LIONEL RICHIE: HE MAKES IT LOOK SO EASY

Lionel Richie seems to turn out hits so effortlessly that the pop world barely blinked recently when his new “Dancing on the Ceiling” album was declared gold, platinum, double platinum and triple platinum on the same day. Three million copies sold in four months.

There were also no headlines earlier in the year when Richie tied Irving Berlin’s record for the most consecutive years (nine) of having one of his songs reach No. 1 on the national sales charts.

One reason the record industry takes Richie so much for granted is that he appears so orderly, so controlled, so normal. You don’t hear complaints about backstage tantrums or whispers of fast-lane indulgences.

There’s also a sense of normalcy in his songs. You may not run across the mountaintop sunniness of early John Denver, yet there is silver lining in most of Richie’s songs. His ballads have been described as being filled with reverence and guileless optimism. He doesn’t even scruff up his image by talking during interviews about moments of self-doubt or artistic torment.

This relentless positiveness has tended to cause Richie, 37, to be viewed as a somewhat one-dimensional figure. The new tour, which includes shows Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday at the Inglewood Forum, isn’t likely to change that public view.

On stage here, Richie was quick to share the positive side of his landmark “We Are the World” experience.

He didn’t sing “We Are the World” (which he co-wrote with Michael Jackson) during his sold-out concert at the Rosemont Horizon arena, but he did perform some songs (including “Se La”) that were inspired by his involvement with the 1985 pop campaign to help famine victims in Africa.

Richie also took time during the show here to thank the audience for contributing to the campaign that raised tens of millions of dollars for those victims. He even shared parts of one of the many letters of thanks he has received from Ethiopians.

In interviews, Richie has been equally enthusiastic about the “We Are the World” crusade. He spent most of the one-hour ride to the arena here talking about the rewards of using your power as a pop performer for social good.

Yet there is another side of the “We Are The World” experience--a side that Richie spoke about with reluctance, almost in passing. But the admission is helpful in understanding Richie’s songwriting process. “I had to get back to liking the world,” he said. “I went through a period where I felt people were totally desensitized. How can we walk past someone and let them lay on the sidewalk, hungry with no place to go at night?

“There was a time when all you had to do was say, ‘There are some people dying’ and everyone gave some money. Now, we have to make it an event . . . like holding hands across America or something.”

Richie said he could have worked around the disillusionment if he were simply a singer, but he found it difficult to write upbeat songs--his forte--when he felt so negative.

“I finally realized that I can only do what I can do as an individual--regardless of how frustrated I may get or how terrified I may get about the plight of the world,” he said. “That’s when I started going back to writing. I didn’t feel hypocritical writing a positive song because I attacked the problem by saying, ‘What if?’ So in ‘Se La,’ which was a breakthrough for me, I wrote just that. . . . I wrote about a better world. It was my way of expressing the sadness I felt.”

Disillusionment wasn’t the only reason Richie’s new album was delayed almost a year. There was also the matter of his status as a “charity celebrity.”

Almost immediately after the “We Are the World” recording session in January of last year, Richie was besieged with calls from groups who wanted to honor him for his contributions on that project or ask him to help with other causes.

“The requests came literally every day in some form or another,” Richie said. “You feel a certain responsibility, but you can’t help everyone.

“The problem was, each time I stopped the album to attend some function, it meant days or weeks of delay. People think you can step away from the studio for a few hours and go right back to work, but it takes two or three days for you to get your head back to a mode of creativeness, and I kept stepping so far away that it was taking two or three weeks to get back to work.”

Though it didn’t contribute to delaying the album, another problem resulting from his “We Are the World” involvement was a brief break with manager Ken Kragen. When the latter announced in February that Hands Across America (a project that grew out of USA for Africa) was taking so much of his time that he could no longer adequately represent Richie, there was speculation that Richie had forced the break.

But Richie insists the move was totally Kragen’s.

“One of the things that makes Ken a great manager is that he is fanatical,” he said. “Once he gets onto something, he’s 150% into it. After dealing with USA for Africa, I wanted to go back and finish my album, but Ken wanted to do more. One reason is that he went to Ethiopia and saw what was happening there.

“Harry (Belafonte) always said to me once you walk on the soil and see the people face-to-face, you’ll never be the same--and the real commitment came from Ken after he went over there. That’s when he created Hands Across America.”

But Kragen quickly changed his mind and resumed his management duties with Richie. He was with Richie in Chicago and their relationship seemed quite comfortable.

Richie, whose solo career followed years of hits with the Commodores, smiles when the concept of “effortless hit maker” is brought up.

“The funny thing is, I can look at all my albums, from the Commodores albums through today, and see the painful moments as well as the good ones,” he said. “But I don’t always express that pain or struggle in obvious ways. I try to find some other way, some more positive way to express myself.

“Take the song ‘Easy,’ for instance. That was not an easy time for me because I was going through my first flash of fame and they dropped this book on me that had 365 pages in it and it told me where I would be every day for the next year.

“It was our tour book, and it had literally a whole year blocked out. That was a very hard time . . . because of my desire to be home, and that desire led to a song like ‘Still.’

“And the (sadness) of the breakup of the Commodores is what led to the sensitivity expressed in ‘Endless Love.’ Then, there was the first solo album and the death of (Commodores manager Benny Ashburn) and the desire to prove myself, which is what ‘Wandering Stranger’ was all about.”

Similarly, Richie’s disillusionment after “We Are the World” is funneled in songs on the new album in ways that aren’t immediately detectable. He weaves his feelings into celebrations of love and hope.

“I try to find a real feeling in me and share that with the audience, but in a way that they can understand,” he said. “I have seen many, many writers deal with personal accounts and situations, and they go so deep they lose the listening audience. It becomes their personal thing, and you can’t follow it. What I try to do is take the problem as I see it and digest it and then word it so that it reaches out to people, so that the emotion is there, but the story is also clear. I like for people to feel uplifted, inspired.”