Lionel Richie Truly The Love Songs Album

[Mohammed Huberty]

Fewhitmakers owned the '80s like Lionel Richie. The onetime Commodores singer/songwriter had one of the decade's most successful solo careers, thanks to back-to-back-to-back million-selling albums and 13 consecutive Top 10 hits between 1981 and 1987. But to millions of fans, his real talent is finding the right romantic lyrics for any situation, with stirring melodies to match.

Commodores, "Just to Be Close to You" (1976): Lionel and the Commodores brought the funk on early hits like "Machine Gun" and "Slippery When Wet," but it was when Richie started showing off his more sensitive side that the band really started to take off. "Sweet Love" was their first Top 10 hit, and "Just to Be Close to You," featuring an emotive piano and that double-tracked, harmonic vocal, soon followed, also becoming their second No. 1 hit on Billboard's R&B charts.

Commodores, "Three Times a Lady" (1978): Perhaps the quintessential Commodores ballad, Lionel wrote this after a moving speech his father gave to his mother at a wedding anniversary party. Although he wanted to pitch the tune to Frank Sinatra, producer James Anthony Carmichael convinced him to let the band take a try. The result: the band's first No. 1 hit.

Commodores, "Still" (1979): Richie once explained his balladeering process in the Commodores as an act of insurance: the members of the band were always jockeying to get their own songs on albums, which Motown wanted to be a balance of uptempo and romantic numbers. Richie wrote ballads, which few of his bandmates wanted to do. And he was damn good at them: "Still," written for a divorcing couple who wished to part as friends, was the group's second chart-topper.

Kenny Rogers, "Lady" (1980): At the start of a new decade, Richie's hitmaking pen could not stop, and he finally logged some time as a writer and producer for other artists. Teaming up with Kenny Rogers might have seemed an odd fit, but the Tuskegee, Alabama-born Richie knew a few things about the genre. And if people didn't know it then, they certainly knew it after "Lady" topped the pop, country and adult contemporary charts and made it to No. 10 on Billboard's end-of-decade survey.

Lionel Richie, "Hello" (1984): While Lionel's self-titled debut spun off three Top 5 hits in 1982, Can't Slow Down became his defining juggernaut, yielding five Top 5s across two years. "Hello," the album's second No. 1 hit, is still one of its most memorable, not only for its sweet sentimentality (dig that smooth acoustic guitar on the bridge!) but for its iconic music video, where love and affection transcended sight...or the ability to make a convincing bust of Lionel's face.

Lionel Richie, "Say You, Say Me" (1985): Lionel wasn't done dropping smash hits even after promotion for Can't Slow Down wound down in 1985. He co-wrote USA for Africa's charity chart-topper "We Are the World" with old friend Michael Jackson (who he used to open for when the Commodores were starting out) and penned another moving movie theme - this time for the drama White Nights, about a pair of expatriate dancers (Gregory Hines and Mikhail Baryshnikov) forming an unlikely bond in the Soviet Union. Predictably, Motown didn't want Lionel's first song after Can't Slow Down to show up on a rival label's soundtrack, so fans had to settle for a single - and settle they did: "Say You, Say Me" became another No. 1 hit and also won Richie an Academy Award for his songwriting.

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In conjunction with the GRAMMY Foundation's mission of recognizing and preserving our musical past, this year's GRAMMY Foundation Music Preservation Project will explore the history of legendary influencers in music and the invaluable contributions of those key players, the music they inspired and their impact on the American cultural landscape.

Performers include GRAMMY winners Rodney Crowell and Emmylou Harris, current 55th GRAMMY nominee Ed Sheeran, and singer/songwriter Lianne La Havas. More performers will be announced shortly. The evening's musical director will be Darrell Brown, songwriter/producer, Recording Academy Trustee and GRAMMY Foundation Board member. Neil Portnow, President/CEO of The Recording Academy and the GRAMMY Foundation, will be in attendance, along with other prominent music industry leaders and members of The Recording Academy.

Beloved by fans around the globe, yet increasingly unaffordable for many artists, concert tours are central to the world of entertainment and local economies. After the pandemic-era global shuttering of concert venues large and small, tours are back, and bigger than ever.

Against that backdrop, heightened concerns about the global environmental cost of concert touring have led a number of prominent artists to launch initiatives. Those efforts seek both to mitigate the negative effects of touring and communicate messages about sustainability to concertgoers.

No serious discussion of climate issues suggests a worldwide halt to live music touring, but there exists much room for improvement. Both on their own and with the help of dedicated nonprofit organizations, many artists are taking positive steps toward mitigating the deleterious effects that touring exerts upon the environment.

The ESI collaborates with industry heavyweights Live Nation, Warner Music Group and others as well with touring/recording acts like Coldplay to examine the carbon footprint of the music industry. A key component of the ESI is the Climate Machine, a collaborative research group that seeks to help the live music industry reduce carbon emissions. "As a research institution, we bring technologies and analytics to understand, in the best way possible, the actual impact of the music industry upon climate change," says John Fernndez, Director of the ESI.

Guitarist Adam Gardner is a founding member of Massachusetts-based indie rockers Guster, but he's more than just a singer in a rock band. Gardner is also the co-founder of REVERB, one of the organizations at the forefront of developing and implementing climate-focused sustainability initiatives.

Founded in 2004 by Gardner and his wife, environmental activist Lauren Sullivan, REVERB began with a goal of making touring more sustainable; over the years its focus has expanded to promote industry-wide changes. Today, the organization promotes sustainability throughout the industry in partnership with music artists, concert venues and festivals.

REVERB initiatives have included efforts to eliminate single-use plastics at the California Roots Music & Arts Festival, clean energy projects in cooperation with Willie Nelson and Billie Eilish, and efforts with other major artists. Gardner has seen sustainability efforts grow over two decades

Watt acknowledges that like every concertgoer, each touring artist has a certain level of responsibility where sustainability is concerned. "And everyone can be doing something," he says, noting a number of straightforward actions that artists can put in place while on tour. "They can eliminate single-use waste. They can donate hotel toiletries that [would otherwise] hit the landfill."

Four-time GRAMMY winner Brittany Howard is another passionate REVERB partner. "Knowing that I wanted to make my tours more sustainable was a start," she tells GRAMMY.com, "but working with REVERB really helped me bring it to life on the road. REVERB has helped us with guidelines and a green rider to keep our stage, greenrooms and buses more sustainable."

Singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Adam Met does more than front AJR, the indie pop trio he founded in 2005 with brothers Jack and Ryan. Met has a PhD in sustainable development and is a climate activist; he's also the founder/Executive Director of Planet Reimagined, a nonprofit that promotes sustainability and activism through its work with businesses, other organizations and musicians.

As the Backstreet Boys celebrate the 25th anniversary of "I Want It That Way," take a look at how the song has been diversely covered, lovingly lampooned and karaoke jammed by an array of voices in the business.

When the king of parody songs selects one to skewer, you know it's an iconic song. Weird Al Yankovic paid tribute to the largeness of the Backstreet Boys classic when he used "I Want It That Way" as the basis of a song called "eBay" in 2003.

Yankovic's chorus replaces the original's with, "A used pink bathrobe/ A rare mint snow globe/ A Smurf TV tray/ I bought on eBay." The Backstreet Boys send up appears on Yankovic's album Poodle Hat, which won Best Comedy Album at the 2004 GRAMMYs.

The lead singers of Alabama Shakes and My Morning Jacket covering a boy band classic. It doesn't sound real, but Brittany Howard and Jim James did just that in 2016 when they recorded "I Want It That Way" for an animated short cartoon called "A Love Story."

Released by the fast food chain Chipotle Mexican Grill, the clip was part of a creative campaign to showcase the company's focus on natural ingredients. Howard and James highlight the poignancy and versatility of the song by adding lush string arrangements and dramatic beats.

British rockers The 1975 performed a fairly faithful cover of "I Want It That Way," hitting all the high notes at several of their 2023 world concert tour stops. But it's not the first time frontman Matty Healy has hinted at the Backstreet Boys' influence on his band: he told Pitchfork in 2020 that "College Dropout-era Kanye West meets Backstreet Boys" was part of their veritable moodboard at the time when working on their own song called "Tonight (I Wish I Was Your Boy)."

In 2020, Lil Uzi Vert released a rap song called "That Way" that includes a refrain of "I want it that way" sung to the tune of the Backstreet original, but with an AutoTune twist. From there, the lyrics become quite a bit naughtier than anything the BSB guys have uttered in any song.

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