It was 1980. Punk had detonated, disco was dying, new wave was on the ascent, and Kenny Rogers was playing with house money...
“Lady” is wired much the same way as “Lineman”: melancholy and plaintiveness intertwining. Richie was starting to operate in the softer, less heralded registers of pop: the tones of adult contemporary, soap opera themes, string-soaked showcases. He knew that a Kenny Rogers hit, fairly or not, would have more reach than a Commodores hit. But Rogers would have to meet his composition more than halfway. He had, essentially, shifted his band’s own No. 1 hitto a minor key.
. He neither hectors his lost love nor luxuriates in the pain. On each line, he reveals a small devastation, showing just a hint of grain in his vocal. The back half finds Rogers finally singing from his heels a bit, but he never threatens to tip. He navigates a text that’s a thicket of conversational asides, switches from melancholy to wistfulness and back again, and lets Richie’s forlorn arrangement have the last word. He’s out under four minutes.
“Lady” was the sound of two men taking a flyer on each other, and themselves. Up to this point, Rogers’s solo career had been tracked by one producer, Larry Butler. In February of 1980, largely due to his work with Rogers, Butler had won the Grammy for producer of the year, still the only Nashville producer to do so. Though clearly a young hitmaker, Richie had never produced a session before Kenny asked him to helm “Lady.
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