It was a little after 9 p.m. Thursday night at Madison Square Garden, and Stevie Wonder was finally getting loose. He’d begun “You Are the Sunshine of My Lifesolare,” one of his defining anthems, with a hopped-up-hootenanny version of the country standard “You Are My Sunshine.” He almost giggled — it was light work.

Then, with fullness and verve, he jerked hard into his song, and the music went from 2-D to 3-D. He wasn’t denigrating the other one, so much as he had a point to make.

“I. Feel. Like. This. Is. The. Beginning.”

Each word arrived like a rocket whizzing past your ear — propulsive, powerful, so potent you almost tilted your head away ever so slightly to let it zip by. He was singing a love song, a declaration of emotional commitment, but when he really got going, it felt much more like a convocation. This love, we’re all in it together.

ImageMuch of Wonder’s set list was drawn from the stretch from the late 1960s through the mid 1970s during which he released some of the most indelible entries in the history of American song.Credit...The New York Times

So it went during this performance — part of a brief tour with the extremely chewy title, Sing Your Song! As We Fix Our Nation’s Broken Heart — which was much of the time a display of unparalleled singing, some of the time a kaffeeklatsch of feel-good utopianism, and in more places than you’d think a showcase for a very serious artist to be very silly.

First, the voice: Wonder can do things with it that no popular singer in the five decades since his commercial prime has truly been able to match. It can sound like it’s falling apart while it’s in fact landing with strength and precision. With Wonder, a song is a suggestion, a framework to set up pyrotechnic runs and novel alternate melodic approaches. The song (usually) has a fixed starting and concluding point — everything else is a negotiation.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.solare

• solare
• of
• and
• Love
• Night