Ne-Yo was in his car, on the way to rehearsal, when his cell phone rang. The number wasn’t saved in his contacts. By his own account that usually settles it, because he lets calls like that go.
“I normally don’t answer those,” he told Sherri Shepherd on her daytime show Sherri, in a clip the show posted in January 2026, “but for whatever reason I just picked it up.”
He had set the story up for her audience in one sentence: “I might have got a cold call from one of the most famous people on the face of the planet.”
The call lasted a few seconds
Ne-Yo replayed the whole exchange for Shepherd, both sides of it, and it doesn’t take long.
“Hello. Hey. Hi. Who’s this? Michael. Michael who? Michael Jackson. Ah, cool.”
That was the end of the conversation. Shepherd said it out loud for anyone who hadn’t caught up: “You hung up on Michael Jackson.”
He had, and he had his reasons. Ne-Yo is a Grammy winner, the singer of “So Sick” and the writer of Beyonce’s “Irreplaceable”. Even so, this particular name, on his own cell phone, from a number he didn’t have saved, was a different matter.
“Michael Jackson don’t call nobody’s cell phone,” he said. “I’m like, somebody clearly playing. Somebody messing with me. I hung up the phone.”
So he drove on toward rehearsal, sure that somebody had just tried to fool him.
Ne-Yo tells the story on Sherri
This is the show’s own upload. Ne-Yo starts the story right at the top of the clip and it runs to about 1:02. The call itself comes at about 0:20, and Shepherd’s “You hung up on Michael Jackson” at about 0:29.
Then his assistant rang
Ten minutes went by and the phone rang again.
“10 minutes later, I get a call from my assistant,” he said. The message was meant to be a friendly heads-up: “Hey, man. Uh, so Michael Jackson’s about to call you in about 10 minutes.”
Ne-Yo’s reply, as he tells it: “You mean 10 minutes ago?”
The warning had simply arrived late. The voice Ne-Yo had dismissed as a prank was the real one.
That left a practical problem. One of the most famous people alive had introduced himself by name, heard “Ah, cool” and then nothing. Somebody had to get him back on the line, and Ne-Yo had to have something to say when they did.
They did get him back. “Got him back on the phone,” Ne-Yo said, and he didn’t pretend he handled it with any courage. “I instantly lied.”
Here is the excuse he gave the King of Pop, word for word as he told it to Shepherd: “Yeah, man. It went through a tunnel. It was bad reception. What’s going on, Mike? How you doing?”
A tunnel and bad reception. He didn’t admit he’d taken Michael Jackson for a prank caller, and from the way he tells it he moved straight on to small talk and called him Mike while he was at it. Ne-Yo doesn’t say in the clip whether Michael believed a word of it.
He does give his own verdict on the whole episode a few seconds later, at about 1:00: “That was embarrassing.”