Bill Withers - Acoustic Soul!!!

Sunday morning traffic is always the heaviest around the greater Tel Aviv area, as well as other parts of the country. A large number of traffic jams seem to be unnecessarily caused by drivers who simply don't know how to use lanes properly - they hesitate too much, block exit lanes that could easily flow faster if they were surer of themselves or decisive in any way.
To compound all that, there is a fanning out or widening funnel effect caused by assholes who try to cut in further down the line and block additional lanes that are not part of the exit, this causes a chain reaction that slows down the rest of the lanes, causing a traffic jam backup of a few miles...So I wanted a mellow album to help me be patient, and also to try to wake up. I took along the new Bill Withers Super Hits compilation that I picked up last Friday.

Sundays are hard days to get back to work, the one and a half day weekend is short, and I'm quite often still very tired - the body wakes up at 6:30 in the morning, but the brain sometimes takes it's sweet time in fully waking up 'till around one hour after I arrive at the office...

I was just starting high school as Bill Withers began hitting the charts with songs like "Ain't No Sunshine (When She's Gone)", "Use Me", "When I'm Kissing My Love", and the following year, "Grandma's Hands" and his all time classic "Lean On Me".
I consider Withers to be a real crossover artist - someone with true R&B sensibilities - he started his career teamed up with Booker T. Jones.
Withers played acoustic guitar and wrote very catchy pop-oriented tunes, so it's not surprising that he made it big at the time as part of the Pop-Folk-Singer/Songwriter scene. Many of his songs are timeless, standing up today as well as they did back then when I would hear them on Boston radio stations all the time, and I have performed his classic "Lean On Me" quite a few times on stage over the years.

Well, maybe it was the karma of Bill Withers' music, and maybe it was sheer luck, but once I got past the unnecessary jam in the Sheraton City Towers area of the highway, the rest was smooth sailing, and I was in the office trying to wake up in no time...