“I want to do something sort of Sade-like for Michael.”
That’s the phone call songwriter Patrick Leonard says he got from Quincy Jones, the producer behind “Thriller.” Michael Jackson had just finished his big 1984 tour with his brothers, and Patrick had worked on that tour. He was still in touch with Michael and Quincy, and now Quincy wanted a new song for Michael.
The sound Quincy had in mind was smooth and soft, like Sade, the singer behind “Smooth Operator.” It was a long way from the hard-hitting dance songs most people expected from Michael back then.
So Patrick sat down and wrote one. He worked on the music with a guitarist friend. Then he put the song on a tape with a rough vocal of his own and sent it off to Michael’s team.
He was hoping for a yes. What came back was a short phone call.
“Ah, I just don’t think it’s for Michael,” Patrick remembers being told.
That could have been the end of it. Most songs that get turned down end up in a drawer and stay there. But Patrick had another job at the time. He was the musical director for Madonna, who was already one of the biggest stars in the world.
He played her the song Michael’s team had passed on. Her answer was quick. “Oh, I like this, let’s work on it,” Patrick recalls her saying.
The two of them sat down together and pulled it apart. Madonna changed the words and made the song her own. She reportedly wrote much of it in Hong Kong, while she was away filming a movie. Patrick produced the record and played keyboards on it, and his guitarist friend played the Spanish guitar you hear on it.
Here’s what that rejected tape turned into.
Madonna’s official video for the song Michael passed on
The song came out as a single in early 1987. It went all the way to number one in Britain and reached number four in America. Its video was MTV’s most requested for 20 weeks in a row, the longest run the channel had seen at that point.
And it never really went away. In 2025, nearly 40 years later, it became the first of Madonna’s music videos to pass one billion views on YouTube.
Patrick has never made a big deal out of it. Looking back, he simply said, “It’s a good song, for sure.”
Michael did just fine too. Later that same year he released “Bad,” his first album since “Thriller,” with Quincy Jones still at his side. It gave him five number one songs in America.
So the next time this song comes on the radio, listen for that soft, smooth sound. It was first written with Michael Jackson in mind.