Remembering Bill Withers

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

NPR

Society & Culture

4.7 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2020

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Bill Withers died last month. He was 81. For Bullseye this week, we look back at our two interviews with the soul singer responsible for such classics as "Ain't No Sunshine," "Lean on Me" and "Grandma's Hands." We look back at the life of the man, the myths behind why he left the industry and the soul of the artist. Bill also talked to us about charting his own course to happiness in life.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.
0:12.4	I'm Jesse Thorn, it's Bullseye.
0:21.4	Bill Withers died about a month ago. Like a lot of us I was home when I heard, I was
0:26.9	processing the news of the world shutting down around this, trying to figure out how I
0:31.2	and my family and my company would carry on. The world was a scary place and it still
0:36.2	is. It was a tough time to lose a hero.
0:39.7	Besides the great hits and beautiful melodies, Bill Withers had two great unsung gifts.
0:45.0	The plain devastating clarity of his lyrics which are breathtaking without ever having
0:49.4	a moment of pretence. And his voice, deeply and profoundly soulful, but distinctly non-churchar
0:56.9	g, is plain and powerful as his lyrics.
1:01.6	Bill Withers songs are full of warm insight and cutting insight as well. His anger was
1:06.9	righteousness, his kindness was enveloping. So maybe the world lost Bill Withers when
1:13.2	they needed him most, or maybe the world always needed Bill Withers.
1:19.2	What's left behind is his music. It'll be there to comfort us, to inspire us, to sue
1:24.2	us and to keep us moving. So, excuse me, we're going to do something different on this week's
1:29.3	Bullseye. We're going to play my two interviews with Bill Withers. The first one came from 2007.
1:37.4	Withers left the music industry in the early 1980s and he didn't really do press. And
1:43.3	in 2007 when I was making this show basically by myself and my apartment, I got a press
1:48.9	release for a movie called Soul Power. And I responded to it. It was a documentary, is it
1:56.5	documentary made from the footage of the concert that accompanied the rumble in the jungle.
2:01.4	If you've seen when we were kings, the boxing documentary, it's the same pool of footage
2:08.6	that they drew upon, but the music part of the giant festival. And I thought maybe I
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