How Lionel Richie Mastered the Love Song

0:02This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

0:12This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Lionel Richie has remained a star in the music scene long after many of his peers have faded away. Richie has been making music for 50 years. He's sold over 100 million albums, and he's endeared himself to younger generations as a judge on American Idol. His hits include Stuck On You, Say You, Say Me, Brick House, and the great duet with Diana Ross, Endless Love.

0:50Lionel Richie is now the author of a memoir. It's called Truly. And while the book has a lot of triumphs to cover, Richie also writes frankly about his failed marriages in the breakup of the Commodores, the band that launched him into stardom. For Hanif Abdurraqib, a contributing writer for The New Yorker, speaking with Lionel Richie was also personal. I wanted to open, perhaps, by showing, you know, I'm a collector of vintage music shirts. I collect vintage music shirts and have my whole life, as my adult life. I think I found someone who maybe worked for the Commodores Road Crew, because they sold me all this stuff from the 81 tour.

1:29No. And I got this 81 Crew Tour shirt. And on the back, it says, they make it rock, we make it roll. That is badass. Yes, I do. Oh, my God, man. Wow.

1:43Their conversation begins in a pivotal moment in Richie's career, 1977, and the release of the Commodore's ballot, Zoom. You know, I was interested in the book when you talked about Zoom in the early stages of the book. You talked about Zoom being kind of the work of a dreamer. And someone who was idealistic about the world they were in. And it made me curious about the way that songs came to you early in life, even before you maybe knew what they were or before you played at the piano with your grandmother, these kind of things. Right. It's interesting because you never know. People have a chance to kind of define you and you've kind of fallen in line with the story they have about you.

2:27So I was this guy who was, how they described me was, I suffered from a tension deficit, hyperactive. It's hard for him to pay attention. It's called ADD today. Okay. But back then it was kind of, how do you focus Lionel? And I'm the kid who sat on the table and my head is going like this in the classroom. and the answer was, Lionel, stop tapping on the desk. Lionel, would you like to join the rest of the class? It was at that moment that I didn't know that where I was was on the other side. That was the beginning of my young childhood years when I kept thinking, why can't I pay attention to what the guy is saying in class?

3:18Why can't I pay attention to what's happening in church? because I was always daydreaming somewhere on the other side of this thing. And so as time went on, I started, if you will, listening more and more to the other side. And as I got older, especially leading up to joining the Commodores, I started meeting people, meeting other great artists and other great writers and realize, just sit there with them for a minute. Why is their leg tapping while we're having a conversation? And why is their head moving while we're having a conversation? You have the same problem that I had. Or is that a problem or is that called creativity?

4:10And so, you follow me? So I had to kind of learn, and the word I'm going to use is discover. If I had to change the title of this whole book and just put it in realistic terms, it's how I discovered Lionel Richie. Because it was from all of these moments of listening to myself and worrying, why can't I be like everybody else? And, you know, I mean, listen, I know the answer to that, but I don't care about that. What I care about is it's more exciting what's on the other side that I'm listening to. I mean, you're a poet. You understand. When you start listening to that voice, you know, and trusting that voice, now you get to be stronger and stronger in your own right.

5:05Right. But up to Zoom. Zoom was that song that I was able to put in words what I really wanted to have as my mandate going forward. I may be just a foolish dreamer, but I don't care.

5:30Cause I know my happiness is waiting out there Somewhere You know, there's another, early in the book, you say that you didn't begin to heal until you became a songwriter. And I was interested if through the making of this book, you uncovered new processes to heal or things that you were healing and didn't even know it. You hit it dead on the head. When I started out this book, I had some great stories I was going to tell, keep it real surfacy, no big deal. I didn't realize that it was going to take me on a journey of it's not this mountaintop and this mountaintop and this mountaintop. It was this mountaintop and then the valley.

6:19The book is about the valley. And then it got to the next mountaintop. And then to go to the next point, you have to go back down in the valley. Well, each time I went down in the valley, it was painful because there were things in this book that I wanted to forget in life. But what created the real substance of me was I had to face my insecurities. I was not this jock that played football, basketball. I was not the hottest guy on the campus. I was not the yo, yo, ladies man. I was the shyest kid in the world, man, painfully shy to the point of just agony. And so to realize and to discover that it was that that I had to uncover that actually made the book actually relatable.

7:15because what makes a record a record, if you will, is when people walk up to me at the end of the song and go, Lionel, I felt the same way. That means you had the same experience, yeah, because all of us have doubt, you know, and all of us are not sure. We have a great front. But as time went on, I realized that what I was doing as a front, I had more substance in the back that I had to bring forward. Yeah. You follow what I'm saying? Yeah, for sure. The book is so vulnerable. And also, you seem at peace with your contradictions. From an early point in the book, I mean, you write about working at the bomb factory and being against the war, but also there's that really beautiful scene early on, I think, physically being beat up by a bully in a way that made me think about how so often the memoir can be a place to kind of stand atop the highest version of yourself, get atop the highest version of yourself shoulders and shout about how great you are, particularly from a position that where you have these accolades in this history.

8:16And I was really moved by the way you were wrestling with it, really still wrestling with yourself as the book went on. Yeah. You know, what determines, what determines a man? What determines a person? You know, okay, I grew up in the sixties and seventies, you know, where, you know, it's, you know, stand up straight, hey, son, somebody kick your ass, go back and kick their ass again. No, it wasn't like that. The vulnerability of, I don't want to kick anybody's ass. And the joke of that bully, if you really want to know the truth about it, the bully showed up one night at a concert with his wife, and you could see he was angry to the point of, because his wife kept saying over and over again, oh, Lionel is so wonderful.

9:01I'm going to say, I finally kicked the bully's ass. But what happens in all of this is that that was painful because they always had these lines where, if anything, you could talk your way out of something. This guy wanted to fight no matter how I tried to avoid whatever it was coming. It was coming. And it was just something I had to deal with to the point of humiliation. because you have to go home and face your father. And he goes, why don't you kick his ass? And that's the end of the manly story. But I wrestle with that in my head because as time goes on, the bully does not come to beat you up physically.

9:48The bully now becomes life kicking your ass every day. Everybody has that bully sitting in front of them and you have a choice of either saying, And I'm going to really tell you what I think about you or just kind of, you know, Tai Chi you around a little bit till I get to the other side. Yeah. You know, and you kind of, everything is not supposed to be that fight. Just get away from it or get over it, you know, or win in some way. So, you know, I found that in my case, instead of trying to beat somebody from the standpoint of physical, I'll beat you here. Deal with what is it that you need? You need your ego?

10:31I'll give you your ego. What do you need? You need accolades? I'll give you accolades. What do you need? And once I satisfy that, then I just move away. Hopefully, if I do it correctly, I'll never see you again. Right, right. There's such generosity in the book. I thought about how richly the book was populated and how thoughtfully he wrote about other people and places. For example, there's that great, you just write so beautifully and tenderly about Tina Turner. And then you flow into writing about Marvin Gaye's loss. And I was, you know, when I hit these points and I thought about how your life has been filled with so many people from so many corners, how did you manage that balance of populating the book so well, but not turning fully away from yourself, but still giving these people the love they deserve?

11:16Well, you have to understand, in life, if you find yourself saying, and I thought, and I said, and I felt, and I did this, and I did that, okay, you're not being honest. How you got here was somebody else taught you something. Somebody else passed something on to you that you decided instead of giving them grace, you said I. That's not important. This is my book. But I think it's important to say that there were aha moments in my life. Okay. I think I had a struggle. I think I was suffering. Okay. Talk to Tina Turner. I had Tina Turner for a whole tour. Two tours. The first tour when she first left Ike and the second tour when we just toured together.

12:10and I saw a broken person, but I saw her crawl back up on that stage and walk out as the divine Miss Turner. You understand me? Yeah. Or you see Marvin, who was so misunderstood, who was such a, you're talking about ADD or ADHD. He was just on another planet. And you could see in his lifestyle, it was not going to serve him well. In his talent, it was going to be, he was so gifted, it was unbelievable. But his lifestyle, the people he had around him, these are stories you have to look for a future singer like myself at that time. I had a chance to see it before I got in it with Marvin and with Smokey.

13:01You have a chance to hear somebody else's story. and then you all of a sudden realize, okay, well, it's like my dad said, you can either fall in every hole along the way of life, crawl out of that hole, and now you know that. Then you go to the next thing and you fall in the next hole and you learn something, you get out. Or you can find out where all the holes are located and walk around them. And in this case, by talking to Tina, by talking to Marvin and these wonderful artists that have already been in it for years. It was just, don't say much, just listen. And they'll teach you the whole navigation of this crazy world we're living in.

13:49Lionel Richie speaking with Hanif Abdurraqib of The New Yorker. We'll continue in a moment.

14:05you have such a prolific catalog of songs that you've written not just for i mean for others too but it seems like the height of your form throughout your career has been the love song specifically the love song right oh yeah uh and i don't know if there is uh there are too many writers who do the thing you do well where you are very up close in the love song is essentially like a dialogue like a close dialogue between two parties one of whom is the speaker and one of whom could be anyone. And I'm wondering how you hone that, how you hone that sensibility. And also, if you, in the writing of this book, felt like you were kind of the speaker speaking to yourself trying to extract some tenderness from the process.

14:47Yeah, you will. I now learned that when speaking to myself, that is how I speak to the public. That's how I present. So I had to learn the most important note that I'll ever have to hit in my life. It's called the whisper. It's not hardcore. And they have to hear this.

15:19Now. Oh, when you, sometimes when I. Follow that? Yeah. All right. You don't scream I love you. You whisper, I love you. You don't scream, you hurt me. You really want to know you hurt somebody, they tell it to you very softly. Hey, man, that was, I'm devastated. That's soft. So you have to get as close to the mic as you can, and it's basically, I'm whispering into your ear. Now, it's not the big notes. it's the tenderness and the compassion that comes along with something in the silence with the whisper now who did I learn that from? that's Marvin Gaye you follow me? absolutely

16:14and so once you learn it's not even the technique it's believability it's believability that's the point that makes the difference between a song and I by the way I did not plan this that I was going to write these love songs this is just what happened and I think I said it in the book you know the reason I ended up with the love song is because five other guys came in with the funkiest songs in the world so I uptempo is not going to happen you didn't discover that I could write uptempo songs until after I started doing solo because you can't win with five other guys bringing you all this up-tempo stuff.

16:54So I didn't try to go there. How do I guarantee I get a song on the album? Here's the slow song. But it was one of those things that I found that if you can just say something that's meaningful, like, for example, when a man's in love, he's only got one story. Cause when a man's in love He's only got one story That's all you needed That's the takeaway You know, I do love you still It's just, these are phrases That, you know, I know it didn't work out And I know, of course, in the anger of the divorce Or in the anger of leaving It's still, geez, I'm sorry I'm sorry I just got messed up like it did because you didn't start out not liking each other.

17:45There's a moment that you miss. And that's what I tried to capture in these love songs. And it is captured in the book, too, that what you just said, this sense of just because you fail at the end of the arc of love doesn't mean that the love was a failure. I thought you did that so well in talking about your own, which is, again, another vulnerable thing, talking about your own relationships and your own arc of love. All right. It's so important to, and I had to learn this, you know, because, you know, there's guilt in failure. You know, why couldn't I, what was I thinking? That was stupid. Or 20-20 hindsight.

18:26You can see it clearly, Howard. But at the time, there's something you have to remember. You're 30 years old. You're 25 years old. You're 35 years old. and you're 35 years old experiencing something that is so amazing, it takes your focus off of what was supposed to be the important thing. I'd never been to the Grammys. I'd never been to the Oscars. I'd never been invited. So you're realizing that you're growing daily. And all of a sudden to go back and look at your life and say, oh, my God, man, I can't believe that this happened or she said this. And I, no, no, no, no, no. It was growth. And the only reason I got to the next level was, unfortunately, I had experienced that.

19:19Because when I first came to Hollywood, I kept saying, Commodore said it when we first came in. We're never going to be like those other groups that break up. We're going to stay together and make sure we don't do that dumbass shit that they always do. Well, the answer was, we did exactly what the rest of the groups did. And Lionel Richie went solo, just like everybody else does. I kept thinking, how did we fall into that trap? And then all of a sudden, divorce. Well, we're never going to have a divorce. I mean, God, that beetle breakup, that was crazy. We're never going to let that happen. The temptations, bro, no, no, no.

19:50We did exactly what happened. In other words, it's the rite of passage. The reason that I ran into this wonderful problem in Tuskegee, I went to my minister, Father Jones, and I said, I need counseling and divorce. And he said, I can't counsel you. And I said, why? He said, no one in the church has ever divorced. Well, did you hear that? That means no one ever left Tuskegee to the point where they learned something else new. So their example of beauty is right there in their house. The challenges of their lives is right there in the house or on the campus of Tuskegee University. Here I am going to another country every day at age 32, 37, 40, 42, 40.

20:40Are you kidding me? And trying to go back home and say, okay, everything is just like I left it. It's normal. It changed. So I had to be kind to growth. and I had to be kind to my family for understanding that that was just, if you listen to Wandering Stranger. I know you're waiting for me to come home again. Please allow me to just go through these and don't take it personally. It was something that happened, but, you know, I was growing. Please try to understand. And you have to just kind of admit that to yourself, that it requires an apology if I want to say I'm sorry, but I had no control at the time.

21:35It was just, it was happening. Were you a different character in the Commodores than you were as a solo artist, or was that solo character just an expansion, an extension of the embodiment of who you became? Oh, no, no. The solo guy was just a continuation. The actual experiment, the proving grounds, the experimental group, that was the Commodores. I remember they used to have a section at the bottom of each song. They said on the album, vocalists, several vocalists. It was only two of us, me and Clyde, the drummer. But what I would do is one track would be, all you know, I had some value, no purpose, you know, all that.

22:23And then I'd come back with you once, twice. So they figured that's two different people. And then the next person came along with, sail on down. So they got a country guy in there somewhere. No, no, that's a character. So whatever I would do whenever I got ready to record, I would spend about 10 minutes trying to find what character I wanted to be. Now, did it go forward? Yes, it did. Because all night long was, well, my friends, the time has come. You know? Nom, nom. And then, of course, on that same thing was, hello. And so, again, they now know that the several characters was just two of us.

23:03But I made it a point to make it interesting so it wouldn't sound the same. That's the thing. you know your ear just gets it gets flat when you happen to you know okay here comes another singer that sings in the same key sings the same notes the same way that gets boring after about four songs five songs so you know okay so what's going to make it really different is where's the character. And that's when I discovered that, I realized we've got something now. The last thing, and it's maybe a big thing, but what I loved most about the book was its tone. You know, you open with this scene, I think it's at Glastonbury where you're kind of like, I can't believe I'm here.

23:50You know, there's this beautiful tone of disbelief. And that actually kind of maintains throughout the book. There's this sense of, even though it's a memoir and you are writing from the perspective of yourself, there are these moments where you sense that you're kind of like, I can't believe this has been my life. You're kind of steeped in gratitude. And I'm wondering, I mean, as you've kind of, you're still going and you're kind of, I don't think you're going to quit or retire. Does it seem like retirement? No, no, no. It's not going to happen. I hope. Do you kind of have these now when you are on American Idol, when you're mentoring younger artists, when you're watching the musical landscape change and you still have a heavy hand in it.

24:28Do you get the chance to kind of step back and consider your own legacy? Or are you, you know, with a sense of disbelief? Or are you kind of head down and keep the work going? That was probably one of the most painful parts of the book, which is I always had the Italian race car driver's theory, which is what's behind me doesn't count, what's coming next, what's in front of me. I had to turn around, look behind me, and evaluate behind me, which was the, it was, for the couple of months I started, it was, I didn't want to see behind me. I didn't want to dissect each phase of the low before the high, before the low, before the real low, before the high.

25:18In other words, I had to get through these things. The book made me kind of deal with my reality, which is, okay, I'm Lionel Richie, but I had to twist that to survive. And I'll give you my ritual. I think it's in the book. Every morning I get up, it's true to this day. lying in that bed before I get out of bed I've got a list of problems I'd like to tell you and I've got a list of things how's the kids, what's going on with the family what's going on with the building, what's going on with this and then I go struggle into the bathroom and I look in the mirror and I go goddamn Lionel Richie in other words what the hell of all the faces that could be in that mirror is Lionel Richie.

26:18Same guy I've been talking to for the last 76 years. And so my point is, it becomes gratitude. Because this book is going to actually say to you what I had to go back and realize. I lived through that. It's not the winning. It's the losing. It's the pain. It's the struggle. What kind of pain did you have, Wyn? No, no, no, no, no, no. To get through loss, you know, I lost a community of people. I lost mom and dad and grandma and that group. I lost the Commodores. I lost, I outgrew, you know, I lost families, you know. So to be here, it's emotional to realize that if I walk out and say, and here I am, ladies and gentlemen, you know.

27:10No, no, no, no, no, no. A lot of people crumble under just the loss of parents or just the loss of kids or just the loss of a divorce. I've seen strong people lose their complete minds over the fact that they couldn't deal with the loss of. but yet here I am to tell the story. So I thought from the story standpoint it would be very important to be open and to be real about how I felt vulnerable. Not this confident writer, but oh my God, I wrote this song. And then you have to stop for a minute and go, hmm, I wrote this song. in the quiet of my life, I wrote this song. And at the time I wrote it, it was, I wrote this song.

28:02But looking back, it becomes, holy crap, I wrote that song. That's beautiful. Lionel Richie, thank you for spending some of your time with me. The book is beautiful, and I thank you for your work, not just in the book, but the long career you've had, which has been immensely important to me. Thank you for your work. Well, thank you so much. You've inspired me now to go out and go, yeah, I did it.

28:33Lionel Richie speaking with Hanif Abdurraqib of The New Yorker. Richie's new memoir is called Truly. Now, before we go today, I want to tell you about something pretty important to all of us. You've probably heard that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting shut down its operations as of last week. That is a consequence of Congress, at President Trump's demand, rescinding all of CPB's funding. Some public radio and TV stations are now in real danger of not being able to pay their bills or even closing entirely. In response, WNYC has launched the Station to Station Programming Project. We're providing the New Yorker Radio Hour to at-risk stations for free, without the normal fees that stations pay to broadcast the program.