Michael Jackson Almost Recorded J.Lo's “If You Had My Love''
Quote:
One of the things I took away from your book, excuse me if I read between the lines a little too much, was that Michael seemed to be surrounded by too many “Yes Men.” Would you agree?
I think you’re smack bang on target. Let me tell you the story about Jennifer Lopez. Rodney Jerkins was given the opportunity to meet with Michael. I detail that in the book. What I don’t talk about in the book is the songs that he got the opportunity to play for Michael. There was 15 or 20 of them, and basically they were in the room, and Rodney was going through track-by-track and playing them. Everyone was wondering, “What’s Michael thinking? What is he going to choose?” [Songwriter/head of Sony’s A&R at the time] Cory Rooney had only pre-selected one of those songs and had Jennifer Lopez record it the previous year.
It was already allocated to her. He’s sitting there and the way he explained it to me was that he had everything crossed that Michael would not want that song, because that song had already been chosen to be released to radio two months later and was going to be Jennifer’s first ever single. The lead single from her On The 6 album. Rodney had already produced it. It had already been recorded, vocals, everything was done.
So, they’re listening to all of these songs and get to the end, and Michael was kind of like, “there’s one song on there that I like. It’s got a really great groove and it’s track number seven.” Everyone was like, “Oh, ****. That’s the one.” That was “If You Had My Love.” Everyone’s like, “Shit, now we’re going to have to argue with the King of Pop because that’s already going to be Jennifer’s first song and it’s already in motion and is going to radio in two months.” How do you possibly tell Michael Jackson no?
So, they’re all sweating on it, and then he goes, “But, it should be sung by a female, so I’m not going to take it. You should find a female singer to sing it.” Everyone sighed and the whole room was relieved. For me, that just goes to show that Michael Jackson himself had an ear for hit material, because that song went on to be Rodney Jerkin’s first Billboard Hot 100 number one and it was Jennifer Lopez’s first Billboard Hot 100 number one. Michael knew it was a hit. It was the only one of Rodney’s songs that he gravitated towards, but he also had the intuition to know that a female should sing it for it realize its best potential.
As much as the Invincible album itself didn’t really soar and there weren’t any huge hits on it, Michael himself, when no-one’s in his ear telling him what to do, he still knew a hit song when he heard it.
So he just chose randomly from demos? I thought he wrote his material
He did that too, he wrote the songs and co produced the material for thriller and his other stuff.
This is around the late 90s to near 2000's so by this time he was probably more willing to pick stuff out.
very interesting.