Smokey Robinson has been writing songs since he was a teenager in Detroit. He is now in his eighties. The catalog that spans those decades is one of the most extraordinary in American music — not simply in its commercial achievement but in its emotional range, its lyrical sophistication, its consistent ability to find the precise language for the specific feeling that most songwriters approach and most cannot quite reach.
He wrote “Tracks of My Tears” before he was twenty-five. He wrote “The Tears of a Clown” and “I Second That Emotion” and “Ooo Baby Baby” and “My Girl” — which he gave to the Temptations — and “My Guy” and dozens of other songs that became part of the permanent vocabulary of popular music in the way that only the best songs become. Songs that people reach for in specific moments of their lives because the songs are the most accurate available expression of what those moments feel like.
He has said across many interviews and across many years that he does not fully understand where the songs come from. This is not false modesty — it is the genuine puzzlement of someone who has been a conduit for something for sixty years without fully understanding the conduit’s mechanics. He sits down. Songs arrive. He has learned not to question the arrival too carefully because the questioning seems to impede the arriving.
The song he believed would be his last — the song he sat down to write in the awareness that he was older than he had been and that the catalog was longer than he had imagined it would ever be and that someday the arrival would stop — came to him in the specific way that his songs always come. Unexpected. Without laboring. The melody finding itself and the lyric following the melody the way it always had.
He cried through the writing of it. Not in the distressed sense — not because the writing was difficult or because the emotion was painful. In the opposite sense. He cried because the song was arriving the same way songs had always arrived for sixty years and the arrival was the most extraordinary thing that had ever happened to him and was still happening and he was eighty years old and it was still happening.
He has said that he wept from gratitude. From the specific, overwhelming gratitude of someone who has been given something for sixty years that they did not deserve more than anyone else and cannot account for and cannot explain and cannot ensure will continue and that has continued anyway.
He wrote the song. He cried through all of it. He finished it.
He has said that as long as songs still arrive he will not consider it the last one. That the last song will be the one that doesn’t come — the morning he sits down and there is nothing. He dreads that morning. He does not know when it will come.
So far it has not come. So far the songs are still arriving.
He sits down. He listens. He writes what he hears.
He has been doing it for sixty years. The gratitude has not diminished across those sixty years. It has grown.
The tears are the measure of it. He cries because the gift is still being given. Because he is still here to receive it. Because the morning of silence has not yet arrived.
He wept while writing because weeping was the correct response to sixty years of unearned, inexplicable, undiminished grace.
That is what songwriting is when it is real.
That is what it costs. That is what it gives.
Smokey Robinson has been paying and receiving in equal measure for sixty years.
He is still paying. He is still receiving.
The songs are still coming.