Paul Anka has written for some of the biggest names in music. He wrote “My Way” for Frank Sinatra and the theme for The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and he scored his own hits with “Diana” and “Puppy Love.” On Jimmy Kimmel Live, though, he told a story about a very different kind of guest at his house. “He spent two weeks with me,” Anka told Kimmel. He was talking about Michael Jackson.
How Michael ended up at Anka’s house
The visit came in the early 1980s. Anka invited Michael to his home in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, according to writer Damien Shields, who has traced the pair’s work together. The plan was to write songs, and Michael ended up staying for two weeks. Anka was around 40 at the time. Michael was in his early twenties and already a solo star, with Off the Wall behind him.
Much of that time went into Anka’s home studio. “For the two weeks we just threw ideas around and titles and concepts,” Anka said in an interview Shields quotes. Shields writes that Anka would play a simple one-finger tune on the piano, and Michael would turn it into full singing parts.
Michael didn’t need the keys to build a song. He did it “all with sounds,” Anka told Kimmel, singing the parts out loud. In the interview Shields cites, Anka put it this way: “It was the way he heard everything and he would vocalize it to me.” For a songwriter who’d been writing hits since the 1950s, that was something to see up close.
“He was a sponge”
Anka didn’t describe a demanding star. He described a young man who took everything in. “He was a sponge,” he told Kimmel, and he made it clear how he still feels about his guest. “I loved Michael,” he said.
There was one more thing Anka noticed during those two weeks, and it had nothing to do with music. So what was the habit he couldn’t forget?
The snack Michael kept reaching for
Michael ate nuts, and plenty of them. “He loved eating nuts. A lot of peanuts,” Anka told Kimmel. Peanuts were part of the routine whenever the two of them took a break from the studio.
Anka summed up his guest in a few words. Michael was the houseguest “who never stopped eating nuts.”
Paul Anka tells Jimmy Kimmel about Michael staying at his house
This is the official Jimmy Kimmel Live upload. Anka starts on Michael at about 9:16, and the Michael section runs to about 10:35. Listen at about 9:44 for “he spent two weeks with me,” and for the peanuts a little after 9:59.
The rest of the interview covers Anka’s long career, from writing “My Way” to his stories about Andy Warhol as a houseguest. Michael’s part runs a little over a minute, so start at 9:16.
Anka’s two weeks with Michael happened in a house on the California coast, with a piano, a studio and a steady supply of peanuts. He was still bringing up the peanuts on Kimmel’s show more than four decades later.