"Lately" follows a man who has started noticing the cracks. Stevie Wonder wrote it as a ballad about a love that still looks whole from the outside but has already begun to hollow out from within. He does not have to say anything. She already knows. The silence between them tells more than any confession could. He has been thinking about where they went wrong, and the thinking itself is proof that something is already lost.

George Benson took that same interior collapse in 1981 and let the guitar say what the voice could not. Stevie's original stays in the piano, fragile and exposed. Benson brings a full arrangement, a smooth jazz glide that wraps the ache in something almost comfortable. Underneath the gloss, the same questions are turning. He is just asking them in a more beautiful room.