How Lionel Richie Mastered the Love Song

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The celebrity memoir is a form of which I’m reflexively skeptical. Some books lean solely on name recognition, without much concern for the content inside. Others promise salacious details of a life that people have watched and opined on from a distance but never had actual access to. I may not be the target audience even for the best of them: I’ve always preferred to operate at a slight remove from the artists I enjoy, knowing only as much as I need to know to access the art I’m consuming.

Lionel Richie’s memoir, “Truly,” captivated me anyway. Unlike most entries in the genre, it is genuinely vulnerable, heartbreaking, and often very funny. Its primary focus is, of course, his expansive music career, which began in 1968, when he joined the Commodores as a singer and a saxophonist, lending his writing, vocal, and onstage performance talents to danceable hits like “Brick House” and ballads such as “Easy Like Sunday Morning.” After leaving the group, in 1982, Richie released his début, self-titled solo album, which kicked off a run of chart-topping success throughout the eighties. He is, above all else, one of my favorite architects of the love song, and, in the book, he writes frankly about the relationships that inspired them—including those that ended painfully. Richie, now seventy-six, seems to have made peace with his failures; he’s not afraid to assess them, and to allow a reader to be witness to those assessments. Throughout, there’s a principled commitment to not letting himself off the hook, but, also, a tenderness with his younger self. For The New Yorker Radio Hour, I spoke with Richie about craft, memory, and an old Commodores shirt I found years ago. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I collect vintage music shirts—I have my whole adult life—and I think I found someone who maybe worked for the Commodores’ road crew, ’cause they sold me all this stuff from the ’81 tour. I got this ’81 tour crew shirt, and on the back it says, “They make it rock, we make it roll.”

No. That is badass. Oh, my God, man. Wow!

In the book, you talk about [the Commodores song] “Zoom” being the work of a dreamer and someone who was idealistic about the world they were in. 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 kinds of things.

It’s interesting, because you never know—people have a chance to define you, and you kind of fall in line with the story they have about you. . . . How they described me was “It’s hard for him to pay attention.” It’s called A.D.H.D. today. But back then . . . the answer was “Lionel, stop tapping on the desk. Lionel, would you like to join the rest of the class?”

I kept thinking, Why can’t I pay attention to what the guy is saying in class? Why can’t I pay attention to what’s happening in church? Because I was always daydreaming, somewhere on the other side of this thing. As time went on, I started listening more and more to the other side. And as I got older—especially, you know, leading up to joining the Commodores—I started meeting people, meeting other great artists and other great writers and realized, just sitting there with them for a minute, Why is their leg tapping while we’re having a conversation? Why is their head moving while we’re having a conversation? They have the same problem that I had. Is that a problem, or is that called creativity? I had to kind of learn, and the word I’m gonna 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? 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, and trusting that voice, you get to be stronger and stronger in your own right.

Right.

But “Zoom” was that song that I was able to put in words what I really wanted to have as my mandate going forward.

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 on this book, I had some great stories I was gonna tell, keeping it real surfacey, you know, 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. The book is about the valley. And then it got to the next mountaintop, and then you have to go back down into the valley. Well, each time I went down into the valley, it was painful, ’cause 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 shiest kid in the world, man. Painfully shy, to the point of just agony—and so it was that that I had to uncover. That actually made the book relatable. Because what makes a record a record, if you will, is when people walk up to me at the end of this song and go, “Lionel, I felt the same way.”