Bill Withers wrote by hand, on the back of his own album cover, what the title meant. Life hands you gifts, he said, and you have to maintain them. God, friendship, marriage, love, lust -- any number of simple but complicated things. You make mistakes. You hurt people. You are left to live with it. Then you make some adjustments. Or as the old people back home called them: +'JUSTMENTS. That handwritten note, reproduced on the sleeve of his third album, is the key to the whole room. Every song on +'Justments is a different kind of repair work. And Can We Pretend -- written by his wife, Denise Nicholas, the actress from Room 222 -- is the most radical adjustment of all: the request to erase the past entirely and start over, as if the damage had never happened.
Nicholas wrote the lyric. Withers sang it, in his baritone that never rushes, the voice of a man who has already decided he will carry whatever weight arrives. The song floats at walking pace. James Gadson’s brushes on snare. Melvin Dunlap’s bass refusing to rush the changes. And what Nicholas is asking for is impossible -- to paint a portrait of tomorrow with no colors from today. She knows it. The song knows it. But the act of asking, of standing in front of someone and saying the weight is real and you wish it were not, that is the adjustment the old people were talking about.
Can we pretend
That from now on
There is no yesterday
Paint a portrait of tomorrow
With no colors from today
