Austin Kleon

Lean on Me

“We talk of poetry in such an abstract way because most of us are bad poets.” —Nietzsche

I loved this note from Ethan Hein about the final day of his songwriting course, which ended with “a spontaneous singalong” of “Lean on Me” by Bill Withers.

“I consider it to be the best American song recorded in the past hundred or so years,” Hein writes. “I made the case that it would make a better national anthem than our current terrible one.”

Here is a video of Withers singing it on the BBC in 1974:

Bill Withers talked to SongFacts.com about writing the tune:

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. That’s often the first song that children learn to play because they don’t have to change fingers – you just put your fingers in one position and go up and down the keyboard. In the course of doing the music, that phrase crossed my mind, so then you go back and say, “OK, I like the way this 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?”

Withers maintained that the song came from where he came from: West Virginia, “a place where people were a little more attentive to each other, less afraid” than the people he noticed in big cities. Withers called it “a rural song that translates,” and he told a story about having a blow-out on an Alabama back road and somebody helping him.

I spent some time yesterday listening to “Lean on Me” and transcribing the lyrics on my typewriter.

When Withers died, I shared a few lines from the song and noted how incredible it was that he spun songs out of such simple, everyday language.

In the same SongFacts interview from above, Withers said that he was “a snob” about lyrics.

It’s very difficult to make things simple and understandable… To me, the biggest challenge in the world is to take anything that’s complicated and make it simple so it can be understood by the masses…. When I say I’m a snob lyrically, I mean I’m a snob in the sense that I’m a stickler for saying something the simplest possible way with some elements of poetry. Because simple is memorable. If something’s too complicated, you’re not going to walk around humming it to yourself because it’s too hard to remember.

He said his music was enduring because it was “re-accessible,” people could recall it. He said, “I don’t walk around with a piece of paper in my hand all the time, so if I don’t remember it, it means it wasn’t very memorable so it’s probably in the wind somewhere.”

But he also said that you have to be careful, because the process can’t be totally explained:

There’s an X-factor that we all function under. And that has nothing to do with you, it’s an accident of birth. That’s the gift that you have. That’s why it’s called a gift, it means you can’t go out and buy it, you can’t go out and get it from anybody, it has to be given to you. I’m doing the best I can trying to explain this stuff, but I don’t have any explanation as to what separates me from anybody else, except certain things were given to me. The real and most profound answer to anything you’ve asked me – why did you say this or why did you that – is because it crossed my mind. Why did it cross my mind versus crossing your mind or anybody else’s mind?

He then joked about the irony that when he first wrote the song, nobody would shut up long enough to listen to it, and now everybody wants to know about it!

The whole interview is worth reading.

Related reading: “Heading out for Wonderful”

Words pinned to the wall


Here are some recent additions to my inspiration corner beside my desk.

Here’s a bit from Raymond Carver’s essay, “On Writing”:

Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. Someday I’ll put that on a three-by-five card and tape it to the wall beside my desk. I have some three-by-five cards on the wall now. “Fundamental accuracy of statement is the one sole morality of writing.” Ezra Pound. It is not everything by any means, but if a writer has “fundamental accuracy of statement” going for him, he’s at least on the right track.

I have a three-by-five up there with this fragment of a sentence from a story by Chekhov: “. . . and suddenly everything became clear to him.” I find these words filled with wonder and possibility. I love their simple clarity, and the hint of revelation that’s implied. There is mystery, too. What has been unclear before? Why is it just now becoming clear? What’s happened? Most of all–what now? There are consequences as a result of such sudden awakenings. I feel a sharp sense of relief–and anticipation.

I overheard the writer Geoffrey Wolff say “No cheap tricks” to a group of writing students. That should go on a three-by-five card. I’d amend it a little to “No tricks.” Period.

In Tuesday’s newsletter, we’re sharing words we’ve pinned on the wall.

Joan Baez on drawing

Some advice on the art of imperfection, courtesy of Joan Baez:

If I really don’t like what’s happening, I drop the drawing in the swimming pool. If I’ve gotten too precise about it, the imperfection brings it to life. One of my friends said, “Tell me just one thing that will last. Make as many mistakes as you can.” When you’re trying to make it perfect, trying to make it exactly what you want it to be, then it’s time to drop it into the pool.

That comes from Amanda Petrusich’s recent interview with the singer-songwriter about her new book, Am I Pretty When I Fly? An Album of Upside Down Drawings.

In the introduction to the book Baez writes about her life of drawing, how she “hated school” and “drew my way through the torture.”

In her seventies, Baez started painting more and making collages. Decades ago, she says, she arrived “by chance” at making drawings upside down.

Somewhere in my teenage years, probably out of boredom, I taught myself how to write backwards, starting with EINAOJ ZEAB, my new name. I worked my way through the Greek alphabet: AHPLA ATEB, AMMAG, ATLED, and so on. I still write backwards as a form of therapy when I need to get to the root of a blockage or calm the buzzing heat of a panic attack. It’s as though the appropriate wires cross my brain when I write backwards, which allows information otherwise unavailable to surface.

Later, I began drawing with my left hand instead of my right. Like writing backwards, using my nondominant hand opened a different compartment in my brain. I discovered the results were less restrained and more fluid, and therefore more interesting to me.

She then writes about discovering the “tightrope-walk thrill” of blind contour drawing.

From Am I Pretty When I Fly? by Joan Baez. Copyright 2023 by Joan Baez and used with permission of Godine

Here’s how she describes her upside-down process:

I start moving my pen or pencil around upside down on the paper — napkin, tablecloth, scrap — as thought the drawing is being made for someone sitting opposite me at the table. Sometimes I have an idea of what I want to draw, but often I just let the pen or pencil start swooping around the page. Once I start to see what’s developing, I begin embellishing, often adding randomly the human form, a floating fish, a flower.

Eventually, I turn the drawing right-side up and see if it needs anything to make it feel complete, in which case I reverse it again and add bits and pieces.

Back right-side up again and the real magic happens: I listen for what the drawing says to me. When a phrase (usually a pun) comes to my mind and resonates, I turn the paper one more time and write the phrase upside down.

Reading all this, I began thinking about Leonardo’s Brain, how he was left-handed, but also ambidextrous, and practiced mirror writing — and how for right-handed people, the left hemisphere controls the right hand, but the right hemisphere controls the left hand.

Baez says she knows there is a neurological explanation for her method, but she says she’s not interested in that. “We don’t need an explanation for every damn thing,” she writes. “There’s a lot to be said for letting go and doing something simply because it feels right… Why tamper with magic?”

Related reading: “Turn it upside down”

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