THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE: I Believe (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever)

This chapter from my forthcoming book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1) was distributed privately to paid supporters of this blog on September 3, 2019. This is its first public appearance. You can become a paid patron for just $2 a month.

Happy Anniversary, Brenda.



An infinite number of songs can each be THE greatest record ever made, as long as they take turns. Today, this is THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE!

STEVIE WONDER: I Believe (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever)

Written by Stevie Wonder and Yvonne Wright
Produced by Stevie Wonder
From the album Talking Book, Tamla Records, 1972

Shattered dreams

Worthless years

Here am I encased inside a hollow shell

In 1978, I met the girl that I was going to marry. I was only 18, a second-year college student, and the grizzled veteran of three broken relationships within the preceding twelve months. My last relationship had accelerated so quickly out of control that I had to grab a parachute and jump from that metaphorical plane before it completed its uncannily accurate tribute to the last farewell of Buddy Holly. And it was my own fault, all of it. So I wasn't really in any big hurry to commit myself again to Love Everlasting. That's what I told myself. C'mon. I was a punk! No future, baby!

And then I met the girl that I would marry. Brenda. She looked into my eyes, and we both fell--truly, madly, deeply, like a pop song. I liked pop songs. And I liked the idea of being a pop song incarnate.

But I wasn't going to let emotion rule me. Oh, no--not this time, brothers and sisters. I would be cool. Measured. Warm, but not, y'know...goopy. We had all the time in the world, right? No need to rush. You can't hurry sincere, earnest, mutual attraction.

Right. Within two weeks, I'd told her I loved her. You can laugh, but lemme tell you this, too:  that was more than four decades ago, and we're still together, still in love, still looking into each other's eyes. We've been married since 1984, and we have one wonderful daughter whose every breath reminds us that, somehow, we must have done something right. There have been trying times--heartaches, tears, and all the petty details that prove to us that life really isn't a pop song (though it really oughtta be!)--but there has also always been love, and the strength love provides. We're still here. And here we will remain.

The many sounds

That meet our ears

The sights our eyes behold

Will open up our merging hearts

And feed our empty souls

I believe when we fall in love it can last forever.

If we believe in a love at first sight (and I'm certain that it happens all the time), we must also believe in a love that builds itself over time. And while I admit this transition's a stretch, it is absolutely true: before I came to love of the music of Stevie Wonder, I was firmly, resolutely indifferent to it.

Believe me.

I didn't really remember Stevie Wonder's work in the '60s. To me, he was basically a new artist when he assumed command of AM radio in 1972-73. Eighth grade again. "Superstition." "You Are The Sunshine Of My Life." "Higher Ground." Living For The City." This barrage of hits was my first conscious awareness of Stevie Wonder (though I probably heard "If You Really Love Me" the year before, too). I've already written of the lasting importance of the music I heard on the radio when I was in eighth grade, lurching toward ninth. Stevie Wonder should have mattered to me. 

He didn't. He wasn't Badfinger, or Johnny Nash, or Sweet, or Slade, or Alice Cooper, The 5th Dimension, Gladys Knight & the Pips. He wasn't an ex-Beatle. He was just another guy on the radio. He was okay, but I didn't understand why everyone was freakin' out about him.

I'm not sure when this attitude shifted, but it has to have been connected to my belated discovery of Wonder's '60s hits. I saw Little Stevie Wonder in a TV rerun of one of the Frankie Avalon-Annette Funicello beach movies from 1964 (Muscle Beach Party or Bikini Beach, maybe both), and I started to hear him on oldies radio shows. I was particularly knocked out by "Uptight (Everything's Alright)" from 1965. This began my reassessment and eventual embrace of the wonder of Wonder.

Brenda didn't experience any delay in becoming a Stevie Wonder fan. She loved him from (at least) eighth grade on, the older stuff retroactively, the newer stuff immediately. When we met, she had Stevie's Innervisions LP and Songs In The Key Of Life double-cassette, and maybe the 3-LP Looking Back anthology, too. Later on, Wonder's "I Just Called To Say I Love You" was a ubiquitous # 1 hit in 1984, the year Brenda and I were married.

Flash forward another 16 years. I had read (and loved) Nick Hornby's novel High Fidelity, loved its setting within the world of record collectors in London, its ability to convey the yin and yang of pop obsessions, its mastery at connecting these obsessions with life, love, emotion, loss, and the intricacies of interpersonal relationships. I swear the book itself smelled like vinyl, but that was just my imagination runnin' away with me. The 2000 film adaptation moved the novel's locale to Chicago, changed British record shop owner Rob Fleming to all-American counterpart Rob Gordon (played by John Cusack), and should have been a disaster. Instead, it was brilliant. The film's opening shot of stylus meeting LP as "You're Gonna Miss Me" by The 13th Floor Elevators fills the theater and the universe brought chills. This was my kinda flick.

There's a scene in the film where obnoxious record-shop clerk Barry Judd (played by Jack Black) berates a potential customer's interest in a 45 of Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called To Say I Love You." Barry Judd is an asshole, but it's a funny scene. But the most important scene involving Stevie Wonder occurs at the end of the film, as Rob Gordon reflects on life and love and music. The music comes up and plays us out.

I believe when I fall in love with you it will be forever

I believe when I fall in love with you this time it will be forever

It was a song I had ignored my whole life. It wasn't ever a hit. I had bought a used copy of Stevie Wonder's 1972 Talking Book album years before, but I hadn't paid much--any--attention to that album track. Watching the end of this movie, the track swelled up inside of me, took control, just as the AM radio gems of eighth grade used to establish a beachhead in my heart and soul all those decades before. In 1972, I was lonely and out of place. By the time of this shiny new millennium, I had met and married the love of my life. Stevie Wonder knew. I should have listened to him sooner.

Music is love. Love is music. We are finite, but love and music are eternal, and we can touch briefly upon immortality with our openness to these twin glimpses of the divine. Love doesn't always last forever. Sometimes it can't. Sometimes it shouldn't. Our belief that it can, that we can be part of something larger, something greater, something infinite...well, that belief keeps us going. We turn up our music. We hold fast to those we hold dear. We listen. We love. We dream.

We believe.

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Carl's writin' a book! The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1) will contain 155 essays about 155 tracks, each one of 'em THE greatest record ever made. An infinite number of records can each be the greatest record ever made, as long as they take turns. Updated initial information can be seen here: THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE! (Volume 1).