from “le détroit” · the strait
Two Fox Theatre nights, his 1976 album Songs in the Key of Life played front to back, on a 50th anniversary tour where Detroit is the only city getting two shows. Tickets go on sale Tuesday, September 15 at 10 a.m.
Stevie Wonder is coming home for two nights in December, and he is bringing the whole of “Songs in the Key of Life” with him.
The shows are Tuesday, December 8 and Wednesday, December 9 at the Fox Theatre, part of a tour marking 50 years since the album came out, and Wonder will perform the 1976 album in its entirety at both. Tickets go on sale Tuesday, September 15 at 10 a.m. at 313Presents.com, LiveNation.com and Ticketmaster.com. Both shows start at 8 p.m., and ticket prices have not been announced.
The tour runs 18 dates, opening October 13 at Utilita Arena in Birmingham, England, crossing Europe, and landing in the United States on November 19 at Madison Square Garden, with Chicago and Washington before Detroit and a December 19 finale at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, outside Los Angeles. Every other stop is an arena, so the Fox is the only theater on the list, and Detroit is the only city getting two nights.
The album turns 50 on September 28: it came out that day in 1976 on Tamla, Motown's label, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, only the third album ever to do that and the first by an American artist, and stayed there for 13 straight weeks. It won Album of the Year at the 19th Grammy Awards, and both "I Wish" and "Sir Duke" went to No. 1 on the Hot 100. The Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry in 2005, and Rolling Stone ranked it No. 4 on its 2020 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
Wonder's Detroit story starts early: he was born in Saginaw on May 13, 1950, moved to Detroit with his mother at four, and in 1961, at 11, Ronnie White of the Miracles took him to an audition at Motown, where Berry Gordy signed him to Tamla, the start of a career that has collected 25 Grammy Awards.
The city put his name on a street in December 2016, renaming a portion of Milwaukee Avenue north of downtown, with the new sign at the corner of Woodward, a mile from Hitsville U.S.A. More than 400 people came out to see the sign go up on a street he grew up on. He sang a burst of "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" to the crowd that afternoon.
His last Detroit show was October 22, 2024 at Little Caesars Arena, one of ten dates on the "Sing Your Song! As We Fix Our Nation's Broken Heart" run. The Fox, which opened in 1928, has 5,048 seats, so two nights there add up to about 10,000. Set an alarm for Tuesday morning.
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