“A memory of working with Michael Jackson is laying on the floor at Michael's writing the lyrics to ‘We Are The World’ together with Michael's snake slithering around us while I was trying to concentrate. He would ask me ‘what do you think of this line’ and all I could think was ‘Man! there a snake crawling me right now!!’ I can't help but laugh when I think about it.”
--Lionel Richie“[For ‘We Are the World’] Michael and I stood right next to each other in the line of people who had individual parts in the song. He was super charming. He took a real interest in our songs; he recited all our tunes and said he was a big fan and blah, blah, blah...just sweet. Very soft-spoken and frail, obviously, but very sweet. And during the session he didn't miss a trick. When we first did the lead lines, [Quincy Jones] wanted to do it all at once, so they had four mics set up and three guys on each mic. They started with Lionel and then Stevie, and whenever someone would screw up they'd just start over. So we're sitting there with our legs shaking--I'm petrified, literally, about the whole thing--and the guys on the first mic are getting three, four takes and we haven't sung our lines once yet. So I said to one of the [engineers], ‘Can't we go through the whole song so at least we can audition our lines? Stevie over there has had four takes, and we haven't done ours yet.’ The guy says ‘cool’ and we did it that way, and Michael thanked me for that 'cause he was thinking the same thing. It was an incredible night in general. One of the most incredible moments was when we all gathered around the piano with Stevie Wonder to sing our [individual] parts. It was the first time you could hear the personality of each guy singing the lines, and Stevie, who up 'til that moment didn't know who was there, as he heard every new voice it just hit him, and you could see it on his face. He said, ‘Oh my God, so many stars. So many stars!’ It was great. --Huey Lewis
