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Hello: The Joke That Became Lionel Richie’s Most Beloved Ballad, and the Clay Head That Haunts It
Hello: The Song Lionel Richie Tried to Throw Away, and the Video That Refused to Be Forgotten “Hello, is it me you’re looking for?” Say the words out loud and something happens. The melody arrives uninvited — that gentle piano figure, that aching pause before the question. In 1984, Lionel Richie’s “Hello” was inescapable: six…
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Lionel Richie: The Family Man Behind the Eternal Smile
Ask Lionel Richie what he’s proudest of, and he won’t mention the Grammys, or the hundred million records, or the night he sang to the whole planet at the Olympics. He won’t mention the Gershwin Prize from the Library of Congress, or the Kennedy Center Honors, or any of the other laurels that have piled…
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How Lionel Richie Made “Can’t Slow Down”: The Album That Ruled the World
By the spring of 1983, Lionel Richie had a problem most musicians would kill for. His self-titled solo debut had been a smash, spinning off the number-one ballad “Truly” and proving that the shy saxophonist from the Commodores could carry a record on his own. But debut success is a trap: the second album is…
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The Untold Story of Lionel Richie: The Gentleman Who Wrote the Soundtrack of a Generation
Before he was the smiling judge on television, before the world knew him as the man who could make any room grin, Lionel Richie was a saxophone-playing economics student from Tuskegee, Alabama, who stumbled into pop history almost by accident. He wrote some of the biggest ballads ever recorded, co-wrote the most famous charity single…