The question came near the half-hour mark. K-Ci and Mr. Dalvin of Jodeci were sitting with host Nessa at HOT 97 in New York, there to celebrate 35 years of “Forever My Lady,” the 1991 debut album that made them stars. They’d already talked about leaving North Carolina for New York as teenagers with no record deal and no money. Then Nessa asked who had run into them and turned out to be a fan, someone they never would have expected. Mr. Dalvin’s answer was short. “It was Michael Jackson.”
For anyone who missed the 90s, Jodeci were two pairs of brothers from Charlotte. K-Ci and JoJo Hailey were one pair. DeVante Swing and Mr. Dalvin, born Donald and Dalvin DeGrate, were the other. “Forever My Lady” gave them three straight No. 1 singles on the Billboard R&B chart with the title track, “Stay” and “Come and Talk to Me.” A minute before Nessa’s question, the group had talked about growing up on Prince and Michael Jackson. “We took like melodies and stuff from them,” one of them said. So meeting Michael at all would have been a story.
This one went further. Dalvin said he and Michael got into a long conversation, and he soon realized Michael didn’t just know the name of the group. He knew the music, and not the way most famous fans do.
Then Michael started singing.
“He started singing out interludes, not the songs, interludes,” Dalvin told HOT 97 in 2026. “And tell me what key they was in.”
Interludes are the short pieces that sit between the real tracks on an album. They rarely get radio play, and plenty of listeners skip right past them. Michael had learned them well enough to sing them to the people who made them.
“I told K, I said, ‘Man, that’s what shocked me,'” Dalvin said. “He wasn’t just singing the songs. He was talking about the interludes on our album.”
He tried to explain what that felt like. “I’m looking at this man like, ‘Bro, you’re the most famous man walking this earth,'” he said. “For you to know even not our songs, but our interludes on our album means he studies our music.”
Dalvin’s brother DeVante was part of the conversation too. According to Dalvin, Michael went through “the keys that they were in, the chord changes” with the two of them. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, he really studied our music.'”
Then came the line Dalvin didn’t believe. Michael told him he bought a Jodeci CD “in every city I go to.” Dalvin thought he was joking. Michael’s answer, as Dalvin tells it, was “No, no.”
Mr. Dalvin tells the Michael Jackson story on HOT 97
This is HOT 97’s official upload of the full interview with K-Ci and Mr. Dalvin. Nessa asks the question at about 29:21, and Dalvin tells the whole story, from the interludes to the CDs, by about 30:20.
Dalvin didn’t say when or where the meeting happened. What stayed with him was how much Michael knew. The man he called the most famous on earth had spent enough time with a Jodeci album to learn the parts most people skip, and then he sang them back to the brothers who made them.
Right after the story, Nessa turned to K-Ci and asked whether anyone had ever surprised him the same way. The anniversary tour for “Forever My Lady” opened on Wednesday, Nov. 4.