Lean on Me

In his Songfacts interview, Bill Withers talked about this song: "This was my second album, so I could afford to buy myself a little Wurlitzer electric piano. So I bought a little piano and I was sitting there just running my fingers up and down the piano. In the course of doing the music, that phrase crossed my mind, so then you go back and say, 'OK, I like the way that 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?' At that point, it's between you and your actual feelings, you and your morals and what you're really like. You probably do more thinking about it after it's done."

Withers did not record his first song until he was 32 years old. He was in the US Navy for nine years, then worked at a factory making parts for airplanes. Says Withers: "Being from a rural, West Virginia setting, that kind of circumstance would be more accessible to me than it would be to a guy living in New York where people step over you if you're passed out on the sidewalk, or Los Angeles, where you could die on the side of the freeway and it would probably be eight days before anyone noticed you were dead. Coming from a place where people were a little more attentive to each other, less afraid, that would cue me to have those considerations. I think what we say is influenced by how we are, what's been our life experiences. Now, I notice young guys writing about shooting each other in the city and stuff like that, well I would never have said anything like that because it was not my experience, I'm not from a big city. I think circumstance dictates what people think."

This is often the first song children learn to play on the piano because they don't have to change fingers. You just put your fingers in one position and go up and down the keyboard.