The visceral, hard-charging proto-Parliament funk of 1968’s brilliant For Once In My Life is indicative of the extent to which Wonder himself, and not his influential minders, is now fully in charge of his music. The sound here is purely Stevie and only occasionally classic Motown — he may be a team player, but he is also an iconoclastic eighteen-year-old eager to pursue his own agenda. The unstoppable hit single “Shoo-Be-Doo-Be-Doo-Da-Day” may have been the main catalyst for a full length, but the net result is a dry run for his ’70s era classics- the world destroying anxiety of the lovelorn “I Don’t Know Why” and the complicated, longing appeal to a paramour’s family “Do I Love You” which anticipates Outkast’s “Sorry Ms. Jackson” by three decades. For Once In My Life is that peculiar unicorn in popular music — a record that lays bare the genius of its auteur without fully realizing it, similar in that respect to Public Enemy’s Yo! Bum Rush The Show or The Replacements’ Hootenanny. While the discreet pleasures here are palpable, the sense of something momentous looming on the horizon is the real attraction.