The bizarre story behind Stevie Wonder’s plant album.
Unpacking the history and legacy of his most misunderstood project.
collage by Will Vanman.
There’s no question that Stevie Wonder holds one of the most impressive discographies in music history. The multi-platinum soul artist remains the only musician to win three consecutive Grammy Awards for Album of the Year with Innervisions (1973), Fulfillingness’ First Finale (1974), and Songs in the Key of Life (1976). But nestled between the end of this ‘classic’ period and the 1980s Hotter Than July is an album that both puzzled and polarized critics and audiences alike: 1979’s Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants. Initially dismissed as “vague”, “goofy”, and even “nerdy” by critics, this album sharply deviated from his previously acclaimed work. However, this album stands as one of his most daring and misunderstood works, pushing musical boundaries with groundbreaking digital recording techniques and experimental storytelling of nature’s beauty and mysteries.
The story of this album begins in an unexpected place: a CIA interrogation specialist in the 1960s. Cleve Backster noticed something unusual when he accidentally hooked up one of his office plants to a polygraph machine, also known as a lie detector. When subjecting his plant to a threat, such as an open flame, it produced similar electrical patterns that a stressed human under interrogation produced. Backster conducted experiments with plants connected to a polygraph, including unpredictably dropping small shrimp into boiling water to observe if plants in the same room reacted. He concluded that plants could not only sense other organisms, mourn the death of nearby living creatures, but also have a consciousness.
While this study was dismissed by the scientific community as not properly accounting for random variables, it piqued the curiosity of two best-selling writers: Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. Together, Tompkins and Bird compiled Backster’s studies, as well as various other controversial botanic experiments, to create the 1973 book The Secret Life Of Plants. This book delves into a mix of groundbreaking discoveries and far-fetched pseudoscience, ranging from the respected research of Bengali botanist Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, who demonstrated that plant tissues respond similarly to animal tissues, to the wildly speculative theory that aliens are communicating with humans through plants.
Although widely criticized by top scientists for promoting pseudoscience and unfounded claims, the book became a massive success, particularly among the New Age, hippie, and alternative spirituality movements emerging in the late 1960s. The claim that plants possessed intelligence and spirituality resonated closely with the ecocentric, anti-capitalist, countercultural, and postmodern ideas emerging at the time.
One of the book's most bizarre claims was that plants could not only hear music but also respond to it. According to certain studies, plants placed in greenhouses playing Bach, Indian classical music, jazz, or even twelve-tone serialism thrived and grew faster than those exposed to rock or pop. Although this sounds unlikely, the experiment was later tested in the TV show MythBusters. They conducted their own tests and deemed this a plausible result, also finding that plants exposed to Metal produced the best yields.
This naturally sparked a question: what’s the most effective music for growing plants? Enter Mort Garson—an eccentric easy-listening arranger and producer who worked with musicians such as Bill Withers, Cliff Richards, and The Sandpipers. Having just been introduced to a mysterious new electronic instrument called “the modular synthesizer” by Robert Moog in 1967, he was eager to create an album inspired by his mother’s love for plants. By 1976, he had accomplished experience using the Moog Synthesizer, having composed an electronic space-age soundtrack to CBS News’ live TV transmissions of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing.
Mother Earth’s Plantasia cover art.
The result was Mother Earth’s Plantasia, released in 1976—a sonically lush, experimental album billed as "warm earth music for plants... and the people who love them." Never heard of it? That's not surprising, given its unconventional promotion: the vinyl was exclusively available with a complimentary purchase of a house plant from the plant store Mother Earth in West Hollywood or as a bonus gift with a Simmons mattress from Sears. Because of this limited promotion, the album faded into obscurity, with its most notable moment of recognition being a sample on The Pharcyde’s 2000 album Plain Rap. Decades later, however, bootlegged uploads of the record to YouTube in the late 2010s gained a cult following, leading to a physical reissue and uploading to streaming.
collage by Will Vanman.
Returning to The Secret Life of Plants, director Walon Green began creating a documentary adaptation of Tompkins’ and Bird’s book in 1979. Green embraced the avante-garde while directing the film, blending scenes from the book with a mix of bizarre and brilliant footage. There were time-lapse montages of plants growing and flowers blooming, a cameo by the wife of Fuji Corporation’s Director of Research, Ken Hashimoto, attempting to teach her household cactus the Japanese alphabet as well as, most spectacularly of all, Soviet scientists investigating whether cabbages scream when sliced in half. Spoiler alert: the cabbages weren’t thrilled.
It’s not clear if Stevie Wonder had ever heard Garson’s album when he accepted the invitation from Green to soundtrack the documentary. However, his work, Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants, resembles Plantasia not only sonically, but in technological innovation. Wonder used solely digital recording techniques to produce the album, meaning each individual instrumental part was recorded digitally and then electronically stitched together using an editing controller. Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants was only the second popular music album in history to use solely digital recording, a practice that has become the norm today.
Stevie Wonder broke new ground in music with his innovative use of sampling on Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. While earlier artists, like the innovators of the French musique concrète movement in the 1950s, experimented with incorporating raw, physical sounds into their work, Wonder took this concept into new territory. He was the first musician to harness the potential of the newly developed digital sampling synthesizer—the precursor to the modern sampling keyboards we know today. For example, on the second track, “The First Garden”, Wonder uses various bird and forest sounds to create rhythmic percussion. This album laid the groundwork for sampling as a musical technique, which would later become a core component of hip-hop emerging in the 1980s.
How does a blind person compose a soundtrack to visual stimulus? The production team had figured out a way–using a four-track recorder and headphones, Wonder worked on compositions for each of the scenes. In one ear, Wonder was told what was happening on-screen, while in the other, the sound engineer counted down the sequence's frames, allowing Wonder to structure his scores.
Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants album cover.
Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants opens with the track “Earth’s Creation”—a dissonant, dramatic Analog synth-based tune akin to Plantasia complimenting scenes of lava gurgling and waves crashing. This chaotic track is then soothed with a soft, haunting music box on “The First Garden.” It also introduces Wonder’s signature harmonica, as well as synth orchestral textures previously explored in Songs of The Key of Life’s “Village Ghetto Land.” “Voyage to India” opens with an ornamented overture of the later track “Come Back As A Flower,” set to a shimmering sound produced by rubbing the rim of a wine glass with water. The track perfectly transitions into a soundscape evoking, in a vaguely orientalist fashion, the Indian subcontinent, using sounds reminiscent of Alice Coltrane’s Journey In Satchidananda. This sets up the first sung track of the album—an homage to the Bengali botanist Sir Chandra Bose, as well as African-American agricultural scientist George Washington Carver. Wonder unites their shared dismissal from the predominantly white scientific community as the “Same Old Story” of institutionalized racism. The link between India and Black America emerged during the civil rights movement in the US, where African-American intellectuals saw solidarity between them and the previous anti-colonial struggle in India led by Gandhi.
“Venus’ Flytrap and the Bug” is a playful skit featuring a swinging walking bass line, with Wonder’s warbled vocals capturing the cheeky, seductive allure of a Venus Flytrap. “Ai No Sono” is another vaguely orientalist track featuring pentatonic koto playing and children chanting uplifting, hopeful Japanese lyrics. This leads into an interlude where Wonder’s wife reads a nature-themed bedtime story to their children, transitioning seamlessly into a lush orchestral passage.
“Power Flower” is one of the more successful songs on the record, featuring Wonder softly singing in his falsetto range accompanied by soothing electric piano chords, a mandatory harmonica bridge, and concluding with uplifting lyrics playfully evoking ‘Flower Power’ hippie messaging. The next track presents an orchestrated instrumental version of the lead single, “Send One Your Love,” a piece that later captivated hip-hop legend J Dilla. His sampling of the track on his early demo mixtapes with Slum Village attracted the attention of Questlove of The Roots, ultimately influencing the evolution of hip-hop, R&B, neo-soul, and jazz.
Finally, the first half concludes with “Race Babbling,” taking a sharp turn with its upbeat, funky rhythm and percussive tonal layers that stand out from the album’s more serene, nature-inspired tracks. With heavy analog synths driving a sense of mechanical order, Wonder delivers a poignant critique of modernity, lamenting, “This world is moving much too fast.”
The second disc begins with “Send One Your Love,” the project’s most successful single, peaking at number four on the US Billboard Pop and soul singles charts. This heartfelt track uses floral imagery to convey romantic gestures, combining unique chord changes, ethereal vocal layers, and an infectious melody. Following it, “Outside My Window” offers a playful, funky tribute to Wonder’s love of plants, featuring a syncopated synth bass groove, percussive bird-sound samples, and a chromatic chord progression to celebrate nature’s unconditional affection. “Black Orchid” is a cheesy ballad calling for the world to leave hate behind in favor of love—a theme Wonder still resonates with, as he recently embarked on a “Fix Our Nation’s Broken Heart” tour. The next instrumental track is a dynamic synth orchestral piece that builds up intensity, similar to Ravel’s “Bolero.” The contrasting “Kesse Ye Lolo De Ye” is a soothing chanting piece featuring Senegalese kora playing.
Side two of disc two opens with “Come Back as a Flower,” featuring a sweet vocal performance from Wonder’s ex-wife Syreeta Wright. The next track, “A Seed’s A Star” (the English translation of Kesse Ye Lolo De Ye, which features as a countermelody in the final chorus) celebrates Afrocentric wisdom, referencing the Dogon people of Mali’s ancient astronomical knowledge of Sirius (Po Tolo) before European science with a funky slap bass line and talkbox verse. Next, the quirky, paranormal title track summarizes the content of the documentary. “Tree” features a twinkling piano and a celestial synth to unite plants with the cosmos, while the “Finale” track features a creative, catchy orchestrated medley of themes from across the album.
Together, Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants features cutting-edge technological experimentation and oozes infectious positivity and love for nature. However, critics at the time, anticipating a follow-up album akin to Songs in the Key of Life, were left dumbfounded when Wonder broke free from the mold audiences expected from him. While debuting at number 4 on the Billboard charts, it quickly plummeted: record publishers complained that out of the one million floral perfume-scented vinyl pressings produced, only 100,000 were bought and sold. In a 2004 interview with Billboard, Wonder acknowledged he never expected it to be popular, remarking the album “was an experimental project with me scoring and doing other things I like: challenging myself.”
Ultimately, the album stands as a testament to Stevie Wonder’s willingness to defy expectations and explore uncharted creative territory. Though it may never rival the acclaim of his other masterpieces, the album endures as a landmark of technological innovation. Its themes of ecological harmony and the interconnectedness of humanity and nature offer a powerful, hopeful response to the growing environmental crises of the present. In doing so, Wonder cultivated an album that, much like the plants it celebrates, continues to grow in appreciation over time.
edited by Celeste Alcalay.
photo collages by Will Vanman.
album artwork believed to belong to either the publisher of the work or the artist.
