Tamla released on 28 September 1976. Wonder wrote it for his daughter Aisha Morris, born in February 1975 to him and Yolanda Simmons. The track does not start with a verse. It starts with a newborn’s cry. That cry is not Aisha’s. The bath at the other end of the song is. You hear water, a small protest, and Wonder talking her through it: come on, get out at the other side.
He plays nearly all of it. Drums, percussion, synth bass, Fender Rhodes, RMI Electra Piano, chromatic harmonica, the vocal. Greg Phillinganes added some keyboard parts. Bassist Nathan Watts put down a guide line so Wonder would have a map, and Wonder replaced it with his own keyboard bass. The harmonica solo was improvised in the room and left in. Engineers John Fischbach and Gary Olazabal are the names on the track sheet for the long Key of Life sessions that produced it. The finished song runs 6 minutes 34, with the bath and the solo sharing the fade.
Motown wanted a 7-inch. Wonder would not shorten it to fit. A promotional edit, a little over three minutes, went to radio in late 1976 with the cry trimmed and the ending faded early. There was no commercial single in the US. Airplay still pushed the song to number 23 on Billboard’s adult contemporary chart in January 1977. In Britain it nibbled the chart on play alone. He had already spent thirteen weeks at number one with the album. He did not need this song to be a single, and he treated that as a musical decision, not a stunt.
Yolanda is in the lyric, sung as Londi, the person the last verse thanks. Aisha’s name is glossed in the song itself: life. The record is a birth announcement that refuses to behave like one. It is cheerful, and it is also six minutes of one man playing a band, with a real child audible at the end.
Come on, Aisha. Get out of the water, baby.
(Stevie Wonder, on the recording, 1976)
The version worth hearing is the album cut. The promo edit proves the point by what it removes: the cry, most of the harmonica, the bath. Without them it is a pretty chord sequence. With them it is a document. Jazz singers took the chords anyway. It became a standard without ever having a proper single, which is a strange kind of hit.
In June 2012 Wonder sang it at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee concert and bent the words toward Elizabeth. The recording from 1976 does not need that occasion. It already has the child it was written for, on tape, refusing to leave the bath, while the harmonica keeps going. That is the track. The compilations that tag it as a deluxe extra are just filing.
