Stevie Wonder Brings ‘Sing Your Song! As We Fix Our Nation’s Broken Heart Tour’ To Sold-Out MSG (Review)

By Tamara Palmer

Stevie Wonder’s “Sing Your Song! As We Fix Our Nation’s Broken Heart Tour” was announced on Sept. 19 and began just weeks later at PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh on Oct. 8. According to a press release, Wonder planned it as a call to “joy over anger, kindness over recrimination, peace over war”—which he accomplished in stunning manner.

The tour is produced by Wonder Productions and promoted by AEG Presents and Free Lunch, the creative agency behind Kendrick Lamar’s Juneteenth concert in Inglewood, CA, and coincides with the recent release of The Wonder of Stevie, a six-hour and 10-minute podcast series produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground and Questlove for Audible.

Wonder, a U.N. Messenger for Peace, didn’t name any political names or denigrate anyone running for office at the sold-out second show of the tour at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on Thursday night, one of the few stops in the itinerary not in a swing state. The focus, rather, in his two-and-a-half-hour, 28-song set was on moving forward together with love and compassion—messages all could stand to absorb.

This he accomplished with his music. He opened with his newest song, “Can We Fix Our Nation’s Broken Heart,” (see below) and offered career-spanning classics like “Master Blaster (Jammin’),” “Higher Ground,” “Sir Duke,” “Superstition” and “As.” He also included now rarer cuts such as “Village Ghetto Land” and “For Once in My Life.”

He appeared with robust and highly-skilled support from an army of musicians including a full string section, three percussionists, six horn players, six vocalists (including his daughter Aisha Morris) and a guest appearance from Sheléa, an actress and singer-songwriter who has toured with Wonder as a backing vocalist.

This writer has seen Wonder perform in many venues in several cities over the past 16 years, and has rarely heard his voice so wonderfully healthy, loud, clear and strong as it was in Madison Square Garden, both in terms of vocal performance and in calling for non-partisan positive action that looked at facing our nation and without name-calling or derision.

“Let me say this to you, just keeping it very real. And this is for anybody; I’ll say it in front of anybody. Get beyond what has happened by confronting it for what it was. You understand? Don’t have to throw away no books. Just talk about what it was, fix it and move forward.”

Wonder did hint about what he sees as needing fixing, such as disenfranchisement and women losing bodily autonomy. “Let’s just do what we need to do,” he said. “We have to come together for the good of all.”

The show was a service to joy and to reassuring his fans that it’s “really OK.” “You know I belong to you, right?” he asked. “You know that I give you my heart, right?”

Acknowledging that he was in New York City and inside a venue where Billy Joel’s honorary jersey hangs for performing the most shows ever at the venue temple that is MSG — including 150 shows over the course of his 10-year residency — Wonder most appropriately included a cover of Joel’s “Just The Way You Are.”

He leads with serious talent, but there’s also plenty of humor, deployed to take the sting out of those who try to racially divide with no basis in reality “Show me a picture of people eating dogs!” he playfully said.

Wonder and crew continue the shows in Philadelphia on Oct. 12 and plan to stop in Baltimore, Greensboro, Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Grand Rapids, before concluding Nov. 2 at Chicago’s United Center.