When Michael Jackson died on the 25th of June 2009, the pop star had unfinished business. And no, I’m not talking about the ill-fated This Is It concert series that awaited him in London. I’m talking about music.
Jackson is well-known for taking longer than most artists to complete and release albums. This is because he was a perfectionist.
“A perfectionist has to take his time,” explains Jackson. “He shapes and he molds and he sculpts that thing until it’s perfect. He can’t let it go before he’s satisfied… You work that thing till it’s just right. When it’s as perfect as you can make it, you put it out there. Really, you’ve got to get it to where it’s just right. That’s the secret.”
For each studio album, Jackson and his collaborators worked on an abundance of material, selecting only the best tracks for the official release.
“As usual [Michael] goes in the studio and he does a lot of stuff, like hundreds of tapes and stuff, you know, and it was great,” recalls Quincy Jones, producer of Jackson’s Off The Wall, Thriller and Bad albums.
“And [Bad] is the one where I asked him to write all the tunes,” continues Jones. “I could see him just growing as an artist and understanding production and all that stuff. Michael had written thirty-three songs, and they were saying, ‘Well okay it’s showdown time! We gotta pick it.’ … You can’t put thirty-three songs on a record. And he’d written some fantastic stuff! Really, really fantastic.”
One of the ‘thirty-three songs’ that Jackson had written during those sessions was “Scared Of The Moon”.
It has been reported that Jackson’s friend, actress Brooke Shields, had told the pop star a story in the early-mid 80s, which inspired the concept of the song. Jackson then worked with songwriter Buz Kohan to bring that concept to fruition.
One of Jackson’s collaborators, Matt Forger, recalls working on the original demo for “Scared Of The Moon” at Westlake Studios.
According to co-writer Kohan, those sessions took place in 1985.
Another of Jackson’s studio collaborators, technical director Brad Sundberg, recalls the simplicity of the original demo.
“They just did the background vocals, the lead vocal and the piano. That was it,” says Sundberg.
With the vocals and piano down on tape, Sundberg recalls that Forger made an innocent mistake:
“Matt [Forger] broke the number one rule that you never break – he gave Michael the master tape. And once you hand anything to Michael Jackson you may as well just chuck it off a pier because you’re never ever going to see it again.”
A short time after recording Jackson’s vocals, Forger received a phone call from an engineer at Evergreen Studios. This is where Forger’s innocent mistake became apparent.
“The engineer was there at Evergreen, calling Matt, saying, ‘Hey I’ve got this Michael Jackson session for ‘Scared Of The Moon’. Michael is here… the string players are here… but we don’t have a tape. Can you run the tape over?’ And Matt’s like, ‘I don’t have the tape… I gave it to Michael!'”
And so they went back and forth, trying to figure out what could be done.
Fortunately, Forger still had a cassette copy of the mixdown of the original demo session. And so he drove the cassette over to Evergreen.
It wasn’t the original multitrack, but it was something.
The engineer at Evergreen then transferred the audio from the cassette onto a new multitrack session, recorded the strings on that same multitrack, and then mixed it all down together.
“From a recording engineer’s standpoint, that’s just breaking every rule in the book,” says Sundberg of their ingenuity. “You cannot take a vocal from a cassette and then put it back onto a multitrack and have it still sound that good.”
“I told Matt that it was pure genius,” adds Sundberg. “It’s just absolutely amazing that it worked because that was the original vocal. It was just a hokey, cute little song that Michael wanted to do. And we did dozens of those. We’d do lots of little snippets where Michael would have an idea and we would do a demo. But how ‘Scared Of The Moon’ came about – technically – shouldn’t have worked, but it does. It was like the little engine that could. It’s the little song that could!”
In the end, “Scared Of The Moon” didn’t make the final cut for Bad, and remained unreleased for almost two decades.
But the track re-surfaced during collaborative sessions for Jackson’s final studio album.
“There are things that just stuck in his mind,” recalls Michael Prince, who served as one of Jackson’s most trusted studio engineers between 1995 and 2009.
“Sometimes he writes new songs, and sometimes he wants to bring up something from the past that he knows is an unpolished gem… I remember we did a little work on ‘Scared Of The Moon’ for the Invincible album.”
Prince continues:
“I remember Steve Porcaro from the band Toto joking, ‘Oh that song again?’ It’s so funny because I’d never heard it before. But that’s Michael’s way of doing things – he always revisited his favourite stuff. He’d say, ‘Why didn’t we put this on our last album? Let’s listen again. Can we make it any better?’ Sometimes it makes it on the album and sometimes it doesn’t.”
As with the Bad album, “Scared Of The Moon” was not selected for Invincible, which was released on October 30, 2001
But then, in November of 2004, Sony Music released The Ultimate Collection – career-spanning box set consisting of both released and unreleased Jackson material. “Scared Of The Moon” was included in that box set.
Listen to “Scared Of The Moon” below – as featured on ‘The Ultimate Collection’:
![Michael Jackson - 14. Scared of the Moon (Demo) [Audio HQ] HD](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/LBJC1g-kOeQ/hqdefault.jpg)
But despite the fact that the demo had been officially released on The Ultimate Collection, Jackson still wasn’t done with “Scared Of The Moon”.
The song, along with many others from different eras of Jackson’s career, was cited in a musical ‘to do’ list the pop star had written in 2009.
The handwritten note, seen below, details the titles of around 30 songs Jackson had hoped to finish.
That particular note was taped to the pop star’s bedroom wall at the time of his death in 2009 – twenty-four years after the “hokey” little demo was first recorded.
Damien Shields is the author of the book Michael Jackson: Songs & Stories From The Vault examining the King of Pop’s creative process, and the producer of the podcast The Genesis of Thriller which takes you inside the recording studio as Jackson and his team create the biggest selling album in music history.
