Lionel Richie sold 20,000 copies of his new album Tuskegee in a one hour spot this past Friday, while performing live on the popular home-shopping network HSN. The album has a country flare, featuring songs with artists such as Shania Twain and Willie Nelson, Rolling Stone reports on the story:
Lionel Richie hasn’t gone so far as to don a cowboy hat – yet – but that hasn’t kept him from feeling the love from the country music world: the R&B singer and Eighties pop star sold a whopping 20,000 copies of his new LP, Tuskegee, in a single hour during his live concert event on HSN last Friday night.
“To do this album was very eye-opening,” the five-time Grammy winner told Rolling Stone just before the start of the show, which broadcast live from St. Petersburg, Florida to the 24-hour shopping network’s TV, Web and Facebook audiences. “I didn’t realize that all of country knew all of my songs anyway.”
Tuskegee, named for the 62-year-old’s Alabama hometown and featuring countrified covers of some of his biggest hits (including “Say You, Say Me,” “Stuck on You,” and “Easy”), teams Richie with a host of country superstars, including Blake Shelton, Darius Rucker (a country crossover artist himself) and Willie Nelson. The album also features the first new recording from Shania Twain in seven years, as she replaces Diana Ross on a new version of “Endless Love.” In fact, Richie said Twain was so nervous to record with him, they had to fly to her house in the Caribbean to make it happen and wound up placing microphones in her bedroom just to get her comfortable enough to sing.
Click here to read the rest of this story.