At the 1988 Grammy Awards, Michael Jackson walked out to perform “Man in the Mirror.” He began quietly. Controlled, restrained, almost gentle — a man standing at a microphone singing a song. By the time it finished, he had a full gospel choir behind him, he had dropped to his knees on the stage, and he was improvising and driving the whole thing forward like a preacher at a revival meeting. The Grammys themselves now count it among the most iconic performances in the show’s history.
To understand why it turned into that, you need to know where the song came from — because Michael Jackson did not write it.
Siedah Garrett and Glen Ballard wrote it, and it nearly did not exist at all. Garrett had been carrying around a single line about a man looking in the mirror for roughly a year. Ballard had already submitted songs for the Bad album and had them turned down, so when Garrett rang him one Thursday night saying they had to write one more for Michael, his reaction was “Are you kidding? I’ve struck out.” He sat down at a keyboard anyway. In his words, “it took about an hour, honestly.”
Michael Jackson | Man In The Mirror – 30th Grammy Awards 1988
Garrett did not wait either. She rang Quincy Jones the next day and told him not to wait until Monday to hear it. He asked her to come straight over. She delivered the tape and waited. Four hours later he rang back and said yes.
Then Michael got hold of it and made it enormous. He rewrote some lyrics but left the writing credits exactly as they were. He brought in the Winans and the Andraé Crouch Choir for gospel vocals. And there is a lovely detail about how carefully he approached it: he asked Garrett to videotape her demo vocal so he could study exactly how she sang it, and asked her to personally coach him through his vocal sessions.
Michael Jackson – Man In The Mirror (Official Video)
So by the time he stood up at the Grammys, this was not just another single. It was the song he has often been said to have loved most of everything he recorded.
Choreographer Vincent Paterson built the staging, and the plan was a slow build. Michael brought Garrett out with him, along with the Winans and the Andraé Crouch Choir, and performed an extended version with a much longer ending than the record. He let it escalate. The gospel voices came up behind him. And then he stopped performing it and started living in it — on his knees, eyes shut, pushing the choir on.
The song had already gone to number one in America and was nominated for Record of the Year. But it is the Grammy performance people go back to, because it is the clearest footage in existence of Michael Jackson losing himself completely in his own music.
There is a final detail that gives the whole thing a different weight. When Michael Jackson’s memorial service ended in 2009, and his casket was carried out, the music playing was the instrumental introduction to “Man in the Mirror.” Then a single spotlight lit an empty stage with one microphone on it.