I think every artist at some point should record one of his songs on their projects. That’s how you keep it going. He deserves that. | | | | Bill Withers at the Rainbow Theatre, London, Oct. 1, 1973.
(Fin Costello/Redferns/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “I think every artist at some point should record one of his songs on their projects. That’s how you keep it going. He deserves that.”
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| | rantnrave:// He started way late—he was 32 when his classic debut album came out—and ended way early. His last album, which can't even be bothered to have a Wikipedia page, came out a mere 14 years later, after which he spent the last 35 years of his life being a dad, being a good soul, being the regular guy he insisted he always had been, and expressing absolutely no regrets. He might've carried a little residual anger at the music industry, too. In between, he wrote and sang himself into the American songbook with tales of heartache, everyday struggles and nearly heroic friendship, and a self-assured storyteller's voice that made him a kind of poet laureate of black America. “BILL WITHERS is the closest thing black people have to a BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN," QUESTLOVE said in 2015. He was "the working man’s troubadour," COREY GLOVER said. "He is what BOB DYLAN wants to be." Bill Withers' death, at age 81, is an immense loss to American music, in a year of immense loss. He was not a victim, as far as we know, of the coronavirus. He was, rather, someone we had leaned on as the plague attacked the civilized world's soul. A week after he died at age 81, his songs are already outliving him. There may not be a major artist alive whose songs have taken root, and survived, as organically as his. He was a hard-working man—he had a job manufacturing toilets for airplanes when he recorded that first album—who became a hard-working artist. He was a craftsman, with a craftsman's personality, which can make it weirdly easy to overlook how big a star he was in the 1970s, and how many of his songs continue to be part of the fabric of our lives. They show up in movies and TV shows, on the radio, in quarantine windows. But there was no Bill Withers TV special, and no comeback tour. He chose a quiet, ordinary, dignified life, befitting a singer with a phenomenal and resolutely unflashy voice. If you have 75 minutes, watch ALEX VLACK and DAMANI BAKER's 2009 documentary STILL BILL, which skillfully traces his career while mostly being about where he came from and where he ended up—a musician's life as seen through the lens of his nonmusical pursuits. A musician who spent his life wanting to be judged for what he did, rather than what you thought he should do. RIP. MusicSET: "Bill Withers Was the Quiet Soul of a Nation"... Good citizens: PINK, who is recovering from Covid-19 (along with her 3-year-old son, JAMESON), has pledged $500,000 each to emergency funds in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. MADONNA donates $1 million to Gates Philanthropy Partners' search for a treatment or cure. ELTON JOHN launches a $1 million emergency fund. JOHN MAYER donates money for ventilators for Livingston HealthCare in Livingston, Mont. JAY-Z and MEEK MILL's Reform Alliance sends 100,000 surgical masks to prisons around the U.S. CARDI B donates 20,000 meal supplements to New York area hospitals... DUFFY has posted a long, chilling essay about the rape/kidnapping that led to her decade-long absence from music. A difficult, important read... RIP VAUGHAN MASON, ALEX HARVEY, NEIL LASHER, GARY A. JENKINS, LUIS EDUARDO AUTE, PATRICK GIBSON, PAUL QUIRK. | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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 | REDEF |
| In a recording career that lasted a mere 14 years, Bill Withers wrote himself into the American songbook with tales of heartache, struggle and nearly heroic friendship—and a storyteller's voice that made him a kind of poet laureate of black America. | | |
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 | Now This |
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 | The Guardian |
| People singing from balconies during coronavirus lockdown are part of a long tradition of using music to fight fear, stretching back through the Black Death to the 7th century BC. | | |
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 | Salon |
| What is the American bard driving at with a 17-minute song on the JFK assassination? David Talbot thinks he knows. | | |
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| | | played a tambourine so well |
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| COVID-19 has brought in-person songwriting sessions to a halt, so professional writers are jumping on Zoom and FaceTime to pen next year’s hits. | | |
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| The Guardian |
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| After cancelled musicals and spring concerts, choral directors across the country are going the extra mile to have their students' voices heard. | | |
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