The Words Bill Withers Never Wrote

At Sunset Sound Recorders in Hollywood, on a spring evening in 1971, Bill Withers was thirty-two years old, working day shifts at a Burbank factory installing toilet seats into 747s, and recording an album in the off-hours with a band whose names he had not fully processed. Booker T. Jones, the producer. Donald "Duck" Dunn on bass. Al Jackson Jr. on drums. Stephen Stills on second guitar. Withers had written a song the previous winter after staying up late with Days of Wine and Roses on television — Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick playing two people whose lives are organized around an absence that won't end. The song was called "Ain't No Sunshine." The verses came in clean. The choruses were short and devastating. The bridge was a hole.

When the band rolled tape, Withers had nothing to put there. He told them he would come back to it — he would write a real bridge later, words that meant something, syllables that earned their place between the second and third verse. To hold the time, he sang the only thing in his head: I know, I know, I know. He sang it twenty-six times. He had intended it as a metronome — a placeholder to keep the band oriented through eight bars.

Booker T. listened to the playback and shook his head. Leave it. Stills agreed. Withers protested that he had not written that part of the song yet. The producer said you had. You just didn't know it yet.

The record went out in September of 1971 with the placeholder intact. "Ain't No Sunshine" hit number three on the Billboard chart and won a Grammy. Of every line Withers ever wrote, the one he had not written is the one most people sing along to in the car. Twenty-six I knows that meant nothing in the moment and now mean exactly the thing the song is about — the saturation of certainty when someone you depend on is gone, the way grief loops back on itself until repetition stops being repetition and becomes the only honest grammar a person has left.

This is the discipline songwriters spend their lives trying to learn. The gap is not always a gap. The placeholder is not always temporary. Sometimes the thing you sang while you were stalling is the thing you had been trying to say from the beginning, and the trained part of you — the part that wants the bridge to "develop" or "lift" or "modulate" — would have replaced it with something more competent and less true. Craft, at a certain point, becomes the willingness to recognize when the unwritten draft is the final draft. You stop trying to fill the gap because you finally hear what was already sitting in it.

There is a corollary, and it is harder. The producer's job is sometimes to insist on what the writer is embarrassed by. Withers wanted to replace those I knows because he was a meticulous lyricist who had carried this song in his head for months and the bridge had no language in it. He thought he had failed. Booker T. heard what failure had revealed. The performance was already telling the truth; the writer was still trying to dress it up.

Most songs do not survive their writer's instinct to finish them. The ones that do are usually the ones where someone in the room had the courage to keep the unfinished part in.