Andre Williams - “Amends”
Andre Williams is 75 years old. He wrote songs for Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, for Ike and Tina Turner, and for many others. In the early 90s, he was homeless and begging for drug money on the streets of Chicago. Since the mid 90s he has again been making music, including this song off of his 2010 album, That’s All I Need.
I was fortunate enough to interview Andre today. Talking to someone with a story like Andre’s is a humbling experience, of course. But, specifically, it is fascinating to brush up against the enormous amount of time a story like that encompasses. Andre had an entire, very successful, career and an entire, very severe, personal collapse. And then he came back from it.
Coaxing out fifty-year-old memories as a twenty-three-year-old is a bizarre exercise because you literally cannot comprehend how far back in time that is, how much experience that amount of time contains. But every inkling of realization of how much time that is blows me away.
This is not a song that can be written with the force of that enormous amount of time behind it. And it is pretty amazing to hear, I think.
