Lionel Richie

Profile and Story. His labels are Island, MCA and Motown. Soul, R&B, pop and pop rock are his genres. The story was written on Wikipedia, Lionel Richie is an American singer (Musician). He was born June 20, 1949 (Tuskegee, Alabama United States).

Richie's 1982 self-titled debut contained three hit singles: the U.S. #1 song "Truly," which launched his career as one of the most successful balladeers of the 1980s, and the Top Five hits "You Are" and "My Love." The album hit #3 on the music charts and sold over 4 million copies. His 1983 follow-up album, Can't Slow Down, sold over twice as many copies and won two Grammy Awards, including Album Of The Year, propelling him into the first rank of international superstars. The album contained the #1 hit "All Night Long," a Caribbean-flavored dance number that was promoted by a colorful music video produced by former Monkee Michael Nesmith.

Several more Top 10 hits followed, the most successful of which was the ballad "Hello" (1984), a sentimental love song that showed how far Richie had moved from his R&B roots. Richie had three more Top Ten hits in 1984, "Stuck on You" (#3), "Running with the Night" (#7) and "Penny Lover" (#8). Now described by one critic as "the black Barry Manilow," in 1985 Richie wrote and performed a suitably soothing theme song, "Say You, Say Me," for the film White Nights, winning an Oscar for his efforts as well as reaching #1 on the U.S. charts and staying there for four weeks, making it the #1 song of 1985 according to Billboard's year-end Hot 100 chart. He also collaborated with Michael Jackson on the charity single "We Are the World" by USA for Africa, another #1 hit.

In 1986, Richie released Dancing on the Ceiling, his last widely popular album, which produced a run of US and UK hits including "Say You, Say Me" (U.S. #1), "Dancing on the Ceiling" (U.S. #2), "Ballerina Girl" (U.S. #7), and "Se La" (U.S. #20), Richie's most recent U.S. Pop Top Twenty hit. The title selection was accompanied by a video directed by Stanley Donen, which drew inspiration from Royal Wedding, a 1951 Fred Astaire film Donen had directed. The critical consensus was that this album represented nothing more than a consolidation of his previous work, though Richie's collaboration with the country group Alabama on "Deep River Woman" did break new ground. By 1987, Richie was exhausted from his work schedule and after a controversial year laid low taking care of his father in Alabama. His father, Lionel Sr., died in 1990. Richie made his return to recording and performing following the release of his first greatest-hits collection, Back to Front, in 1992.

Since then, his ever-more-relaxed schedule has kept his recording and live work to a minimum. He broke the silence in 1996 with Louder Than Words, on which he resisted any change of style or the musical fashion-hopping of the past decade, sticking instead with his chosen path of well-crafted soul music, which in the intervening years has become known as Contemporary R&B.

Richie's albums in the 1990s such as Louder Than Words and Time failed to match the commercial success of his earlier work. Some of his recent albums, such as Renaissance, have returned to his older style and achieved success in Europe but only modest notice in the United States. Since 2004, he has produced a total of six Top 40 singles in the UK. On February 1, 2010, Richie made a remix of "We Are The World" in which Justin Bieber sings Richie's original part in the song. Lionel Richie is to tour Australia next year and is scheduled to perform at several winery events in March 2011.... reference and read more detail Lionel Richie on Wikipedia
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