In 1979, Michael Jackson was 21 years old and about to become the biggest thing in music. He had spent that year making Off the Wall, the album that turned a former child star into an adult superstar. Near the end of the sessions, his producer, Quincy Jones, handed him a ballad he had been holding on to for three years, waiting for the right person to sing it. It was called “She’s Out of My Life.” What happened when Michael recorded it is one of the most painful things ever captured on a pop record.
He could not get through it without crying.
Not once. Every single take. Jones has described it plainly: they recorded between eight and eleven takes, and at the end of each, the 21-year-old singer broke down. Jones’s own account is worth reading slowly. He had carried the song around for three years because you can feel the pain in it, and something finally told him it was the right moment to give it to Michael.
Michael Jackson – She’s Out of My Life (Official Video – Upscaled)
Then Quincy Jones made a decision that most producers would never make. He could have wiped it. He could have run one more take and got a clean ending. Instead, he turned to the room and said: that’s supposed to be there. Leave it on.
So if you play “She’s Out of My Life” today, right at the very end, you can hear him crying. It is not acting. It was not planned. It is a real 21-year-old breaking down in a recording booth, and it has been sitting on the finished record for forty-seven years.
Quincy Jones later made a point about it that goes deeper than the song. He said it was an emotion Michael had never even thought about singing before, because it was “a very mature emotion.” And here is the thing everyone around him understood. Michael Jackson had been working professionally since he was five years old. He had never had an ordinary childhood, an ordinary friendship, or an ordinary relationship. But there was one adult emotion he already knew intimately, at 21, better than almost anyone alive.
He knew what it was to be lonely.
Michael Jackson – (Story Behind) She’s Out Of My Life
He described it himself later, and the description is hard to shake. He talked about filling his room with mannequins, and explained why with a bluntness that stops you: “I used to be very lonely. Painfully lonely. So lonely. You have no idea.” Then he described something almost nobody knows he did. At the absolute height of his career, during the years of Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad, he would walk the streets looking for someone to talk to. He would approach strangers and ask them to be his friend. And they would say Oh my God, it’s Michael Jackson — which, as he put it, was not what he wanted at all.
One of his closest friends once described having him over for lunch, with all the curtains closed. Michael told her it was the first time he had sat down and eaten a meal with other people in ten years. He normally ate alone.
Off the Wall went on to become the first solo album in history to put four songs in the Hot 100’s Top 10. It made him. And buried in the middle of it is a track where you can hear a lonely 21-year-old crying, because his producer had the good sense to leave it in.