Music

The music of Bill Withers radiated a quality that’s rare in pop songs and, really, anywhere else: selflessness.It’s in the subjects that Withers, who died on Monday, chose to sing about: his grandmother’s hard-won wisdom in “Grandma’s Hands,” the suicidal regrets of a failed husband in “Better Off Dead,” and in one of his most indelible songs, “Lean on Me,” a churchy pledge of unconditional help and compassion.Perhaps it was because Withers was already a grown-up, in his early 30s, when his recording career started. He was raised in a large family in West Virginia coal country, served in the Navy and worked factory jobs before getting the chance to record. He hadn’t been sheltered from the everyday lives that he would write about.Withers’s most triumphant years, the early 1970s, were also an idealistic time for soul music. Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, Earth, Wind & Fire and others were writing community-minded songs that melded urban realism and utopian aspiration. Withers could be every bit their peer, particularly in the ways he brought big issues down to personal stories, like his portrait of a badly wounded Vietnam veteran, “I Can’t Write Left-Handed.” And when he wasn’t observing outside characters, Withers could also depict the deepest jealousy, loneliness and melancholy, in songs like “Who Is He (And What Is He to You),” “You,” and his despondent megahit, “Ain’t No Sunshine,” a model of profound simplicity.His voice was at the center of every song, reedy and gritty, strong enough for preacherly declamations and smooth enough to carry a lover’s endearments. Yet he chose to treat that utterly distinctive voice modestly — as a vehicle, not a centerpiece. He sang his stories with down-home fervor, but he was also more than willing to let the sense of the words dissolve into rhythm and incantation, into impulses and feelings.Withers made it seem — with deep-rooted knowledge and virtuoso skill — that each song was creating its own borderless style and groove on the spot, steeped in but never beholden to blues, gospel, country, jazz, folk, rock or any other defined idiom. Imagine Withers’s voice removed from songs like the defiant “Use Me,” and the grooves he devised (with his top-notch studio bands) nearly capture the mood on their own — though Withers’s vocals would also engage those grooves with every phrase.Withers was ill-used by a recording business that second-guessed his songwriting. In his acceptance speech at his long-belated 2015 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction, he defined A&R, record label jargon that stands for artists and repertoire, as “antagonistic and redundant.” After his 1974 album “+‘Justments,” filled with brooding songs about love gone wrong, Withers and his new label, Columbia, recast him as a more conventional romantic crooner. He had some suavely commercial moments: “Lovely Day” in 1977, which for its final minute flaunts one almost impossibly sustained note after another, and “Just the Two of Us,” which appeared on a 1980 album by the saxophonist Grover Washington Jr.Withers’s musical ingenuity lingers on his later albums in some eccentric rhythm tracks and sly chord progressions — and he did manage to resist making disco. But the joyful, risky self-invention of his early albums had given way to professionalism. He made his last album in 1985, then earned a living from his publishing catalog, refusing offers to record again.The Withers album to savor is the one he recorded live at Carnegie Hall in 1972. He brought a band of first-call studio musicians and gathered all of his best early material, seasoned by serious touring. Songs that had been limited to three minutes in studio versions get a chance to groove longer and harder: “Use Me” rides a backbeat of audience handclaps to syncopated ecstasy, and tops that with a reprise. Withers’s voice had a rawer tone than his studio performances without sacrificing any improvisational subtleties.And the songs were populated not with one singer’s ego, but with friends, relatives, lovers, rivals and, in an all-out 13-minute, key-changing, wah-wah throwdown, a week in the life of an entire neighborhood, “Harlem.” It’s not about Withers; it’s about music where everybody lives. More

Bill Withers always sounded like he was strumming the guitar from a seat at his kitchen table — or maybe, at his most luxurious, an easy chair in the living room.The ultimate homespun hitmaker, he had an innate sense of what might make a song memorable, and little interest in excess attitude or accouterments. Ultimately Withers reminded us that it’s the everyday that is the most meaningful: work, family, love, loss. None of that needs dressing up to feel real; it just needs a good melody. And maybe an unswerving beat.Withers, who died on Monday, is remembered for his hits (“Lean on Me,” “Use Me,” “Just the Two of Us”) more than for his albums, but maybe that’s an error. By virtue of how he made music, there’s often little difference between the great songs and the very-good ones: His singles weren’t surgically constructed to be smashes, and his non-hits were written in roughly the same way. Idea, groove, hook — and that’s it.As a result, his LPs from the early to mid-1970s, which contain most of his best-known songs, are stuffed with lesser-known gems too. Here are 10 of those easily overlooked classics.‘Sweet Wanomi’ (1971)A steadily strummed acoustic guitar mixes it up with a clavinet, bass and drums; later, a string section drifts in. Some combination of these parts covers most of Withers’s debut album, “Just as I Am.” The record’s fabulously stripped-down quality commands you to focus on Withers’s melodies, to get cozy with his winningly imperfect voice, to feel the hands being lain on the instruments in the studio. After the LP’s first three tracks, all classics (“Harlem,” “Grandma’s Hands” and “Ain’t No Sunshine”), we get to “Sweet Wanomi,” with a summery groove and lyrics celebrating the tender side of desire. Like so many of his songs, there are only a couple of chords and no bridge, plus a beat that subtly turns folk music into funk.‘I’m Her Daddy’ (1971)One of the most tenderhearted songs in the Withers songbook is also one of his most aggrieved. It’s written from the perspective of a man who has just found out that a long-ago lover had his child without telling him. “Can I see her?” he pleads. “Does she know/I’m her daddy?” It starts with a lonely acoustic guitar and a drizzle of fingers on a hand drum. By the time he arrives at the title line, letting his syllables linger and sometimes verge into a growl, Withers sounds bewildered by his own sadness.‘Do It Good’ (1971)“I can’t play the guitar or the piano, but I made a career out of writing songs on guitars and piano,” Withers told The New York Times in 2015, soon after he was elected to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. “I never learned music. I just did it.” That may be more or less true, but on his debut album, the executive Clarence Avant brought in a crack team that included Booker T. Jones and Stephen Stills. On “Do It Good,” over a two-chord vamp, Withers acknowledges in a spoken interlude that when he first came into the studio, he felt as green as a sprout. He quotes the counsel Jones gave him: “Don’t worry about it. Just do what you do, and do it good.”‘Who Is He (and What Is He to You)’ (1972)With novelistic intrigue, Withers sings of walking down the street with his lover and watching her exchange a seemingly familiar glance with another man. “Dadgummittuh,” Withers spits in a jealous neologism. “Who is he, and what is he to you?” The song would get a second life a quarter-century later, when Meshell Ndegeocello’s largely faithful cover became a No. 1 hit on the Billboard dance chart.‘I Can’t Write Left-Handed’ (1973)Before becoming a household name, Withers spent nine years as a Navy mechanic. He left shortly after the Gulf of Tonkin affair, and never had to serve in Vietnam. But “I Can’t Write Left-Handed” is written from the perspective of a G.I. whose right arm was shot off in the Vietnam War; it’s the closest Withers ever came to penning a protest song. As the narrator asks someone to help him write a letter to his mother, there’s no big climax or rousing chorus — just a slowly unfolding story of heartbreak, as a young man tries to make sense of what’s transpired and searches for a way forward.‘Stories’ (1975)This is a rare sort of Withers song: It’s got hymnal chord changes, a set of “come one, come all” lyrics, and a flourishing harp played by the great Dorothy Ashby. But ultimately, it’s no less than a declaration of artistic purpose. In the bridge, he makes his mission clear:Young and old, we all have storiesThat we all must try to sellTales of how you get to heavenAnd how we’ve been through hell‘Liza’ (1975)Think of “Liza” as a more intimate (and, yes, far less anthemic) counterpart to “Lean on Me.” After dedicating the song to his niece, accompanied only by an electric piano evoking nursery lullabies, Withers sings: “I know what it means to need a shoulder/So lay your head on mine.” Whereas on “Lean on Me,” his voice was hoisted up by a full string section, on “Liza” it stays at a single register, like an elder telling a long story where the plot is not really the point. As he sings, you can almost feel the warmth of his breath.‘City of the Angels’ (1976)This is the closest Withers ever got to an epic work, but it’s still Bill we’re talking about: Even a 10-minute track has a certain modesty to it. For the first half, a throbbing beat and a textured blend of acoustic and electric piano carry the track along as he sings a paean to Los Angeles, where he settled after serving in the military and eventually found stardom. For the second half, with the rhythm gone, he drifts back through those same lyrics as if savoring a memory. There’s no big new formal section, or dazzling instrumental solo. Simply not his style.‘It Ain’t Because of Me Baby’ (1977)Call it the “Hotline Bling” of the ’70s — a song whose lyrics basically say: Things used to be so good between us. I’m still just a phone call away. Don’t you know better than not to call? And just as with Drake, the self-righteousness manages to reconstitute as charm. “It Ain’t Because of Me Baby” comes from “Menagerie,” which to that point was Withers’s most thoroughly produced album. But even through a slick architecture of strings and horns, his unpretentious romanticism cut straight through.‘Something That Turns You On’ (1985)Withers’s last album was a full-on embrace of the by-then-omnipresent “quiet storm” sound. Yet again, he made the style work for him without really changing his mode of delivery at all. Instead of cool bravado or false reassurances — the coin of the realm in a lot of the gussied-up balladry that followed disco — he opens “Something That Turns You On” with a humble prayer for connection:I hope you find in meSomething that turns you onA tie that binds with meAnd holds us together from now on More

Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Mavis Staples, ‘All in It Together’[embedded content]No one else does solidarity, reconciliation and mutual uplift with the soulful dignity of Mavis Staples. “All in It Together” proclaims, “I don’t need any enemies/I want you to be my friend.” Produced by Jeff Tweedy, the song feels loose-limbed and unpolished, hinting at the Rolling Stones’ forays into country. Tweedy leans into his slide guitar and Scott Ligon slings honky-tonk piano flourishes as Staples insists, “I need you/you need me.” The song benefits My Block, My Hood, My City, a Chicago group helping seniors through the pandemic. JON PARELESMoses Sumney, ‘Cut Me’Moses Sumney takes the underpinnings of a vintage soul ballad — an unhurried bass line, a pure and airborne falsetto vocal, gospel tropes of weariness and longing — and thoroughly twists them in “Cut Me,” a sweetly harmonized song about a compulsion toward self-harm, recognized but not conquered. The bass line is spattered with stop-start piano clusters; the song lopes forward through sweet falsetto harmonies, surreal electronics and — why not? — trombones answering Sumney’s voice. It’s one more advance puzzle piece from Sumney’s “Grae,” due in May. PARELESserpentwithfeet, ‘A Comma’[embedded content]“Life’s gotta get easier,” sings serpentwithfeet — the songwriter Josiah Wise — backed by metronomic ticking, impassive minor-key piano arpeggios, a muted beat and something that squeaks. It’s not a prediction — it’s a plea. PARELESPowfu featuring beabadoobee, ‘Death Bed (Coffee for Your Head)’Finally, a video for one of the year’s most infectious pop songs, a casually-loping lite hip-hop ballad full of regret tempered with pity. Pofwu raps with a kind of tender lethargy, or maybe a lethargic kind of tenderness — either way, he’s sweetly compelling. The Dido-ish countermelody by the singer beabadoobee injects a dose of early ’90s melancholy. JON CARAMANICATroye Sivan, ‘Take Yourself Home’An understatedly lush quasi-soul thumper from Troye Sivan, whose songs’ production has often communicated more emphatically than he did. This track is restrained, freeing him to sing calmly, which suits him well. But he hasn’t forsaken loudness — in the final minute, his main vocals drop out, and the song begins to swallow him, swelling into some blend of arch new wave and soulful hard techno. CARAMANICAThe 1975 featuring Phoebe Bridgers, ‘Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America’The music couldn’t be gentler: folky strumming, breathy vocals, floating sustained horns. But as the title suggests, the 1975 is stirring the pot with “Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America,” which has Matty Healy and Phoebe Bridgers confessing to same-sex attractions that they dare not reveal to their peers. “Fortunately I believe — lucky me,” Healy sings, leaving listeners to gauge the irony. PARELESSonic Boom, ‘The Way That You Live’Pete Kember, better known as Sonic Boom, still embraces the cavernous, neo-psychedelic mantras he brought to Spacemen 3, E.A.R. and his own Sonic Boom projects. In this single from his album due June 5, “All Things Being Equal,” the beat is steadfast, synthesizers pulse and swell and wordless “ahs” enfold him as he sings a refrain that might as well be benevolent advice about open-ended but well-connected isolation: “Make it about the way that you live/Make it about the love that you give.” PARELESDaBaby, ‘Find My Way’In which DaBaby eases up on the gas pedal, finds just a touch of melody, and spreads his typical cluster of punches out a little — not a lot, just a little — over an understated and maybe shrug-worthy bit of Nelly-esque production. CARAMANICANduduzo Makhathini, ‘Yehlisan’uMoya’When a musician considers himself basically a healer, as the South African pianist Nduduzo Makhathini does, you can look for clues to his purpose in the effect he has on others. So let’s talk about how I’ve never heard Logan Richardson play the alto saxophone like he does on “Yehlisan’uMoya,” the opener of Makhathini’s Blue Note debut, “Models of Communication: Letters from the Underworlds.” Actually, Richardson’s playing — melodic and brazen and scrawled; circling more than slicing, which is unusual for him ­— is consistently among the best things about this album. And that’s no knock on the bandleader. Because here’s another best thing: the multidirectional synthesis of Makhathini’s compositions, immersed as they are in the traditions of South Africa’s eastern region but richly shaded with Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Andrew Hill and John Coltrane too. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOEverything Is Recorded featuring Infinite Coles and Maria Somerville, ‘11:55 A.M./This World’“This World” offers a hymnlike chorus like a backwoods church congregation, unknowingly transported to be joined by reverb-y guitars or stately orchestra. “This world’s gonna break your heart/There’ll be no place to lay your head,” they sing, with the dusty-voiced Infinite Cole offering somber verses: “I call your name but the truth is hard to find.” It’s the eerie finale of the album “Friday Forever” by Everything Is Recorded, the project of Richard Russell, the producer and head of XL Records; it’s supposed to be the last chapter of a narrative. PARELESWebber/Morris Big Band, ‘Coral’[embedded content]The big band is one of the unwieldiest old vehicles in jazz. But every time the saxophonists Anna Webber and Angela Morris create a piece of music together, they seem to be picking apart their 19-piece ensemble and reassembling it from scratch. On “Both Are True,” its five-years-awaited debut album, the Webber/Morris Big Band is at times a clenched fist (on “Rebonds”), elsewhere a prismatic splay of light (on the title track). On the 10-minute “Coral,” what begins as an Elysian immersion in reeds and brass grows dark and dispersed. Throughout, no steady rhythm takes hold. But at the end, when those original, idyllic harmonies return, so does a sense of peace. RUSSONELLO More

Bill Withers, a onetime Navy aircraft mechanic who, after teaching himself to play the guitar, wrote some of the most memorable and often-covered songs of the 1970s, including “Lean on Me,” “Ain’t No Sunshine” and “Use Me,” died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 81.His death, at a hospital, was announced by his family. His son, Todd, said Mr. Withers had had heart problems.Mr. Withers, who had an evocative, gritty R&B voice that could embody loss or hope, was in his 30s when he released his first album, “Just as I Am,” in 1971. It included “Ain’t No Sunshine,” a mournful lament (“Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone/And she’s always gone too long/Anytime she goes away”) that cracked the Billboard Top 10.Other hits followed, perhaps none better known than “Lean on Me,” an anthem of friendship and support that hit No. 1 in 1972 and has been repurposed countless times by a variety of artists.There were also “Use Me” (1972), “Lovely Day” (1977) and “Just the Two of Us” (1981), among other hits. But after the 1985 album “Watching You Watching Me,” frustrated with the music business, Mr. Withers stopped recording and performing.“I wouldn’t know a pop chart from a Pop-Tart,” he told Rolling Stone in 2015, when he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.“Bill was a mystical man,” Leo Sacks, who supervised the rerelease of Mr. Withers’s catalog for Sony Legacy Recordings, including a 2012 box that won a Grammy for best historical recording, said by email. “Like a Greek oracle. But he let the songs speak for themselves. He sang so conversationally and universally, like he was sitting next to you. His songs made every word count.”William Harrison Withers Jr. was born on July 4, 1938, in Slab Fork, W.Va., to William and Mattie (Galloway) Withers. His mother was a maid, and his father worked in the coal mines.At 17, eager to avoid a coal-mine career himself, Mr. Withers joined the Navy.“My first goal was, I didn’t want to be a cook or a steward,” he told Rolling Stone. “So I went to aircraft-mechanic school.”He spent nine years in the service, some of it stationed in Guam. He quit the Navy in 1965, while stationed in California, and eventually got a job at an airplane parts factory. A visit to a nightclub to see Lou Rawls perform was a catalyst for changing his life.“I was making $3 an hour, looking for friendly women, but nobody found me interesting,” he said. “Then Rawls walked in, and all these women are talking to him.”He bought a cheap guitar at a pawnshop, started learning to play it and writing songs, and eventually recorded a demo. Clarence Avant, a music executive who had just founded an independent label, Sussex, took note and set him up with the keyboardist Booker T. Jones, of Booker T. & the MG’s, to produce an album.“Bill came right from the factory and showed up in his old brogans and his old clunk of a car with a notebook full of songs,” Mr. Jones told Rolling Stone. “When he saw everyone in the studio, he asked to speak to me privately and said, ‘Booker, who is going to sing these songs?’ I said, ‘You are, Bill.’ He was expecting some other vocalist to show up.”Mr. Withers was laid off from his factory job a few months before “Just as I Am” came out. After the album’s release, he recalled, he received two letters on the same day. One was from his workplace asking him to return to work. The other was from “The Tonight Show,” where he appeared in November 1971.That “Ain’t No Sunshine” became a hit off that album was unexpected.“‘Ain’t No Sunshine’ was the B-side to ‘Harlem’,” he told The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 2015, referring to another track from the album, “until the D.J.s turned it over.”The song, he said, had just come to him one day.“I was watching the movie ‘The Days of Wine and Roses,’ looked out the window and it crossed my mind,” he told The Plain Dealer. “Probably some girl had left me, but ego preservation has taught me to avoid inconvenient truths.”“Ain’t No Sunshine” won the Grammy Award for best rhythm and blues song. “Lean on Me” and “Just the Two of Us” (a collaboration with the saxophonist Grover Washington Jr., written with William Salter and Ralph MacDonald) won the same award.Mr. Withers released six other studio albums in the 1970s, for Sussex and then Columbia, and performed across the country and beyond. One memorable appearance was at the music festival in Zaire in 1974 that preceded the “Rumble in the Jungle,” the heavyweight fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali.But he also played clubs like the Bottom Line in Manhattan.“Mr. Withers’s lyrics are among the most thoughtful in all of pop music,” Robert Palmer wrote in The New York Times, reviewing a 1976 show there, “but his work also has its physical side. Many of his tunes simmer irresistibly, as if cooking over a low flame.”Mr. Withers chafed at Columbia, clashing with executives, and after the release of “Watching You Watching Me” in 1985, he was done with the music business. Years later he liked to tell stories about not being recognized in public. One such incident occurred at a Los Angeles restaurant.“Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles up on Pico,” he told NPR’s “Morning Edition” in 2015, “and these ladies looked like they had just come from church or something, and they were talking about this Bill Withers song. So I was going to have some fun with them. I said, ‘I’m Bill Withers,’ and this lady said: ‘You ain’t no Bill Withers. You too light-skinned to be Bill Withers.’”Mr. Withers’s brief marriage to the actress Denise Nicholas in the 1970s ended in divorce. In 1976 he married Marcia Johnson. She and their son survive him, along with their daughter, Kori, and a sister, Florence Mather.In 2015, in advance of a tribute concert in his honor at Carnegie Hall, Mr. Withers was interviewed at a restaurant by a reporter for The Times. The talk turned to how, with no music training, he had managed to fashion a career in music relatively late in life.“It was just something I decided to do,” he said. “If I decided to build one of these fountains” — he pointed to a decoration on the restaurant’s patio — “I could probably do it.”He could also probably have resumed his career at any time.“Late in life, he would tease us about recording again,” Mr. Sacks said. “But I think he was truly ambivalent. He said he didn’t think anyone was interested in what an ‘old man’ had to say. And that was Bill to a tee: wily, cunning, self-effacing. Utterly disingenuous.”Derrick Bryson Taylor contributed reporting. More