Lionel Richie Teams With With Country’s Biggest Stars For Tuskegee

Photos taken by Alan Silfen March 23rd, 2012 at 9:50 am

: Shania Twain recorded her first vocal take in seven years for “Endless Love.” “She is just magical as a person, personality-plus,” says Richie.

: “Blake Shelton and ‘You Are’ was the third song picked for the album,” says Richie. “I was just getting my feet wet of how to record country style, which is the artist, the band, producers, everybody in the same room at the same time. And in walks this guy with more shirt than I’ve ever seen before in my life! A seven-foot-tall guy who claims he’s Blake Shelton and had the voice. I kept saying, ‘We do have a microphone. You don’t have to sing quite that hard!’

: “I’ve been singing along with Lionel on ‘Stuck on You’ since I was a kid, riding around, singing those little harmonies,” says Darius Rucker. “I’ve been doing that for as long as I can remember. As soon as I knew we were definitely doing ‘Stuck On You’ together, I knew exactly what part I wanted to sing. This isn’t my favorite Lionel song, but it’s definitely the song that I wanted to sing.”

: “I wanted to do ‘Say You, Say Me’ because it’s just a classic Lionel Richie song,” says Jason Aldean. “It was a huge song in the eighties, and it’s really soulful. I’m typically really drawn to big soulful love songs, so this had my name written all over it.”

: Lionel Richie on recording “All Night Long” with Jimmy Buffett: “Jimmy came in and you can tell that he took this like no big deal because the first thing he took off was his sandals and he walked around the studio with his bare feet. And his band just came in laid back. I kept thinking, ‘Are we recording this album or is this just a play period,’ but it was just perfect.”

: “There was no way I could say no to him,” says Kenny Rogers of getting the call to record a duet. “He is, after all, my brother from another mother.”

: “It’s an incredible experience to be in the studio along side someone you’ve always looked up to and wanted to meet, much less had the chance to collaborate with on a record,” says Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild. “You put your headphones on and you sing your part and then that voice comes in. It’s pure magic. Lionel is an American music icon and beyond that, he’s a gentlemen. It was such a pleasure.”

: “We picked ‘Dancin’ On the Ceiling’ because it’s a song we have always listened to on the road, pre-show, and we wanted to do something uptempo,” says Rascal Flatt’s Gary LeVox.

: “One of the highlights of this album is to have Willie on it, because this is the generation that I grew up in. It was Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Buck Owens and Conway Twitty and Dolly Parton,” says Richie.