Let's make this a night we won't forget

Michael Jackson 'The Lady in My Life' (Thriller - 1982)

Usually, when I write one of these entries, it is a godsend when an album is so famous that each song has a separate Wikipedia entry, usually a sign that there is plenty to write about and theories and stories to delve into. Unfortunately for me, this time, ‘The Lady in My Life,’ the closer from Michael Jackson’s 1982 colossus Thriller, is one of two songs without a separate page¹. This is because the other seven songs on the album were all singles, all of which made the US top ten, a record equalled by Bruce Springsteen and Michael’s sister Janet Jackson before being equalled and then surpassed by Drake². Despite not being a single, the song was certified gold in the US a few weeks ago as ‘P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)’, ‘The Girls Is Mine’ and ‘Beat It’ received platinum certificates. Yet another indicator of just how huge this record remains.

Due to his perception that his 1979 album Off The Wall had underperformed, Jackson expressed a wish to make every song on the album a potential hit single. He told Ebony in 2007 that he was frustrated by albums that would have one good song, and the rest were like B-sides.

... Why can't every one be like a hit song? Why can't every song be so great that people would want to buy it if you could release it as a single? ... That was my purpose for the next album.

With the move from the amount of disco on display on Off The Wall, there was room to go beyond that into pop, rock and funk. But on the slower, more R&B side of things, there was also a build on the downtempo numbers on the previous album.

In a way, the two obvious comparisons for us at The Run Out Grooves to make with ‘The Lady In My Life’ are with two closers from American artists who also broadened their palates as they developed into more serious album-oriented acts. One before in Stevie Wonder’s ‘Another Star’, and one to follow in Prince’s ‘Adore’.

The choice to close the album with a smooth, slower, soulful love song was smart. It was the type of soulful ballad that marked Jackson’s progression from Jackson 5 member to a solo artist in the early seventies and while it will always be eclipsed by the record’s singles and especially the big three of ‘Billie Jean’, ‘Beat It’ and the title track it a song where the vocal performance elevates Rod Temperton’s songwriting³ in a way that few others would have been able to.

In Moonwalk, Jackson spoke of the challenges of recording it;

“The Lady in My Life” was one of the most difficult tracks to cut. We were used to doing a lot of takes in order to get a vocal as nearly perfect as possible, but Quincy wasn’t satisfied with my work on that song, even after literally dozens of takes. Finally he took me aside late one session and told me he wanted me to beg. That’s what he said. He wanted me to go back to the studio and literally beg for it. So I went back in and had them turn off the studio lights and close the curtain between the studio and the control room so I wouldn’t feel self-conscious. Q started the tape and I begged. The result is what you hear in the grooves.

You can hear that in the song. All the descriptions of her as a precious treasure and their love burning brightly through the darkness are lovely, but you have to land it, and Jackson does. There is so much tenderness and melody in the performance, and even as it progresses to something a little steamier as the funk element is dialled up a notch, it doesn’t go all the way to Prince levels of becoming hot under the collar.

While being one of the two orphaned songs on Thriller not released as singles, the song was used as the primary sample in ‘Hey Lover’ by LL Cool J and Boyz II Men, which reached #3 in the mid-1990s and landed LL Cool J a second Grammy Award for Best Rap Solo Performance.⁴ WhoSampled has it listed on 69⁵ songs, all from 1995 onwards, which shows to me that for an R&B record released in the early 1980s, there was no danger of the song being a forgotten post-Disco number; it sounds like a contemporary R&B radio hit from the 1990s and arguably the 2010s that the likes of Usher, Justin Timberlake and The Weeknd would look to. To this day, it feels incredible that the funky break that comes in around halfway wasn’t a sample that Daft Punk plundered on 2001s Discovery, a record that invented the 2010s.

An extra verse and chorus must have been cut late as they still made the album’s lyrics page. It took until 2020 for a full version to emerge untroubled by the vinyl’s physical limit.

1. The other is track 2, ‘Baby Be Mine’.

2. Respectively, Born In The USA (1984), Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814 (1989), Scorpion (2018) and Certified Lover Boy (2021)

3. Temperton also penned the other non-single, ‘Baby Be Mine’, and the title track. He previously wrote ‘Rock With You’ for Jackson as well as disco era hits for his band Heatwave ‘Boogie Nights’, ‘Always and Forever’ as well as George Benson’s ‘Give Me The Night’.

4. The first was for ‘Mamma Said Knock You Out’.

5. Nice.