Man in the mirror, wow, the song changed my life.
I was signed for two and a half years of my five year contract with Quincy Jones,
and I hadn't written anything of note at the time.
I was just submitting songs to fulfill my contractual agreement.
But then Quincy had a meeting with his west coast songwriters.
I think it was like eight or eight or nine of us at the time.
And they had a meeting in his living room.
And I showed up late, like a half hour late or whatever.
So I walked in and Quincy said, "As I was saying before it was so..."
everybody laughed and I'm like stuck down in the corner and just started taking
notes of what he wanted to finish this album.
So I took some notes and then I went to my writing partner, Glen Ballard.
He said I told him Quincy wants a song for Michael to finish the album.
What kind of song? I don't know.
He said, well, let's just see what we come up with.
He stands up to go over to the keyboard in the corner.
And at this point, we're going to cut to two years before that moment.
Well, I'm at a songwriting session with amazing
jazz pianist John Beasley, and we're writing and I thought we were doing well.
The phone rings.
Instead of letting the answering machine pick it up,
he picks up the phone and begins this very, very banal conversation.
Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm going to do another.
And I'm flipping through my lyric book, Seething and my mind going, oh, no,
I didn't just hear him say he's not doing nothing.
No, I didn't just... and I am flipping through the book.
And he says, The man.
What man? Oh, man.
the man in the mirror.
I write 'Man in the Mirror'.
Two years later, I'm sitting with Glenn.
He gets up to turn on the keyboard and he
starts playing dum dum dum dum dum dum dum.
And I'm flipping through my lyric book and the phrase 'Man in the Mirror' popped off.
Every time I tell the story, I get goosebumps.
I started, I started writing.
I was like, oh, I just I couldn't I couldn't get it out fast enough.
I couldn't write the ideas fast enough.
Friday afternoon we met and demo'd the song.
Friday evening we had a great demo. We knew it.
We hugged. Said this is a great song.
But we didn't know Quincy was going to feel the same way.
And then if we got past Quincy, we didn't know what Michael was going to say.
Friday evening, too late for the Quest
publishing offices to be open and for some reason I could not wait.
So I called Quincy.
I said, Glenn and I have just written this great song for Michael.
He said, Wonderful,
turn it into the office and I'll hear it on Monday and Tuesday.
I said, Monday, can I just drop it off? No.
Siedah I've got twelve people in my dining room and I'm having a meeting.
I can't. Quincy has six daughters,
so he knew this little argument we were having, futile.
So he said, all right, all right. I hung up the phone.
So I went to his house and I dropped off this cassette.
Right.
Quincy comes out of the dining room, he opens the dining room door
and there are twelve suits sitting at his dining room table.
So I'm like OK.
OK, as a cue, here's the here's the song.
The only thing I ask is that you just get back to me soon as. He said.
All right. All right, Siedah.
And he close the door and a few hours
later Quincy calls me at home and says, Sid, my nickname.
This is the best song that I've heard in ten years.
And I'm like,
and he said, But, you know, Michael, we've been in the studio for two
and a half years and Michael has yet to record a song he didn't write.
So I don't know.
But don't worry if I don't record it
with Michael on his album, I recorded with James Ingram on my record.
And I'm thinking
I mean, I love I love James as much as anybody but Michael.
So I had to let that go.
And a couple of days later,
Quincy called me and said, we in the studio recording your old piece of song.
And I'm like, oh,
I couldn't believe what he was saying. And then I heard.
But but Michael has a problem with the chorus
and he said he really wants.
He said hold on it.
And then I hear "muffled voices"
I said, yes, Michael really wants you to bring home the the idea of
hold on, hold on.
He put Michael on the phone. Oh my God.
OK, "OMG Michael jackson"
But on the phone.
How can I help you?
The first thing that Michael said to me was,
I love this song.
The second thing Michael said to me was, I love your voice.
I don't even know.
What made me have the audacity to think I
could ever write anything that he would want to record because every songwriter
in America was submitting songs to Quincy for Michael.
I didn't want to write another 'oh baby baby' kind of song.
I really wanted him to say something
to the world because I recognize he had a huge platform
and the whole world was listening to whatever he had to say at the time.
When I first met Michael Jackson,
it was in this room and we spent a lot of time here recording Man in the Mirror.
It was such a good feeling for someone like that
to say, I want to do this like you did.
And I mean, he is Michael Jackson, for God's sake?
You know, he could have done it any way
He wanted to do it. But he wanted to do it like I did it.
And that was just for me, that was the highest compliment ever.
When I recorded with Michael, I really got to know him a little bit.
We like hanging out and it's fun.
Like he always thought I was so crazy because when I met him, I wasn't the fan.
I wasn't like, oh, God, I can't believe it.
I never like that
That time when we were recording, we spent a week in the studio together
from the time we started recording Man in the Mirror.
Very smart. Is very smart, smarter than I had ever
given him credit for, very knowledgeable about being black,
the struggle of black people in America.
So I didn't think he was even vaguely aware of that.
We had long conversations about that.
Whoever it was, he made you feel
as if he had as much to learn from you as you did from him?
Most people of his celebrity,
it's the opposite, like I know I'm the star, so you listen to me.
But he wasn't like that because he was like a sponge.
He wanted to make himself better and better and better.
So he looked at what everybody did and just took the best parts of what he
like from what they did just to make what he does even better.
He was such a perfectionist and he only wanted to indulge or do something if he
could make it his own and then be the best at it.
He lived a find artist that he
appreciated, and it doesn't have to be a singer or a dancer.
You could be an actor or a chemist or whatever it was you were the best at.
And Michael found you doing succeeding in your chosen field of endeavor.
He appreciated that.
He learned from that.
'Man in the Mirror' comes out and it's like this global success sensation.
What was the experience for you?
It made me wish that I had
on the 'Bad tour' because I rehearsed with him for like a week and a half, OK?
And then decided at the last minute that I
wanted to make my own record because my record company says the single's coming out.
'Man in the Mirror' just dropped in.
I mean,
'I Just Can't Stop Loving You' was just dropped by.
The Man In The Mirror's coming, so you need to have your own record.
OK, so I pulled out of the Bad tour, entered Sheryl Crow.
Oh, Sheryl Crow took your place on the Bad tour.
Yes, ma'am.
Unbelievable.
Yes, I do find it hard to believe.
Wow. Now, one of my biggest regrets,
'Man In The Mirror' was written specifically for Michael for the Bad album.
And then when the next album, The Dangerous Album, came out,
Michael asked me, would you write me another song?
I had a publisher at the time
who when I told her that I really wanted to write another song for Michael's album,
she said to me, And I will never forget this.
She said,You are.
You wrote one song.
Nobody writes songs back to back on Michael's album.
So you just get it out of your mind.
But I had it in my mind.
I just ignored her.
When we were on tour, Michael decided
he would only perform songs that were number one and we were on stage.
There
was two hours of number one songs.
You two singing your duet? 'I Just Can't Stop Loving You', he's grabbing my thighs for some reason
Oh, my goodness.
I don't know why he decided to do it. I don't know.
You do it every night. He didn't do it every night? No
OK, so no romantic? No, no.
Just friends.
Just like the brother I never had. Is he? Ok...
Very nice.
I was getting bored and I wanted to just
spice it up a little bit, and I think I was told, don't do that.
Michael's not going to like that. Don't do that.
I'm like, shut up. I'm going to do what I want to do.
What's the guy gonna do? Fire me? What? You know?
So I got this wig and I remember his face
when he saw me in that wig, he was cracking up.
And I have a great photograph of that moment.
He couldn't even sing.
He was laughing so hard there.
I mean, don't get me wrong, Michael was great every night.
Right.
But there were some nights when he was, I'm getting goosebumps talking about it,
He was just over, so much that we're on stage with him where
we're clapping, damn, there were tens of thousands of people,
70, 80, 100 thousand people, depending on where we were.
And at the end of the night, when that song came on,
it was so amazing to see a sea.
And at the time it was all about the BIC lighters.
So when 'Man in the Mirror' came on, you would see a sea of BIC lighters.
And it was it was like twinkling stars out in the audience.
And it was such an amazing feeling and such a powerful song.
And it was my favorite, favorite time of the night.
Did you see 'This Is It' did you see a movie?
What was your impression of that movie?
Was it true to how the rehearsals and stuff went with you on The Dangerous Tour?
Yes, but you should also know that
if he were alive today, in no way would you ever let his fans see his process.
Really? He was like a magician.
You see what a magician does and you see what the magician wants you to see?
Right. And no way on earth,
not only over his dead body would that film have been released.
I hadn't seen him for a long time before he passed away.
And I run into his nanny, whom I've met one time.
I'd only been to the ranch one time and I met her there.
And I hadn't seen Michael in, like, since the.
And maybe like 10, 12 years,
15 years, and I said to her, when you talk to Michael again
and I swear this is exactly what I said when you talk to Michael again.
'I love his black ass'. At the end of the show,
I go back to the greenroom and she said I finally got him on the phone here.
He's on the phone.
I said, dude, you're going on the road to London.
I want to go. He said.
Really? You want to go? Yes I wanna go.
He said, OK, OK, but it ended up being through the auditioning process.
I couldn't be in London for the time that he had to be there for what I was being paid.
I couldn't I couldn't afford to leave for that long.
He told me that Imagine
the song by John Lennon and 'Man in the Mirror' are his two favorite songs.
And I was just so proud of that.
I mean, like he's Michael Jackson.
He could have any, you know, he could pick any song to be his favorite song.
And I don't speak a word of French, but I know Japanese people,
Spanish people, French people, Africans, Indians who don't speak a word
of English, but they know all the lyrics to Man in the Mirror.
And that's insane to me.
This man has changed my life in such a broad and beautiful way that
even though he's not on the planet.
The effects of his life on his work are still very present.
I'm from Compton. I didn't know as a black child growing up
in L.A. that I would be touring the world with the biggest pop star on the planet,
having been produced by the biggest producer in the world,
traveling these kind of circles, you can only dream about.
I mean, and I want every little girl
that has a dream in her heart.
To follow it, I never really got a chance to tell them how much I appreciated him.
Oh,
I'm sorry.
I'm going to take a break.