8. Bill WithersMaking Music
A fantastic pop soul album. Norman went to see him live and said he was with an English band and wasn’t very good. But if you watch the Still Bill film on Netflix or YouTube, he is great. I watched the Nina Simone biopic and then Bill Withers. And for some reason I thought of Amy Winehouse. It felt like she had watched the Nina Simone one and should have watched the Bill Withers one.
Bill Withers took all that was wrong about fame and took control of it, semi-retired, carried on singing songs he liked, recorded slowly, concentrated on his home life. This sort of reflects that, even though he made it at the height of his fame. He is one of those artists, as well, where when they jumped from vinyl to CD they Stalinistically compressed his whole record collection onto one Greatest Hits. Instead of having them all on CD, they got rid of it and made on Greatest Hits album. You lost so much stuff – this album has so many great songs on it. ‘I Wish You Well’, ‘Best You Can’, ‘Paint Your Pretty Picture’. I got married last year for the first time and that is the song we came out to. It was our wedding song. It is just beautiful, look at the lyrics, we have them framed on the wall where we live.
