A young woman had been living in Los Angeles for six or eight months, chasing a music career that hadn’t happened yet. She didn’t even own a passport. She had barely left the country in her life.
Then one phone call changed all of it.
She was hired as a backing singer for Michael Jackson’s 1987 world tour, the huge run of shows behind the “Bad” album. There was no slow build and no gentle start. “A month later,” she said, “we’re in Tokyo playing for 65,000 people.” One month. From an apartment in LA to a stadium on the other side of the world.
And it gets better, because this wasn’t just a girl in the back row. Every single night, she stepped up to sing a duet with Michael himself.
You know her name now, even if the crowd in Tokyo didn’t. It’s Sheryl Crow, years before her own songs filled the radio.
She told the whole story in a fresh interview with NPR, and you can see one of those duets right here.
Sheryl Crow and Michael sing together on stage
Watching it now is a strange kind of time travel. There’s Michael at the peak of his powers, and standing beside him is a young singer the world hadn’t met yet, holding her own under those enormous lights. She looks like she belongs there, because she did.
The love song they traded lines on each night became a real highlight of the show. It’s a tender duet, the kind that lets two voices lean on each other, and hers was more than up to it. The name of the song is the sweet little payoff waiting for you in the clip above.
Sheryl has said that tour packed a lifetime of experience into a short stretch of time. She felt like she’d already lived in LA and worked for thirty years, all before her own career had truly started. That’s what happens when your first big job is standing next to the biggest star alive.
Not a bad way to earn your very first passport stamp.
Watch the duet above and listen for how easily their voices fit together, long before anyone outside that stage knew who she’d become.