Withers maintained that the song came from where he came from: West Virginia, “a place where people were a little more attentive to each other, less afraid” than the people he noticed in big cities. In the course of doing the music, that phrase crossed my mind, so then you go back and say, “OK, I like the way this phrase, Lean On Me, sounds with this song.” So you go back and say, “How do I arrive at this as a conclusion to a statement? What would I say that would cause me to say Lean On Me?” That’s often the first song that children learn to play because they don’t have to change fingers – you just put your fingers in one position and go up and down the keyboard. So I bought a little piano and I was sitting there just running my fingers up and down the piano. This was my second album, so I could afford to buy myself a little Wurlitzer electric piano. Here is a video of Withers singing it on the BBC in 1974:īill Withers talked to about writing the tune: “I made the case that it would make a better national anthem than our current terrible one.” “I consider it to be the best American song recorded in the past hundred or so years,” Hein writes. I loved this note from Ethan Hein about the final day of his songwriting course, which ended with “ a spontaneous singalong” of “ Lean on Me” by Bill Withers. “We talk of poetry in such an abstract way because most of us are bad poets.” -Nietzsche
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