Where Withers’ perspective differs, though, is that he didn’t kid himself. Or anyone else, for that matter. In his mind, one of the biggest fallacies in music is that the stories behind songs sometimes become more popular than the songs themselves. Or that they become so entrenched in these bigger, more profound meanings that it all just becomes a bit convoluted.

As he put it during an interview with Songfacts in 2004, “I love listening when there’s some song like ‘Eat My Funky Sweat’, and then somebody makes up this profound story about what inspired him to do it. Sometimes the stories are much more profound than the songs.”

He also said that it’s difficult for him not to tell people he was simply thinking about what he wrote when he wrote certain songs, when most interviewers are fishing for these deeper, headline-style stories.

All of this makes his sources even more interesting. After all, Withers was always straightforward when talking about his own work and never tried to embellish things where it was unnecessary. If the source of inspiration for a certain song wasn’t personal, he’d never say it was just for the fucking sake of it. Which is what makes the story behind ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’ particularly intriguing. When asked in the same interview to shed some light on it, he said the goddamn meaning is “pretty obvious”.

On the surface, then, it’s a song about a love so intense that everything falls apart when it disappears. “Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone,” Withers sings, the bluesy nature of the ballad oscillating like a fucking yoyo between the romantic and wistful, simple in its reflective tone. Except that’s not what it’s about at all. Not exactly. In fact, the song captures being tempted by someone when his love is absent (hits too close to home?), a “young thing” he knows he “ought to leave alone” when “she’s gone”.

This idea of wanting something you shouldn’t have came to Withers when he was watching 1962’s Days Of Wine And Roses. Taking the idea of alcohol addiction, he thought about the complicated nature of desire and willpower. “They were both alcoholics who were alternately weak and strong,” he said. “It’s like going back for seconds on rat poison. Sometimes you miss things that weren’t particularly good for you. It’s just something that crossed my mind from watching that movie, and probably something else that happened in my life that I’m not aware of.”

He added, “Watching the movie probably affected me and made me stop long enough to putz around, and that phrase crossed my mind, so you just kind of go from there.”

So, while the song has a natural lament about it, this is less about pining after someone romantically than trying to talk yourself out of temptation. Or, it was Withers taking the nature of addiction in the film and rewiring it into something else, of not giving in to instant gratification when you feel yourself veering off into something darker.

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