Peauxdunque Album Highlight
In this recurring feature, Emily Choate considers the life of an album that’s gone overlooked.
Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants
By Emily Choate, Peauxdunque Review Fiction Editor/Music Editor
A sprawling, experimental double album will always make something of an easy target. For critical scorn. For baffled dismissal. These responses tend to expose a paradox that lies at the heart of our culture’s relationship to artistic ambition. We laud and lionize the idea of creative risk-taking, while seizing upon the results. We seize upon the vulnerability such risk requires. It provides us a chance to assert our own cleverness. We point to cracks and imperfections, thrown by the arrival of something we hadn’t expected to hear. Perhaps something we cannot quite explain or categorize. The very something we’d asked the artist to attempt in the first place.
After Stevie Wonder’s masterful album, Songs in the Key of Life, brought him widespread critical and popular success in 1976, he entered a period of experimentation which included new compositional challenges—like scoring the soundtrack for a documentary, “The Secret Life of Plants.” Directed by Walon Green, the film is based on a 1973 book by the same name. Authors Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird sought to challenge common beliefs by exploring theories that revolved around the conviction that Earth’s plant life is sentient.
Listeners who had eagerly awaited work from Wonder for three years may well have been puzzled to learn of his new album’s focus. Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants arrived in the fall of 1979, buoyed in sales by Wonder’s massive popularity but dividing and perplexing critics. Though Secret Life quickly became overshadowed by the streak of enduring classics that Wonder released throughout the 70s—powerhouse albums like Innervisions and Talking Book—this adventurous, eccentric treasure deserves broader reconsideration now.
Watching the documentary now is something akin to opening a time capsule full of 1970s fringe experimentation and holistic optimism. The theorists featured in the film are all in various ways seeking evidence that plants display sentience, show empathic responses toward animals and humans around them, and perhaps even communicate beyond Earth itself. We learn about experiments involving the polygraphing of plants and attempts to give plants literal voices. In a scene titled “Can plants think?”, Soviet researchers claim to detect and measure a plant’s responses to abuse. Lab techs blow cigarette smoke directly onto a plant’s leaves or destroy a fellow plant in its presence. According to the scientists, such plants can even succeed in “correctly identifying the assailant.”
Forty years on, the question of whether or not the results of these particular experiments would pass academic peer review doesn’t really seem to be the point. Rather, what comes through is a palpable spirit of creative exploration underpinned by the fond care with which these theorists approach their questions about the subtle, hidden possibilities our world might contain. But what shines through most vibrantly is Wonder’s generous, idiosyncratic work.
Secret Life unfurls a rich and playful sonic ecosystem. Over the course of twenty tracks, Wonder engages the specific subjects and ideas of the film, but the expanded vision of the album also heightens and, ultimately, transcends them. By diving into its alternative world, we find a joyful but discerning encounter with the sacredness of all life’s interconnectivity.
The album opens with a suite of instrumental tracks that accompany the film’s extensive opening montage of nature footage. “Earth’s Creation” advances with deliberateness and bombast—almost “Boléro”-like, but with synthesizers—playing over images of the fiery (then watery) origins of life on Earth. During “The First Garden,” a more intimate piece layered with nature sounds, the film’s narrator describes the evolutionary shift that made plant life possible, “spreading across the planet a matrix of green, allowing life to flourish.” “Voyage to India” foreshadows “Come Back as a Flower” and then stretches into an ethereal mood, adding sitar to the album’s soundscape.
Wonder begins to sing twelve minutes into Secret Life, with the subdued “Same Old Story.” This song describes Indian scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose and American botany legend George Washington Carver, both profiled in the film. Wonder sings fondly of Carver and Bose, enfolding their attempts to “take science itself by surprise,” into a larger narrative about suppressed voices who are discounted by “non-believers.”
“Venus’ Flytrap and The Bug” gives us Wonder’s playful side at its wittiest. This saucy but deadly encounter between predator and prey unfolds in boozy jazz trio style. The Bug’s voice creeps in: “Hello flower / Boy, do you look juicy.” When the moment turns, and Wonder’s voice drops into a growl: “Don’t eat me / Please don’t eat me / I’m trapped in your love / Save me, don’t hurt me.” The track escalates into the sound of a loud bite, followed by a laughing exchange between Wonder and young child.
After a dreamy instrumental piece called “Seasons,” which the film pairs with time-lapse sequences of opening mushrooms and green shoots, the tone shifts again with “Power Flower.” This song, co-written with Michael Sembello, hands the story of nature’s quicksilver changeability to Pan, who offers cool assurance about our seemingly chaotic world: “It’s not magic it’s not madness / Just the elements I style.”
Rounding out the first disc is “Race Babbling,” a futuristic dance epic that runs close to nine minutes. The track revolves around its repeated central lyric, “This world is moving much too fast.” It swirls together ancient stories like the Tower of Babel with the problems of an accelerating, uncertain future: “They’re race babbling / This world is moving much too fast / They’re space traveling.” No matter how fast we move, or what marvels we invent, future progress doesn’t exonerate us from our oldest, deepest troubles. But we’ll keep dancing, too.
Secret Life’s second half kicks off with the album’s sole hit single, “Send One Your Love.” The film uses this mellow, breezy love song to accompany a languid sequence depicting a sunny garden filled by well-dressed white people perusing cultivated gardens and prize roses, a scene meant to convey the domesticated ways in which people often choose to relate to nature.
“Outside My Window” follows—a more dynamic love song that arguably boasts one of Wonder’s warmest, most affectionate melodies. During this song, the film runs a joyful sequence of a diverse group of people growing their own vegetables. With the perfect back-up of Wonder’s lyrics—“My love lives outside my window / Clouds burst to water / So send love can grow”—these gardeners express the emotions brought out in them by nurturing their gardens and working the earth with their hands.
The ballad “Black Orchid” pays tribute to Black women. In the film, “Black Orchid” plays against shots of a solo dancer in a field intercut with extreme close-ups of various orchids. The song’s lyrics, written by Yvonne Wright, entwine images of nature with the loving strength of a woman who is “a rushing wind that’s asked to wait / For the promises of rain.” Wonder follows “Orchid” with the eccentric instrumental piece, “Ecclesiastes,” which draws us into a formal moment of classic pageantry, gone slightly cockeyed with the addition of an odd, high-pitched warble. It’s the kind of detail that divides listeners. Is it kooky? If so, is that a problem? But the moment is pure Secret Life.
“Come back as a Flower” captures a longing to experience the early-morning stillness of a garden. Sung by Syreeta Wright, who also wrote the lyrics, this song seems to distill the essence of the album’s spirit: “As I awoke to greet the coming dawn / The sun was hardly peeking through the garden / Then I wished that I could come back as a flower.” The lyrics’ tender clarity and the lush but nuanced arrangement make it one of the most graceful and affecting tracks on the album.
A pair of songs focus on a complex central concept: “A Seed’s a Star.” Among the musicians on “Kesse Ye Lolo De Ye” is Senegalese kora player Lamine Konte. The lyrics (which translate to “A Seed’s a Star”, “A Star’s a Seed”) are sung in phoneticized Bambara, Konte’s native language. Wonder draws inspiration from the Dogon tribe of Mali, known for their astronomically based cosmology. The film ties the Dogon’s celestial insights and beliefs to an esoteric experiment run by a scientist who hoped to prove that mustard seeds might share observable communication with a distant star.
Wonder threads these ideas about the interconnectedness of life throughout the rest of the album, expanding his sound to match. The sole live track, “A Seed’s A Star / Tree Medley” reflects an expansive, joyful vision that celebrates the stories and wisdom of long-ago ancestors—both human ancestors like the Dogon and non-human ones like old-growth trees. The materials from which we are made contain the entirety of the universe—but forget nothing they’ve learned. “In myself I do contain / The elements of sun and rain / First a seed with roots that swell / I gradually burst through my shell / Pushing down into the ground / The root of me is homeward bound.” But lest the message come across too ponderously, Wonder slaps an wild effect onto his vocal during these lines, to indicate that he’s playing the “Character of Tree.”
Before the album’s instrumental finale tracks lead us into synthesizer overload, Wonder gives us the title song—a gentle ballad that retraces the album’s ecological steps. Wonder himself appears solo onscreen to sing this song in the closing scene of the documentary. Slowly, he passes through lush green landscapes, the base of a waterfall, a field of sunflowers, crowds of lily pads on a pond, and a stand of tall trees. He sings as he wanders, recalling the wondrous lifegiving power of our natural world. But he also warns against taking nature’s generosity for granted. (“And yet we take from it without consent.”) But this warning is a humble one. Everything we are able to observe about nature pales in the face of what we don’t know, “For these are but a few discoveries we find inside / the Secret Life of Plants.”
When it comes to our ecological outlook, much has changed in the forty years since Secret Life first appeared. Climate crisis continues to escalate rapidly, and its darkest implications often seem to dominate depictions of nature found in any artform or genre.
We need permission again to set to page (or song or canvas or screen) visions of nature that do not dwell in destruction only. English naturalist Helen Macdonald has written powerfully about the devastating impact of habitat loss and decreases in biodiversity. But in her recent book, Vesper Flights, she argues against climate fatalism: “Apocalyptic thinking is a powerful antagonist to action. It makes us give up agency, feel that all we can do is suffer and wait for the end.” Macdonald writes that “In its earlier senses [the word “apocalypse”] meant a revelation, a vision, an insight, an unveiling of things previously unknown.”
Macdonald exhorts us to keep working toward a new way forward for our world, “even if we don’t believe it. Even if change seems an impossibility. For even if we don’t believe in miracles, they are there, and they are waiting for us to find them.”
When artists push past all the well-worn knowns and givens, they open a space within us when we receive their work. From there, we can hear the thrumming edge of our own vulnerability. From there, we can begin to imagine new possibilities.
Now more than ever, we must find our way back to a joyful, non-apocalyptic way of depicting nature again. Doing so is vital for sustaining long-term commitment to the fight against climate crisis. During this time of multiple crises, as we endure buffeting blows from all sides, we must discover hopeful ways to re-engage with the world.
We need to bring our hip-sway back to the natural world, to find new rhythms that help us keep moving through global predicaments that tempt us to give in to paralysis. We need a creative language that does not become mired in a funereal dirge. Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants offers the perfect antidote.
A sprawling, experimental double album will always make something of an easy target. For critical scorn. For baffled dismissal. These responses tend to expose a paradox that lies at the heart of our culture’s relationship to artistic ambition. We laud and lionize the idea of creative risk-taking, while seizing upon the results. We seize upon the vulnerability such risk requires. It provides us a chance to assert our own cleverness. We point to cracks and imperfections, thrown by the arrival of something we hadn’t expected to hear. Perhaps something we cannot quite explain or categorize. The very something we’d asked the artist to attempt in the first place.
After Stevie Wonder’s masterful album, Songs in the Key of Life, brought him widespread critical and popular success in 1976, he entered a period of experimentation which included new compositional challenges—like scoring the soundtrack for a documentary, “The Secret Life of Plants.” Directed by Walon Green, the film is based on a 1973 book by the same name. Authors Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird sought to challenge common beliefs by exploring theories that revolved around the conviction that Earth’s plant life is sentient.
Listeners who had eagerly awaited work from Wonder for three years may well have been puzzled to learn of his new album’s focus. Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants arrived in the fall of 1979, buoyed in sales by Wonder’s massive popularity but dividing and perplexing critics. Though Secret Life quickly became overshadowed by the streak of enduring classics that Wonder released throughout the 70s—powerhouse albums like Innervisions and Talking Book—this adventurous, eccentric treasure deserves broader reconsideration now.
Watching the documentary now is something akin to opening a time capsule full of 1970s fringe experimentation and holistic optimism. The theorists featured in the film are all in various ways seeking evidence that plants display sentience, show empathic responses toward animals and humans around them, and perhaps even communicate beyond Earth itself. We learn about experiments involving the polygraphing of plants and attempts to give plants literal voices. In a scene titled “Can plants think?”, Soviet researchers claim to detect and measure a plant’s responses to abuse. Lab techs blow cigarette smoke directly onto a plant’s leaves or destroy a fellow plant in its presence. According to the scientists, such plants can even succeed in “correctly identifying the assailant.”
Forty years on, the question of whether or not the results of these particular experiments would pass academic peer review doesn’t really seem to be the point. Rather, what comes through is a palpable spirit of creative exploration underpinned by the fond care with which these theorists approach their questions about the subtle, hidden possibilities our world might contain. But what shines through most vibrantly is Wonder’s generous, idiosyncratic work.
Secret Life unfurls a rich and playful sonic ecosystem. Over the course of twenty tracks, Wonder engages the specific subjects and ideas of the film, but the expanded vision of the album also heightens and, ultimately, transcends them. By diving into its alternative world, we find a joyful but discerning encounter with the sacredness of all life’s interconnectivity.
The album opens with a suite of instrumental tracks that accompany the film’s extensive opening montage of nature footage. “Earth’s Creation” advances with deliberateness and bombast—almost “Boléro”-like, but with synthesizers—playing over images of the fiery (then watery) origins of life on Earth. During “The First Garden,” a more intimate piece layered with nature sounds, the film’s narrator describes the evolutionary shift that made plant life possible, “spreading across the planet a matrix of green, allowing life to flourish.” “Voyage to India” foreshadows “Come Back as a Flower” and then stretches into an ethereal mood, adding sitar to the album’s soundscape.
Wonder begins to sing twelve minutes into Secret Life, with the subdued “Same Old Story.” This song describes Indian scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose and American botany legend George Washington Carver, both profiled in the film. Wonder sings fondly of Carver and Bose, enfolding their attempts to “take science itself by surprise,” into a larger narrative about suppressed voices who are discounted by “non-believers.”
“Venus’ Flytrap and The Bug” gives us Wonder’s playful side at its wittiest. This saucy but deadly encounter between predator and prey unfolds in boozy jazz trio style. The Bug’s voice creeps in: “Hello flower / Boy, do you look juicy.” When the moment turns, and Wonder’s voice drops into a growl: “Don’t eat me / Please don’t eat me / I’m trapped in your love / Save me, don’t hurt me.” The track escalates into the sound of a loud bite, followed by a laughing exchange between Wonder and young child.
After a dreamy instrumental piece called “Seasons,” which the film pairs with time-lapse sequences of opening mushrooms and green shoots, the tone shifts again with “Power Flower.” This song, co-written with Michael Sembello, hands the story of nature’s quicksilver changeability to Pan, who offers cool assurance about our seemingly chaotic world: “It’s not magic it’s not madness / Just the elements I style.”
Rounding out the first disc is “Race Babbling,” a futuristic dance epic that runs close to nine minutes. The track revolves around its repeated central lyric, “This world is moving much too fast.” It swirls together ancient stories like the Tower of Babel with the problems of an accelerating, uncertain future: “They’re race babbling / This world is moving much too fast / They’re space traveling.” No matter how fast we move, or what marvels we invent, future progress doesn’t exonerate us from our oldest, deepest troubles. But we’ll keep dancing, too.
Secret Life’s second half kicks off with the album’s sole hit single, “Send One Your Love.” The film uses this mellow, breezy love song to accompany a languid sequence depicting a sunny garden filled by well-dressed white people perusing cultivated gardens and prize roses, a scene meant to convey the domesticated ways in which people often choose to relate to nature.
“Outside My Window” follows—a more dynamic love song that arguably boasts one of Wonder’s warmest, most affectionate melodies. During this song, the film runs a joyful sequence of a diverse group of people growing their own vegetables. With the perfect back-up of Wonder’s lyrics—“My love lives outside my window / Clouds burst to water / So send love can grow”—these gardeners express the emotions brought out in them by nurturing their gardens and working the earth with their hands.
The ballad “Black Orchid” pays tribute to Black women. In the film, “Black Orchid” plays against shots of a solo dancer in a field intercut with extreme close-ups of various orchids. The song’s lyrics, written by Yvonne Wright, entwine images of nature with the loving strength of a woman who is “a rushing wind that’s asked to wait / For the promises of rain.” Wonder follows “Orchid” with the eccentric instrumental piece, “Ecclesiastes,” which draws us into a formal moment of classic pageantry, gone slightly cockeyed with the addition of an odd, high-pitched warble. It’s the kind of detail that divides listeners. Is it kooky? If so, is that a problem? But the moment is pure Secret Life.
“Come back as a Flower” captures a longing to experience the early-morning stillness of a garden. Sung by Syreeta Wright, who also wrote the lyrics, this song seems to distill the essence of the album’s spirit: “As I awoke to greet the coming dawn / The sun was hardly peeking through the garden / Then I wished that I could come back as a flower.” The lyrics’ tender clarity and the lush but nuanced arrangement make it one of the most graceful and affecting tracks on the album.
A pair of songs focus on a complex central concept: “A Seed’s a Star.” Among the musicians on “Kesse Ye Lolo De Ye” is Senegalese kora player Lamine Konte. The lyrics (which translate to “A Seed’s a Star”, “A Star’s a Seed”) are sung in phoneticized Bambara, Konte’s native language. Wonder draws inspiration from the Dogon tribe of Mali, known for their astronomically based cosmology. The film ties the Dogon’s celestial insights and beliefs to an esoteric experiment run by a scientist who hoped to prove that mustard seeds might share observable communication with a distant star.
Wonder threads these ideas about the interconnectedness of life throughout the rest of the album, expanding his sound to match. The sole live track, “A Seed’s A Star / Tree Medley” reflects an expansive, joyful vision that celebrates the stories and wisdom of long-ago ancestors—both human ancestors like the Dogon and non-human ones like old-growth trees. The materials from which we are made contain the entirety of the universe—but forget nothing they’ve learned. “In myself I do contain / The elements of sun and rain / First a seed with roots that swell / I gradually burst through my shell / Pushing down into the ground / The root of me is homeward bound.” But lest the message come across too ponderously, Wonder slaps an wild effect onto his vocal during these lines, to indicate that he’s playing the “Character of Tree.”
Before the album’s instrumental finale tracks lead us into synthesizer overload, Wonder gives us the title song—a gentle ballad that retraces the album’s ecological steps. Wonder himself appears solo onscreen to sing this song in the closing scene of the documentary. Slowly, he passes through lush green landscapes, the base of a waterfall, a field of sunflowers, crowds of lily pads on a pond, and a stand of tall trees. He sings as he wanders, recalling the wondrous lifegiving power of our natural world. But he also warns against taking nature’s generosity for granted. (“And yet we take from it without consent.”) But this warning is a humble one. Everything we are able to observe about nature pales in the face of what we don’t know, “For these are but a few discoveries we find inside / the Secret Life of Plants.”
When it comes to our ecological outlook, much has changed in the forty years since Secret Life first appeared. Climate crisis continues to escalate rapidly, and its darkest implications often seem to dominate depictions of nature found in any artform or genre.
We need permission again to set to page (or song or canvas or screen) visions of nature that do not dwell in destruction only. English naturalist Helen Macdonald has written powerfully about the devastating impact of habitat loss and decreases in biodiversity. But in her recent book, Vesper Flights, she argues against climate fatalism: “Apocalyptic thinking is a powerful antagonist to action. It makes us give up agency, feel that all we can do is suffer and wait for the end.” Macdonald writes that “In its earlier senses [the word “apocalypse”] meant a revelation, a vision, an insight, an unveiling of things previously unknown.”
Macdonald exhorts us to keep working toward a new way forward for our world, “even if we don’t believe it. Even if change seems an impossibility. For even if we don’t believe in miracles, they are there, and they are waiting for us to find them.”
When artists push past all the well-worn knowns and givens, they open a space within us when we receive their work. From there, we can hear the thrumming edge of our own vulnerability. From there, we can begin to imagine new possibilities.
Now more than ever, we must find our way back to a joyful, non-apocalyptic way of depicting nature again. Doing so is vital for sustaining long-term commitment to the fight against climate crisis. During this time of multiple crises, as we endure buffeting blows from all sides, we must discover hopeful ways to re-engage with the world.
We need to bring our hip-sway back to the natural world, to find new rhythms that help us keep moving through global predicaments that tempt us to give in to paralysis. We need a creative language that does not become mired in a funereal dirge. Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants offers the perfect antidote.
Emily Choate’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Shenandoah, The Florida Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Chapter 16, Late Night Library, Yemassee, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and has earned several residency awards, most recently from Virginia Center for Creative Arts and The Hambidge Center. She lives in Nashville, where she’s working on a novel.