Lately

<p>The song is a confession delivered at a volume just above a whisper. Stevie Wonder wrote it as a ballad about a love that has already ended, where the narrator is still going through the motions of hoping while knowing the truth. The title is the sound of someone trying to start a conversation they do not want to have. Lately... what? Lately I have been thinking about you. Lately I have been realizing it is over. Lately I have been pretending everything is fine. The song exists in the space between the first word and the rest of the sentence.</p> <p>That same suspended confession gets a 90s R&B overhaul in Jodeci's 1994 version on *Diary of a Mad Band*. Where Stevie's original is a solo performance ... his voice, his harmonica, his piano, the intimacy of a man alone in a room with his thoughts ... Jodeci turns the song into a group-harmony showcase. The arrangement is built around a slow hip-hop-inflected groove, the kind of track that made 90s R&B irresistible. Each member of Jodeci takes a verse, and their voices weave around each other in the chorus, harmonizing the loneliness into something that sounds almost communal. Where Stevie was a man talking to himself, Jodeci is a group of men talking to each other about the same woman, and the shared experience of heartbreak becomes its own kind of comfort.</p>