Journey through the Secret Life of Plants
| Journey Through "The Secret Life of Plants" | ||||
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| Soundtrack album by Stevie Wonder | ||||
| Released | October 30, 1979 | |||
| Recorded | February–April 1979 | |||
| Studio | I.A.M. Studios, Irvine, CA (International Automated Media); Crystal Recording Studio, Hollywood, CA; Lyon Recording Studio, Newport Beach, CA; Sigma Sound Studios, Philadelphia, PA; Motown Recording Studios, Hollywood, CA; Studio In The Country, Bogalusa, LA | |||
| Genre | R&B, new age | |||
| Length | 90:05 | |||
| Label | Tamla | |||
| Producer | Stevie Wonder | |||
| Stevie Wonder chronology | ||||
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| Singles from Stevie Wonder's Journey Through "The Secret Life of Plants" | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |    |
| Robert Christgau | B− |
| Rolling Stone | (mixed) |
| Rolling Stone | |
| Smash Hits | 6/10 |
| Yahoo! Music | (mixed) |
Stevie Wonder's Journey Through "The Secret Life of Plants" is an album by Stevie Wonder, originally released on the Tamla Motown label on October 30, 1979 (see 1979 in music). It is the soundtrack to the documentary The Secret Life of Plants, directed by Walon Green, which was based on the book of the same name by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird.
Wonder created the film score by having Michael Braun, the film's producer, describe each visual image in detail, while the sound engineer, Gary Olazabal, specified the length of a passage. This information was processed to a four-track tape (with the film's sound on one of the tracks), leaving Wonder space to add his own musical accompaniment. Wonder attempted to translate the complex information of the book and film into song lyrics. "Same Old Story," for example, tries to convey the scientific findings of Jagadish Chandra Bose, who developed instruments to measure plants' response to stimuli, and the breakthroughs of African-American agriculturalist George Washington Carver.
Although written mostly by Stevie Wonder, a couple of songs were collaborations with former wife Syreeta Wright and with Michael Sembello. Journey Through "The Secret Life of Plants" contained unusual synthesizer combinations including the first use of a digital sampling synthesizer, the Computer Music Melodian, used in virtually every track of the album. Journey is an early digital recording, released three months after Ry Cooder's Bop till You Drop, generally believed to be the first digitally recorded popular music album, with this album being the second (and charting higher than the album Cooder produced). Stevie Wonder was an early adherent of the technology and used it for all his subsequent recordings.
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