Lovely Day

Recorded in Los Angeles at The Record Plant for Menagerie, with Bill Withers and Clarence McDonald overseeing the session. Clarence McDonald also handled the arrangement and played keyboards. Released as the opening single from Menagerie in 1977, it became Withers’s biggest hit of the late 1970s and a major crossover pop and R&B success. Its extended ending note and easygoing optimism helped make it one of the album’s signature tracks. The song remained one of Withers’s most durable recordings, turning up in film, television, covers, and samples for decades. Its long afterlife fixed it as a standard in pop and soul repertory.