At her height, all the record labels wanted songwriter Allee Willis. But labels in general were never her thing. She was a prolific, pioneering music legend, artist and designer who turned her candy-colored life into an ongoing act of next-thing expression while generations of listeners made her hits — including Earth Wind & Fire’s “September” and the “Friends” theme “I’ll Be There for You” — the endlessly repeatable soundtracks of our lives.
(Willis has sold an estimated 60 million records.) She’s now the subject of a lively documentary from Alexis Manya Spraic, “The World According to Allee Willis,” and in a central way, it qualifies as the Detroit-born artist’s final work as well. Willis died in 2019 at the age of 72, one year after entering the Songwriters Hall of Fame, but she left behind enough self-consciously autobiographical material — videos, writings, photos, tapes, files, ephemera, art, a taffy-pink house of kitsch and cool in the Valley to hold it all, plus countless friends with stories — to give this portrait the aura of a collaboration from the beyond.
In person, she felt like a force, her kaleidoscopic wardrobe hardly a match for her natural energy. Full disclosure: She was an occasional fixture at dinners thrown by my late friend Paul Reubens , an interviewee in the film who was apparently Spraic’s connection to the project. I’ll never forget the time one of those dinners segued to the Koreatown karaoke bar Brass Monkey, w.
