as much as I like alternative cover art as much as the next vinyl junkie I will say I strictly grabbed this one bc someone sold it to me for cheap since they didn't like the cover haha. Still Bill boasts the classic Bill Withers sound: warm and easily accessible, with a depth and complexity that reveals itself over numerous plays. Featuring Use Me and Lean on Me, it also includes one of the great opining verses for a song: 'A man we passed just tried to stare me down, when I looked at you, you looked at the ground.

Mastered on Mobile Fidelity’s renowned mastering system and pressed on 180g vinyl at RTI, Mobile Fidelity’s numbered-edition LP of Still Bill gives this lush classic the luxe treatment it has always deserved. Looking back on “Lean on Me” years later, Withers said it seemed like “something that was there before I got here” – the kind of song that could be 100 or 10 years old, or one we encounter anew 10 years into the future. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.No track better exemplifies those principles than "Lean on Me," a feel-good paean to brotherhood and community that hit No. This high level of songwriting is sustained throughout the record, making this probably his best record ever. These characteristics – along with Withers' strong singing, hybrid arrangements, and deceptively simple songwriting – have allowed the album to endure to the point where it sounds as fresh today as in 1972. And there are some good tracks here (I quite like Withers delving into funk), along with some pretty standard soul music. It’s an identity couched in keeping it real, the very inclination that ultimately led Withers to retire in the mid-’80s rather than bend to industry pressures or risk credibility.

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Though the saying “keeping it real” did not exist in popular parlance when Withers released his sophomore effort on Sussex Records, no words better capture the music’s approach, mindset, and value.

Another good one from Bill, recorded and produced with his band and with more of an emphasis on funk and soul this time round. Because he's still got it; Mobile Fidelity here reissue the album on its 50th Anniversary, doing thorough justice to the soul crooner's original album first released on the landmark Sussex Records in 1972.Its rhythmic fare is equally laidback and invigorating; relaxing and rollicking; eloquent and muscular; soft and tough. These are shades-of-gray stories, full of a mature understanding of human nature", Moon observed, before concluding that, "even when reflecting on weighty matters, Withers cultivates a mood of unflappable calm, making everything sound like a lazy summer evening on the front porch. The soul-gospel hymn Lean on Me was inspired by the friendships Withers forged while working at the aircraft factory. Replete with intoxicating detail and depth, the collectible reissue zeroes in on the music's crux – Withers' unique, rich, West Virginia-accented voice – while clearing a true-to-the-source path to the extraordinary backing he receives from members of the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band. Grown-up soul at its finest This was the LP on which the 38-year-old Withers fully came into his own.