Michael Jackson loved a good secret, and this one is a charmer.
Back in 1991 he wrote a short, sweet birthday song for a little girl named Lisa. It was made for one of the most famous TV shows in America. The funny thing is that the first Lisa it was written for never existed. She was a cartoon.
The show was “The Simpsons.” The girl was Lisa Simpson. And the song was called “Happy Birthday Lisa.”
Here’s where it gets even stranger. Michael couldn’t sing it on the show himself. Because of the way his record contract was written, he wasn’t allowed to put out a vocal that way. So the producers brought in a singer named Kipp Lennon who sounded a lot like him, and Kipp did the actual singing. Michael was credited under a made-up name, “John Jay Smith,” so most viewers had no clue the King of Pop was involved at all.
The episode first aired on September 19, 1991, as the big season opener on Fox. Millions watched it without knowing the secret.
The cartoon birthday song Michael helped create
Give this a listen first. It’s the tender little tune from the show, written for a girl who only lives on a TV screen.
So that’s the first Lisa. Now for the second one, and this is the part that ties it all together.
Years later Michael married Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis’s only daughter. In her memoir “From Here to the Great Unknown,” published in 2024, Lisa Marie shared that Michael once serenaded her with that very same song. The birthday tune he’d written for a cartoon girl became a private gift for the real Lisa in his life.
Think about that for a second. A song born as a joke for an animated eight-year-old ended up being sung, just for her, to the daughter of the King of Rock and Roll.
If you want to hear it the way Michael first laid it down, there’s a version with his own feel all over it.
Michael’s own take on the “Happy Birthday Lisa” tune
This one’s worth a play so you can hear the warmth he put into such a simple idea.
Michael slipped little surprises into all kinds of places most people never noticed. A fake name here, a soundalike there, a cartoon that fooled the whole country.
And buried inside one of them was a song that would mean something to the woman he loved.