Lionel Richie, the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, is a legendary singer/songwriter — first with the Commodores, then as a solo artist — as well as a record producer, an American Idol judge and, most recently, the executive producer and a subject of the Netflix documentary about the making of the landmark charity single “We Are the World,” The Greatest Night in Pop. The doc was the most watched English-language film on the streaming service the week it dropped last January, and went on to receive three Emmy noms, including best documentary or nonfiction special. It is now eligible for the best doc feature Oscar and is nominated for the best music film Grammy.
This episode was recorded in Studio A at the former A&M Studios in Hollywood, now known as Henson Studios, where Richie and 45 other A-listers recorded “We are the World” almost exactly 40 years ago, on the night of Jan. 28, 1985 into the morning of Jan. 29, 1985.
Richie has been a major player in the world of music for more than 50 years — indeed, as the New York Times recently put it, he “started out in the age of Motown and has survived into the age of the meme.”
- He’s sold more than 100 million albums, making him one of the bestselling artists ever.
- He’s had five singles reach #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart — “Endless Love,” “All Night Long,” “Hello,” “Say You, Say Me” and “Truly” — and 13 that cracked its top 10.
- He’s had three albums reached #1 on the Billboard 200 — Can’t Slow Down, Dancing on the Ceiling and Tuskegee — and six that cracked the top 10.
- He has been nominated for 15 Grammys — including six for song of the year, “Three Times a Lady,” “Lady,” “Endless Love,” “All Night Long,” “Hello” and “We Are the World,” which is a figure bested only by Taylor Swift, who has accumulated eight noms in the category — and he’s won four Grammys in total: best male pop vocal performance for “Truly” in 1983; album of the year for Can’t Slow Down and producer of the year (non-classical) for himself in 1985; and song of the year for “We Are the World” in 1986.
- He’s also been nominated three times for the best original song Oscar — as a writer of “Endless Love” from the 1982 movie of the same name, of “Miss Celie’s Blues” from the 1985 movie The Color Purple and of “Say You, Say Me” from the 1985 movie White Nights — winning for the third of those.
- Additionally, he was an inductee into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1994, the Apollo Theater’s Legends Hall of Fame in 2012 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2022. He was the recipient of the BET Awards’ Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014, the Recording Academy’s MusiCares Person the Year honor in 2016, the Songwriters Hall of Fame’s Johnny Mercer Award in 2016, a Kennedy Center Honor in 2017, the Library of Congress’ Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in 2022 and the American Music Awards’ Icon Award in 2022.
Over the course of this episode, the 75-year-old discussed his path from small-town Alabama to the biggest stages in the world, first with the Commodores and then as a solo artist; the hits on which he worked along the way, and why so many of them center on love; and why “We are the World,” in particular, means so much to him.