Lionel Richie: "I'm a hopeless, disgusting romantic"

From "Hello" to "Can't Slow Down," four-time Grammy-winning artist and Oscar winner Lionel Richie's latest recognition is a Kennedy Center Honor.

"You hear about these awards for your entire lifetime," Richie told "CBS This Morning: Saturday" co-host Alex Wagner. "And then when it finally happens, it's almost disbelief. … It's one of those things that will make you walk in the backyard, sit down quietly, and go, how did this happen?"

It happened because of a decade's worth of massive hits – especially ballads.

"You've been called 'The King of Love Songs.' My question is, are you a romantic?" Wagner asked.

"I'm a hopeless, disgusting romantic," Richie said. "I can fall in love in 15 seconds on anything and everybody. … When I walk on stage, I meet the people I've never met before … they know me forever. I walk out on stage and they're my old friends right away."

He said being on stage is "one big, great karaoke night."

"Because the more I give them to do, the louder they get," Richie said.

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Richie found music growing up in Tuskegee, Alabama. His grandmother, a classical pianist, taught him how to play, though he wasn't formally trained to write music. 

"My grandmother – God bless her – tried her best to teach me how to play. She would show me how to play the piece properly on the piano with the hand movement. And instead of watching the music, I would watch her hands. She would leave and say, 'Go rehearse and I'll be back in a moment.' And I could play by ear – not knowing that that was special," Richie said. "As soon as she walked away, I wouldn't play anybody else's music, I'd only play my stuff – not realizing that that's called songwriter."

He took those writing skills to college and joined a band.

"This was a college band, how-can-we-meet-all-the-girls-in-the-dormitory band. You know, it was not supposed to be the career," Richie said.

That band would become The Commodores.

"Did you ever doubt that you could achieve success?" Wagner asked.

"When you're 19 to 25, everything is possible," Richie said. "We're the black Beatles. We're The Commodores, and we're going to take over the world."

"Did you believe you were the black Beatles?" Wagner asked.

"Yeah, we were the black Beatles. I believed it. I knew it. By the way, not one song. Didn't have one song," Richie said, chuckling. "But we were gonna be at – we were the opening act for the Jackson 5, and we're on our way."

The Commodores ruled the charts in the 1970s. But the attention Richie was getting as a songwriter convinced him it was time to go solo.

"Fourteen years of amazing times. I always tell people every day, 'Thank God for The Commodores, because without them, I never would've discovered Lionel Richie,'" he said. The world discovered a superstar.

His #1 hit song "Hello" was inspired by a joke.

"My producer, James Anthony Carmichael, he was coming by the house," Richie said. "And he walked around the corner and I said, 'Hello, is it me you're looking for?' And I'm falling out laughing. And he turned to me and said, 'Finish that.' I finished the song, and we lushed it up with strings, forever and forever."

But one of Richie's crowning achievements was anything but a solo project. Teaming up with Michael Jackson in 1985, the pair wrote "We are the World" and recorded it with more than 40 singers, including the biggest stars of the day. The single raised more than $60 million for African famine relief.

"Every time I hear the song, it's even larger than I could ever imagine. At the end that night, we finally played it back at 7:30, 8:00 o'clock in the morning, it was another planet. It was another planet," Richie said.

Looking back on his career, Richie said, "It's not where you start; it's where you end up."

"But when I want to go get grounded, I go back to Tuskegee, Alabama. I still have that home," Richie said. "I was born and raised by the Tuskegee Airmen. I am standing on the shoulders of those people. And when a kid sees me pick up this Kennedy Center Honor, I want him to understand that this is possible."

"It's not where you start. It's where you end up," Richie said again.