Michael Jackson phoned Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis with a question. He’d just heard his sister’s part on “Scream”, the duet the two producers were making with him and Janet, and he wasn’t calling to change a note of it. He wanted to know where she’d sung it.
“Michael called us and he said, ‘Wow, Janet’s vocal sounds really good,'” the producers recalled on The Jason Show, the FOX 9 talk show in Minneapolis, in an interview posted on Aug. 26, 2026. Then came his question: “Where’d you do that vocal?”
“We said, ‘Minneapolis.’ He said, ‘I’m coming to Minneapolis.'”
Why Janet sang her part in Minnesota
Jam and Lewis are Janet’s longtime producers, and their studio, Flyte Tyme, was in Edina, a suburb of Minneapolis. The recording history of “Scream” lists sessions at the Hit Factory in New York in October 1994 and at Flyte Tyme that December.
On the show, the producers described Michael doing his vocal first. The minute the music came on he started twirling, and they called him “the Tasmanian Devil”. Janet was watching. Jimmy Jam said she stepped in between him and Lewis and told them, “I’ll do my vocal in Minneapolis.” By his account she “no way wanted to follow what he had just done.”
So her part was recorded on the producers’ home ground, away from her brother. When he heard the result, he picked up the phone.
He came the next week
Michael didn’t wait for better weather. By the producers’ account he “came to Minneapolis that next week, but it was wintertime.”
He didn’t fly in and straight back out, either. “He spent almost a week up here,” they said. That’s a long stay for the most famous entertainer in the world, in a city where he had no show to play. The way the producers tell it, the cold was the reason it worked.
Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis tell the Minneapolis story on The Jason Show
The “Scream” talk starts at about 15:15. Michael’s phone call comes at about 16:37, and the story of his week in Minnesota runs to about 18:11.
A ski mask at the Mall of America
“Here’s the great thing for him,” the producers said. “He loved the Mall of America. So, he could put a ski mask on and walk around like a normal person.”
That’s the whole trick. In a Minnesota winter a covered face is just how people dress, so nobody looked twice at the man in the ski mask. One of the most recognizable people in the world got to wander a shopping mall like everybody else.
The mall, in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, had opened in August 1992. Its indoor amusement park was called Camp Snoopy in those years, and its Rainforest Cafe, the first one the chain ever opened, arrived in October 1994, the same month as the New York sessions for “Scream”.
Michael made use of all of it, the producers said. They put him “at the Rainforest Cafe” and “at the Mall of America and the rides.” The host wanted to be sure he’d heard that right. “Did he go on the rides?”
“Oh, yeah,” came the answer. “He loved the rides.” And then: “He went to Camp Snoopy.”
Nobody on the couch said which rides. The host joked about picturing Michael on the log ride, but that was his own image, not something the producers reported.
“Scream” was released in May 1995. The vocal that made Michael pick up the phone is Janet’s, and by her producers’ account she sang it in Minnesota. Her brother followed it there and spent the better part of a week at a shopping mall with his face covered, riding the rides.