Michael Jackson did not describe songwriting as sitting at a piano and forcing ideas to appear.
To him, the best songs arrived almost like messages.
Sometimes that meant waking up at night with melodies or ideas suddenly in his head.
A journalist who interviewed Michael during the Thriller era described him as believing that his songs, ideas and creative energy came from God and that he could simply wake during the night and find the music waiting for him.
Years later, Michael explained the process himself in even greater detail.
In a 2002 VIBE interview, he said he never tried to force creativity. Instead, he believed the music already existed before it reached him.
And when it arrived, he said it could arrive with almost everything attached.
The melody.
The lyrics.
The bass.
The drums.
The strings.
Michael described himself as the “medium” or “channel” through which the finished idea passed. He even admitted that he sometimes felt strange putting his own name on songs because the experience felt as though the music had already been created somewhere else.
Michael Jackson Demonstrates How He Created Songs
The unusual part was what Michael did next.
He did not need to write traditional musical notation to preserve the idea.
Instead, he grabbed a tape recorder.
During his famous 1993 Mexico deposition, Michael demonstrated how he would sing and beatbox the different musical parts directly onto tape.
He recreated bass lines with his voice.
Then drums.
Percussion.
Melodies.
Even string and horn arrangements.
Explaining “Who Is It,” Michael said he would put onto tape exactly what he was hearing in his head, then musicians could later reproduce those parts in the studio.
That explains why some of Michael’s demos already sound remarkably complete even before full production was added.
The finished record might eventually involve producers, engineers and instrumentalists, but the architecture of the song could already be living inside Michael’s head.
He described the same frustration in a 1999 TV Guide interview.
The difficult part was not always finding the song.
It was getting the sound in his imagination accurately onto tape.
Michael said that when he heard music internally it could sound perfect, while turning that mental version into a physical recording required enormous work. He even spent weeks perfecting the bass sound on “Billie Jean.”
That is also why Michael spoke about songwriting in spiritual terms throughout his life.
During a 2001 online discussion, he said the process felt as though songs had already been written before a person was born and simply passed through the songwriter when the time was right.
For Michael Jackson, songwriting was therefore a strange mixture of instinct, spirituality and obsessive craftsmanship.
The first version could arrive almost effortlessly.
But capturing every detail he heard inside his head was where the real work began.
Michael did not simply sit down and invent every note one by one. Sometimes, according to him, he woke up and the song already seemed to be there.