How does Michael compose his songs?
MJ explained his composing process on the June 7, 1995 “Prime Time Live” special “Michael Jackson: The Man and His Music”, on the videotaped deposition he gave for the “Thriller”/”The Girl is Mine”/”We Are the World” copyright lawsuit, during his testimony in the “Dangerous” copyright lawsuit, and for the Internet Chat. He does not read or write music, so he sings the melody and vocally imitates the bassline, strings, and other parts into a tape recorder. As he said in the Internet Chat, “The process is creating a vocal rhythm to a click track — which is a sound, a timed beat. And you’re doing these mouth sounds to that beat. These sounds can be looped according to how you sample it in the computer again and again. This is your foundation for the entire track — everything plays off this. It’s the rhythm, like the beatbox rhythm. Every song I’ve written since I was very little I’ve done that way. I still do it that way.” Also, as guitarist David Williams related in Rolling Stone in 19
