Inside the life of a global superstar: Love, loss, and the fight to keep performing

Regarding his parents, he reflected in the film on the lack of happy memories of them as a couple. “I saw stuff with them when I was a little kid that was not good, things were very tense between them,” he said, noting that he and his cousin were “kind of relieved” when they got divorced.

Afterward, they were raised by their mother, Rosalind.

In a 1992 interview, the musician reflected on feeling like an outcast as a child growing up without a father. ”There was no breadwinner, so our situation went downhill pretty fast,” he said. ”I was different than the other kids because they had dads. And I remember, especially like a lot of guys my age, there was a dynamic with their fathers that I actually didn’t have.”

But his cousin saw things differently. In the documentary, she recalled, “When Howard left, it was a relief in that my mother felt more free, but it did give her a lot more stress in that she had to then work very, very hard to keep the family going.”

A childhood friend added, “A depression settled over the house” after Howard’s departure.

He described Rosalind as “a very loving woman” and said he was “almost smothered” by her affection. “I think it was to try to compensate for my dad’s lack of it. But there were also some troubling things about her. She was very isolated. She was lonely a lot, and I think she drank to assuage her loneliness,” he explained.