In case you were wondering how Lionel Richie is living these days, the answer is: well. Every day, in the afternoon, a celebrity bus tour makes a circuit past his mighty Italian-renaissance home, and if you stand out front, in the grand circular driveway, by the central fountain, you can hear the tour guides just beyond the gate: Lionel Richie lives here! Does he ever. Inside he's got Warhols and Basquiats and Banksys. He's got a stereo system that will funnel Toto's "Africa" into every room of the house. The green grass of the Los Angeles Country Club is visible through arched French doors. The lower reaches of his terraces, below the pool, are dense with errant golf balls. In his office, he has an awards shelf that is actually six shelves, going all the way to the ceiling, bearing Grammys, American Music Awards, an Oscar—the Oscar is right there at eye level, where you could touch it. In one of his many bathrooms, there is a photo of Lionel and Michael Jackson and Liz Taylor. Elsewhere there are photos of him with Barack Obama and Paul McCartney and Muhammad Ali. Oh, and bowls of candy: Peanut M&M's. Almond Hershey Kisses. Chocolate with nuts, basically.
Today his girlfriend, Lisa, is here, in leather pants. So is his manager, Bruce, in expensive suede loafers and swooping rich-guy hair. There's a photographer and a stylist and a publicist. Richie is having his photo taken. He's talking to everyone in the room at once: war stories about other, different photo shoots; paintings that he failed to buy in the ’80s that have since appreciated in value; and oh—is that a New York Times alert on his phone? A bus crash in New Mexico? Multiple people were killed? "That's not good." A Lionel Richie–branded scented candle burns merrily on a side table.
After a while, most everybody leaves and he leads me outside, by the pool, up some stairs, to a second, smaller house. The occasion of this conversation is no real occasion at all, but if GQ is going to take his picture, he might as well talk to GQ, and so here we are. He settles into a chair with a sigh. Same sly mustache as ever. Hair still curly and lustrous. Every story reminds him of another story; you less interview Lionel Richie than sit with him while he free-associates. He's on American Idol these days, where he does the same thing. He's just finishing up a Vegas residency: ditto.
Where we're sitting right now is his clubhouse, he says. His retreat. "You have to create a place that is away from that guy over there."
GQ: Who's "that guy"?
Lionel Richie: That's Lionel Richie over there.
So who lives over here?
This is the guy from Alabama, chilled out. I like it over here because it just gets me out of it. Especially considering what I just went through in the last two months, three months, six months, really, of losing so many artist friends.
Who are you thinking of when you say that?
Aretha was the one that kinda—Aretha, Prince, BB King, Michael. You know, Natalie, Glenn Frey. Those are the ones that kind of rattled the cage. Aretha was one of the pillars of the whole building, you know? You wanted to have a record like hers. Marvin's been dead so many years now, but I mean, songwriters. You wanted to be a songwriter like Marvin. But my plan, my plot, was to hang out with the younger ones so that when the older ones started dying, you'd be able to hang out with Michael and Prince and Whitney—and then all of a sudden, you realize: Wait, I think I just lost my plan.
This is a morbid question, but when you hear people talk about Aretha, do you start thinking about: What are people gonna say when I'm gone?
You know, I don't deal with that. I don't think of that. No. The answer to your question: no. It's a moment in time when you start kind of dealing with your own mortality, but I think my kids do that more to me than the business. As I tell the joke every day, you know, all you need is two girls and one boy. Now, for every day you go work out, the more I work out, the better my son, Miles, looks. And with every day you think you thought you were the hippest guy in the world, my daughters Nicole and Sophie will bring you to salvation. They remind you that time is passing. But the business is a stimulant. I'm addicted to exhaustion. I love the adrenaline hit.
Is the adrenaline hit coming from a different place than it used to? There was a time when you were primarily a songwriter. I don't think that's primarily what you do anymore.
I'm going to say this in a positive way. There was a time when you could build catalogs, in the sense of: Just give me three albums and you had a catalog. You didn't need a lot. You just needed to have an album full of stuff. I've seen the business long enough to go from singles to albums, now back to singles. So I caught it in the wave of the album, when if you got 12 songs on the first and 14 songs on the second one, you got a catalog. You do two more albums, you're rolling down the road. So you start out wanting to be this songwriter, and then as time goes on, if you're lucky enough to get that one hit record that you could play for a while, you're good. But people used to want to hear the whole thing: "What's the story?" That was the appeal of the album. And I look at guys now, it's so much noise. It's a beautiful opportunity to break through. I must admit that. If you are not an established artist, the Internet is fabulous. But now you don't get paid. And if you do get paid, it's not the way we were paid. You know? Then again, you talk to Little Richard and his group, they didn't get paid either.
Are you saying something to the effect of: "I could still write a song, but I'm not gonna get a check for it now, so why bother?"
Yeah, but no, no. I'm still in love with songwriting. It's just that my thing now is I'll go to a concert and I'll play two and a half hours' worth of songs, and I didn't play the songs that everybody wanted to hear, I still left out 12. How many times have you gone to a concert with people who are established and they say, "I refuse to play my old stuff"?
Many times.
Every time! I go, "Well, why would you not want to play the six and a half hours of stuff they want to hear already?" I love giving the crowd their pandemonium moment. The crowd wants to come to the show to scream. They don't want to come to the show to go to the bathroom. When do they go to the bathroom? During something they don't know. The frustration for artists is we want it to be just as impactful as the last time it happened. Well, it's not happening like that. Because with the Internet, it's a lot of noise. When I say a lot of noise, I don't mean noise in terms of music. I mean just a lot of noise in terms of—there's so many different avenues.
No one's gonna ever hear a song released today as much as they heard "All Night Long" in the years that it was a hit.
Exactly. There was ABC, NBC, CBS, and a new thing called CNN. That's it! The rest of it was called radio. Right? And you got it beat into your head whether you liked it or not. But it's never going back to the old way. And I remember there were guys when I started out—just imagine the Commodores walking down the aisle at the Grammys, with Henry Mancini in his tuxedo out in the front row. They're looking, going, "Well, there goes the music business." You know, there's the Ohio Players over here, Earth, Wind, and Fire over there, and the Commodores with these Afros. I mean, can you imagine? They were saying the same thing. So you just have to understand, there's gonna be change, and every generation's gonna bring their twist to the table.
Are there artists in the new generation that you like?
There's Bruno Mars: I love him as a writer. Drake, I love as a writer. These are guys who are singer-songwriters, guys who when someone says, "Tell me about why you wrote the song," they can say something besides "I passed the audition" or "Somebody wrote it for me."
I never thought about it before, but Drake is very much the evolutionary version of you.
It's a different twist, but he's still giving you the stories. I'm a storyteller. So, you know, there are writers in the rap world. They're telling you stories, and you're falling in love with the stories.
I was watching the U.S. Open today before I came here, and they were playing "All Night Long" on the broadcast.
I didn't know that.
How often do you encounter your songs out in the wild like that?
All the time. You know, I enjoy it. But I think what I enjoy the most about it is, you know, there used to be a time that if you never heard your stuff, you'd fire your PR people, because they're not doing their job. Now nobody's hired to do that. I didn't call up on the phone and say, "Hey, man, you need to play my song." What you pray for in life is that it stuck. It became a part of the fiber of familiarity.
Do you even hear the songs at this point when you encounter them on the radio?
I'll tune it out for a minute, and then you find yourself talking, and all of a sudden you think, "Oh, that's a great song." Then you go, "Oh, that's me." My music director did a thing to me the other day, it was so funny. When we do sound checks, and I'll turn around and he's just playing chords. I'm going, "Oh, my God—those are great chords, man. Be sure to put that down. That's a definite song. I could write on top of that." He said, "Boss, that is your song." But he was playing one of the older songs that I don't play every day. I find myself drifting in and out of it, but not listening for it.
Is there one that you get sick of?
No. You don't get sick of it. I mean, it's so sweet, because people, they say it and then they apologize. They go, "Hello, Mr. Richie. I mean, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to say 'hello.' I just made a fool of myself." I go, "No, no, 'hello' is the right word." And then they stop apologizing. Or you could be in church, and the minister's giving the sermon and he says, "And you know, you find yourself working very hard all night long." And everybody looks at you. "All Night Long" was mine, but it was not in that context.
It's amazing that you can own the word "hello" or the phrase "all night long."
Crazy. You know, "Easy," "Stuck on You," "Truly," "Endless Love." Forget about it. I used to always go for like, "How simple can you make it?" There was a show when I was a little kid called Name That Tune. And the idea was "I can name that tune in four notes. I can name that song in three notes." Okay. And you heard [to the tune of "All Night Long"] Da da… That's it. Da da da… I mean, you following?
Completely.
And so I used to pattern my songwriting on that show.
It seems like you've had the same definition of cool since the '70s, which takes a certain kind of self-confidence. Where did that confidence come from?
It took the Commodores, what, a year to convince me, "Lionel, bend over and kiss the girl on the front row." You know what my answer was? "I don't know the girl." Right? And then I discover something. I kissed the girl in the front row. And you know what they kept saying to me after that? "Stop kissing the girl in the front row and sing." You follow me? My coming of age was I joined a band. I wasn't cool before that. And then I joined the Commodores. And the best fun of my life happened, ’cause everything my parents told me that was bad for me, I loved every minute of it. I mean, I missed Woodstock, I was too young, but everything after that, I caught everything after that. And then you start realizing, here I am in the middle of—there was nothing more out of control than George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic. Are you kidding me? Grown man walking around onstage in a diaper. Now you know we got to find out what that's all about. Rick James, you can't beat Rick. Marvin Gaye, you can't beat Marvin. Sly Stone. You can't beat Sly Stone. You know what I'm saying?
You find a thing that works, and then you kind of play with it. And then the most unusual re-occurrence happens. The circle comes back around. The old music is now the new music. When you walk in the door, and the last time you bought a pair of Gucci pants, it only cost you this much. Now they try to sell it to me for $10,000. I'm going, "No, but I got that same pair of jeans." You know, they want to sell me some bell-bottoms again. I go, "No, I got my bell-bottoms." You know, you've realized you've lasted long enough to where the old style is the new style. And the old music is the new music, and then you realize, "Holy crap, I think I've done a little circle here." But the trick is most folks don't make it to the circle. Somewhere along the line, your career died or your style died or you died.
You mentioned kissing the girl in the front row. I wondered if you were ever exhausted, trying to live up to your reputation as a player and a playboy.
Oh man, please. Are you kidding me? Growing up, I was too short for basketball, too skinny for football, too slow for track. The only sport I could play was tennis. Ain't no girls hanging around the tennis court. And then I walked out onstage one day, and some girl screamed on the front row. And I said, "Done."
But that can harden into a part that you have to play, right?
I was never the guy to be the player. I'm not that guy. I've tried to hang out with a couple of players, and I go, "I gotta go, guys." But I think that's probably why I'm still alive today. You know, it's out of my league. I've been with what I call—you want playboys? I got a couple of ’em for you. Unfortunately, over half of ’em are dead now. Or they got sued to death. Girls love playboys and girls love bad boys. But in the long run, does it serve them? It doesn't work. At a certain point, you gotta kind of pull out of it, and there's a reality syndrome that happens to you. And I think my truth serum was probably my kids. Once you own the word "dad," it kinda messes up the sexy a little bit for a while. You know, because you can't quite play it the way you thought you were going to play. And then you just have to kind of realize that that's the next step of what that existence is gonna be.
What's your daily routine these days?
Morning is around 11:30 a.m. So I always tell people that lunch is breakfast, four in the afternoon is lunch, and about 9:30, ten at night is dinner. You know, that's just how I work. And my "Good night, I'll see you tomorrow" is around three in the morning. That's what it is. And so that's my ritual there. And it serves me well, because I get a chance to experience the best of the silence of the night, which is my creative time. And during the afternoon, I get to meet all of my lawyers and my managers, because that's the only time they're awake.
In the morning, I shower. I shave. I had kids on American Idol ask me, "Man, what do you do to get your mustache so good?" And I said, "Oh, I tweeze." And they said, "Tweeze?" I said, "Yeah." So when you have what I call dead time, boredom, you're in a hotel or the dressing room, and there's a big ten-magnification mirror? Oh man! Turn that mirror on thy face.
This is maybe an unanswerable question, but you've always seemed to have a knack for writing hits. I'm sitting here wondering where that came from.
Possessed is possessed. They've asked me several times to teach at a couple of universities for a semester. And I said, "My songwriting class takes exactly 30 seconds." I said [Richie begins tapping his foot], "Now, for you all who hear me tapping my foot, if all you can hear is tapping my foot, you're not a songwriter. For all of you who can hear a song and a melody on top of this, you're a songwriter." Course over. The universe is either talking to you or it's not.
