Another one of my long-standing favorites. Curiously, I never bothered with any other songs by Stevie Wonder. The only other of his works that I am even aware of is Ebony and Ivory by him and Paul McCartney.
My most vivid memory associated with this melodic and evocative love ballad has nothing to do with being romantic. My first summer in the US, I worked as a counselor at a YMHA day camp (‘H’ stands for ‘Hebrew’, for those who don’t know; other letters mean exactly what they do in the more famous YMCA acronym, but without a catchy song to its credit). One day, the camp held a talent show, and among many renditions of Heveynu Shalom Aleichem, Hava Nagila and the like, one of the senior groups went with I Just Called… It stood out, to say the least.
You probably know a few other Stevie Wonder songs, but just don’t realize they’re his. Isn’t She Lovely springs to mind, as well as Very Superstitious, or even Part Time Lover?
He was also one of the foursome (along with Dionne Warwick, Elton John and Gladys Knight) that recorded That’s What Friends Are For for AIDS research back in the mid ’80s.