Songwriters pitch songs to big stars all the time, and most of those pitches go nowhere. Every so often, though, a song that gets turned down by one superstar ends up becoming a classic for another.
This is one of those stories, and the man who tells it is the songwriter himself.
His name is Patrick Leonard. Back in 1984 he tried out for a job with Michael Jackson and his brothers. “I auditioned for The Jacksons’ Victory Tour, as a keyboard player,” he told Music Business Worldwide in 2022. He got the gig and then some. By his own account he ended up “sort of quasi musical directing it.”
That was the brothers’ big tour of 1984. Here’s a look at one of those Victory Tour shows, the kind of night Leonard was helping run from behind the keyboards.
The Jacksons on stage during the 1984 Victory Tour
After the tour, Leonard stayed in touch with Michael and with the producer Quincy Jones. And one day Quincy came to him with a request.
Leonard told the story in an interview with Boy Culture, and Out magazine passed it along in 2017. Quincy said, “I want to do something sort of Sade-like for Michael.” If that name doesn’t ring a bell, Sade is the smooth British singer of “Smooth Operator.”
So Leonard went to work. “And so I wrote that song and sent it to him with some form of a vocal on it and the phrase ‘la isla bonita,'” he said.
Yes, that “La Isla Bonita.”
The demo went off to Michael’s camp with the title already sung on it. Then the answer came back: “Ah, I just don’t think it’s for Michael.”
That could have been the end of it. Instead, Leonard played the music for Madonna, and she liked what she heard. The two of them reworked it together, and Madonna wrote the lyrics while she was in Hong Kong in 1986 filming the movie “Shanghai Surprise.” Bruce Gaitsch is credited as a writer on the song as well.
Here’s Leonard himself playing the song he first wrote with Michael in mind. Listen for the Sade-like mood Quincy asked for.
Patrick Leonard plays “La Isla Bonita”
“La Isla Bonita” came out on Feb. 25, 1987, as the fifth and last single from Madonna’s album “True Blue.” It climbed to No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 on May 2, 1987, and it’s still one of her most loved songs.
People haven’t stopped watching it, either. In 2025 its video became Madonna’s first music video to pass 1 billion views on YouTube. If you haven’t seen it in a while, it’s worth another look, and this time you can try to hear the song the way it started out, as a Sade-style tune meant for Michael.
Madonna’s official video for “La Isla Bonita”
It’s fun to wonder what Michael would have done with it. Quincy obviously thought the sound could suit him, or he never would have asked.
But the answer was no. So Madonna took that demo and turned it into a song people still sing along to almost 40 years later, and Patrick Leonard got to tell one of the best “what if” stories in pop music.