1973 · Behind the Songs
Cut at half past two in the morning, with Wonder playing nearly everything himself.
The session began at 2:30 in the morning on November 10, 1972, at the Record Plant in New York City — Stevie Wonder, alone at the piano in the small hours, starting the track that would become “All in Love Is Fair.” When Innervisions arrived on August 3, 1973, the 3:41 ballad in C-sharp minor carried one of the album’s starkest credits: Wonder on lead vocal, acoustic piano, Fender Rhodes and drums, with only Scott Edwards’ electric bass for company. Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff share the production credit, but the sound is unmistakably one man telling the end of a relationship through the oldest clichés in the book — and making them ache. AllMusic’s Matthew Greenwald would call it one of Wonder’s “finest ballad statements”; Robert Christgau, unimpressed, dismissed the singing as “immature.”
Tamla never released it as a commercial single in America — the only 7-inch came from Brazil in 1974, backed with “Too High” — yet the song refused to stay an album cut. Barbra Streisand recorded it on December 14, 1973 at United Recorders in Los Angeles with producer Tommy LiPuma, and her March 1974 single from The Way We Were reached No. 63 on the Hot 100 and No. 10 on the Adult Contemporary chart (No. 60 in Canada), with Billboard hailing it as a “musical gem.” Nancy Wilson, Cleo Laine, Billy Eckstine, Shirley Bassey, Brook Benton and Michael McDonald all followed her lead. Wonder’s after-midnight original remains the standard they were all chasing.