Lionel Richie has been talking about his friendship with Frank Sinatra and thoughts on Metallica and Foo Fighters.
Billboard caught up with 2014 Touring Awards’ Legend of Live honoree Lionel Richie, who shed light on some of the most memorable moments of his legendary career, like acquainting with Michael Jackson’s pet snake while writing We Are the World and his “unlikely” friendship with Frank Sinatra.
Nodding to legends in other genres, in response to the question “What’s the loudest, most raucous music you enjoy?” Richie answered “Metallica. They play their asses off. It’s sophisticated loudness. And Foo Fighters are brilliant.”
Explaining about his most unlikely showbiz friendship with Frank Sinatra he recalled him saying, “If you’re lucky enough in this business to have one hit record that the world remembers and asks you to sing over and over, you got yourself a career. You lucky son of a bitch, you got more than one and you wrote them all.”
Asked is he still had the green sweater from the cover of his first solo album? “I sure do. And I’ve got the Hello sweater. The only thing we didn’t think about twas the Hello bust — it was so God-awful, I wanted to get as far away from that thing as I could … Ultimately, it’ll be in a Lionel Richie museum somewhere.”
On The Commodores he said “I loved being in a band for two reasons. One is that it’s the most fun you’ll have in your life, to come backstage and have all the inside jokes. But the most important part of being in a band is that if anything goes wrong, I can blame somebody else.”
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