Motown, 13 February 1984: the ballad from Can’t Slow Down that topped Britain for six weeks
On 13 February 1984 Motown released Hello, the third single from Lionel Richie’s second solo album, Can’t Slow Down. Richie wrote the song and produced it with James Anthony Carmichael, the arranger who had worked with him since the Commodores years at Motown. The recording dates from 1983. The single runs 4 minutes 8 seconds. The B-side is You Mean More to Me. Richie had written the ballad earlier and left it off his first solo album. His then-wife, Brenda Harvey Richie, pushed him to include it on the second.
Hello is the slow song on a record that also contains All Night Long (All Night) and Running with the Night. The track sits on a soft pulse, with the vocal close and the chorus reduced to one word and a question: “Is it me you’re looking for?” It is a quiet-storm ballad built for pop radio, which is why it could lead the R&B chart, the Adult Contemporary chart and the Hot 100 in the same season. Can’t Slow Down had already started its run in October 1983. Hello was the single that turned the album from a dance hit into a ballad people requested.
Bob Giraldi directed the video. He had already made Michael Jackson’s Beat It and Richie’s Running with the Night. Hello does not illustrate the lyric so much as invent a short film around it. Richie plays a drama teacher, Mr. Reynolds. Laura Carrington plays a blind student in the class. Giraldi told Richie the story was his to write, not the singer’s. The ending is the shot that stuck: she has finished a clay head, and she tells him this is how she sees him. The sculpture does not look like Lionel Richie. On set, Richie kept saying so.
Bob turned to me and said, Lionel, she’s blind. End of subject.
(Lionel Richie to Billboard, 2014, recalling Bob Giraldi on the Hello set)
The charts ignored the joke. Hello reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks from 12 May 1984, No. 1 on the R&B chart for three weeks, and No. 1 on Adult Contemporary for six weeks. In Britain it spent six weeks at No. 1 as winter turned to spring, ahead of the American peak. All five singles from Can’t Slow Down made the US Top 10. The album went on to win Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards in 1985.
Richie was still explaining the clay head thirty years later. In a 2014 Billboard interview he said he asked Giraldi, more than once, to look at the bust because it did not resemble him. Giraldi’s answer was the plot: she is blind, so a perfect likeness would have been the wrong story. Richie stood next to the head and sang the last chorus anyway. The song outlasted the sketch. Hello is still the ballad people mean when they mean Lionel Richie in 1984: Motown, a slow tempo, and a chorus that is only a greeting.
