The Bill Withers song inspired by a classic movie
Bill Withers was still a factory worker when he wrote and recorded what would become his signature song. In fact, the front cover of his debut album, 1971’s Just as I Am, features Withers posed with a lunch pail by a brick wall, underscoring his everyday blue-collar identity that had almost nothing to do with the entertainment business. And yet, in a matter of months, Withers would be out of the factory and presented with a gold record.
That was thanks to ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’, his melancholy folk-rock ode to heartbreak and stormy weather. While the track certainly pulled on the real-life emotional beats that the singer had experienced in his then-three decades on earth, Withers denied that the song was autobiographical. As it turns out, ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’ was actually based on a classic film.
“It’s pretty obvious what it’s about,” Withers told SongFacts in 2004. “I was watching a movie called Days Of Wine And Roses with Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon. They were both alcoholics who were alternately weak and strong. It’s like going back for seconds on rat poison. Sometimes you miss things that weren’t particularly good for you. It’s just something that crossed my mind from watching that movie, and probably something else that happened in my life that I’m not aware of.”
Blake Edwards’ 1962 drama pulls from stark reality and depressing true stories that followed the director and the film’s star. According to the film’s commentary, Edwards admitted that both he and Lemmon were heavy drinkers during the film’s production. Withers found that the film also tapped into some of his own darker thoughts as well.
“To me, songwriting is you sitting around scratching yourself and something crosses your mind,” Withers claimed. “There are probably more great stories made up about the writing of songs after they’ve been written and received, because you’ve got to say something. I love listening when there’s some song like ‘Eat My Funky Sweat,’ and then somebody makes up this profound story about what inspired him to do it.”
“Sometimes the stories are much more profound than the songs,” he added. “I’ve gotten into trouble a lot of times. Being at the age now where I’m a certified curmudgeon, you get a little grouchy when you pass 65, I used to do it when I was younger sometimes, I’ve learned to try to probe a little deeper. Somebody would ask, ‘What were you thinking when you wrote so and so,’ and the obvious answer was, ‘I was thinking what I wrote.'”
While Withers didn’t get too autobiographic in ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’, he also didn’t base the song entirely on Days of Wine and Roses. Instead, the song was born from both elements working together. “Watching the movie probably affected me and made me stop long enough to putz around, and that phrase crossed my mind, so you just kind of go from there,” Withers observed.
Check out ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’ down below.
