Lionel Richie

Five planets in this chart sit in air signs and only one in earth. Air sets a thing out and examines it; earth is what consolidates a position and stays put in it. The record on Richie is a band and then a solo career, in that order, which is a working life in two halves rather than one long accumulation, and a chart with almost nothing in earth is a reasonable place to find that shape.

The Sun sits on the last degree of Gemini, with Mercury and Mars in the sign as well. Gemini will not stay in one register, and a Sun on the final degree of a sign is the placement that has already finished with it. Three planets there means identity, speech and drive all run on the same restlessness, and the Aries Moon behind them is the half that moves first and consults nobody. A singer who spent years inside a band and then years under his own name was never going to be held by one arrangement for long.

Jupiter stands awkwardly against Uranus seven hundredths of a degree from the exact angle, the smallest orb anywhere in the chart, and two yods run through the chart sharing Jupiter and Saturn between them. Neither resolves. Venus sits at a hard angle to Saturn at a fifth of a degree, which is what a person values set against what it costs to keep, and the Moon stands at a hard angle to Mars at under a quarter. In a career that produced hit singles in two separate formats, the cost side of that Venus aspect is the half the records never show.

Jupiter closed a full circuit of his chart, back on the degree of Aquarius where it began, on 22 December 2020, at seventy one, still in reverse, as it was at birth. Aquarius is the sign that does the thing in the form nobody arranged, and the planet of reach in it counts distance from the expected rather than progress towards it. A singer who left a group to work under his own name had already answered that question before the circuit closed.