Five years ago, Stevie Wonder told reporters about three new projects on which he was working. Since that time, none of them have been released and it appears that two are dead with one still in the works.Wonder told reporters on Tuesday that he has two albums ready to go. The first, When the World Began, is a collaboration with David Foster and includes rerecordings of some of his best known songs with full orchestral accompaniment along with a number of new compositions.
The second is Ten Billion Hearts, a gospel album that he promised his mother, Lula, that he would record before her death in 2006. Wonder told reporters “I might sing a gospel song in Arabic or do something in Hebrew. I want to mix it up and do it differently than one might imagine. Obviously the good word at the end of the day, it’s not about the religion, it’s about the relationship. And I think we all need to check our relationship.”
Gone from his plans appears to be his duets album with Tony Bennett and a multimedia presentation called Through the Eyes of Wonder that was going to express his experiences as a blind man.
Wonder’s last studio album was 2005’s A Time to Love.