Chris Barnes

Bill Withers wrote the song "Ain't No Sunshine" at age 31 while working at a factory, making toilet seats for airplanes. Using his own money, he would record demo tapes and play at various clubs at night. When he debuted with "Ain't No Sunshine", he refused to quit his day job, believing that the music business was a fickle industry. Fortunately for him, the song turned out to be a massive hit. When it went gold, the record company gave him a gold toilet as a gift, marking the start of his new career. In 1985, at age 47, Bill Withers decided to walk away from it all. He felt that the record companies he worked with were constantly trying to exert more and more control over how he should sound if he wanted to sell more albums. He felt pigeonholed and no longer wanted to be part of the music business. In 2015, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He claimed to have no regrets and provided the following reflection on his later life: "I've always been serious that way, trying to evolve to a more conscious state. Funny thing about that, though. You tweak yourself, looking for more love, less lust, more compassion, less jealousy. You keep tweaking, keep adjusting those knobs until you can no longer find the original settings. In some sense, the original settings are exactly what I'm looking for—a return to the easygoing guy I was before my world got complicated, the nice guy who took things as they came and laughed so hard the blues would blow away in the summer wind."