Lionel Richie confirms he wrote the song ‘Lady’ on the toilet

He had a flood of ideas.

Lionel Richie announced Thursday that he wrote the second verse of his hit song “Lady” while sitting on the toilet.

Richie, 73, made the unsanitary claim while appearing on The Drew Barrymore Show.

“It’s very simple. I work with Kenny Rogers — that’s back then — and so Kenny calls and says, ‘I want you to write a song for me,'” Richie explained. “And of course I wrote ‘Lady.’ .”

Rogers also asked the American Idol judge to write a second song, which became Goin’ Back to Alabama, to appear on the late country star’s 1981 album Share Your Love.

Richie revealed that the duo was halfway through writing when Rogers decided to change up his tune.

“He says, ‘I don’t want to sing this song. I think I want to do Lady first,” the Easy singer recalled. “Well, what he didn’t know was that I had only written the first verse of ‘Lady’.”

Richie then asked for a moment so he could flush out the rest of the song.

Do you want to see Lionel Richie live this year? Get tickets here.

“I said, ‘Excuse me for a minute. Let me, uh, go to the bathroom,'” Richie said. “I’m sitting in the booth writing the second verse of ‘Lady’.”

Barrymore noted that she was very impressed that the musician wanted to put out a “hit Juggernaut classic” in such a short amount of time.

“You’re going to do some amazing things when you’re scared to death,” Richie said. “The idea of ​​telling Mr. Rogers that I don’t have the second verse would not happen in my lifetime.”

Rogers, who died in 2020, joked in a 2014 interview with the Today show that Richie “don’t write whole songs, he writes ideas.”

He also said Richie may have written “lady” on toilet paper while he was in the men’s room.

“We were in the studio recording the song and I said, ‘Where’s the second verse?’ And they said, ‘Lionel is in the bathroom right now writing them,'” Rogers said. “He can’t write unless he has the pressure to write.”

“He went in there to kind of get away from it all and focus,” laughed Rogers.