One Song - Michael Jackson's "Thriller"

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

As Spooky Season falls across the land, no mere mortal can resist the power of this 1983 smash hit. On this very special Halloween episode of One Song, Diallo and LUXXURY break down Michael Jackson’s spookiest pop song, “Thriller.” They discuss how the King of Pop teamed up with Quincy Jones to make the iconic title track for the best-selling album of all time (70 million+ copies!), and how its cinematic music video redefined what a music video can even be. And prepare yourself to hear Michael’s isolated and stacked vocals…they’ll make you jump right out of your seat! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Great news. The federal EV rebate is back. Eligible customers get up to $5,000 with the federal EVAP rebate on select 2027-volt and 26 Equinox EV models. Visit your local Chevrolet dealer today for more details. Darkness falls across the land. The podcast hours close at hand. This has come in search of tools. So please subscribe and like.

Real soon, today's song has the sound of MJ and Quincy Jones getting down. But Rod Temperton played a part, you see, say Diallo and Luxury. And though you want to hear the stems, you'll hear things only they could deliver, for no mere mortals could record. The song we know as Thriller. Bam-da-da-Bap. Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Happy Halloween, everybody.

It's a luxury. Today's song is from one of the most famous people of the 20th century. And it's the title track on the best-selling album of all time. I think to date there are 70 million copies that have been sold. This spooky R&B Pop Smash from 1983 is certified Diamond, and it topped the charts in the U.S. and damn near every country with a record player worldwide. It even pops back on the charts annually during a particular time of year.

This song's popularity knows no bounds. You can go to any corner of the world and find somebody who's played this song at some time in their life. Plus, it's music video redefined what a music video can even be. That's right. It's one song, and that song is Thriller by Michael Jackson. I'm actor-writer-director and sometimes DJ Diallo-Riddle. And I'm producer, DJ songwriter and musicologist Luxury,

aka the guy who talks about interpolation on the internet. And if you want to watch one song, please go to our YouTube channel and watch this episode. And while you're there, please subscribe. All right, let's start. Let's do this. I think it's hilarious the idea of playing a song like this one for someone and then be like, oh, this is catchy. Who is this?

I've never heard this before. Never heard this in our life. Who's this artist? It's really, this is like a mind-bogglingly known song and a mind-bogglingly-known performer, but for good reason. Well, listen, man, what does what does thriller and Michael Jackson mean to you? When I was a kid, I loved Michael Jackson. When I was a kid, I loved this album thriller. And when I was a kid, I loved this song and this video. So it just reminds me of being a kid and how pop music at that age is so important and so meaningful and shared with everyone you know knew about it. So that's what it brings back to me is just childhood. Like, we're on the same thing. grade memories. Listen, I tried to tap back into that core memory. I went back and listened to the song, and I remember how much it scared me. Yeah.

Like, this song was legitimately- It was kind of scary. That means and price part about, like, ghoul's closing in to seal your doom. Like, when you're a kid, you're just like, why are they, like, pounding me with this infectious rhythm? And yet they're, like, trying to scare me at the same time. It was the confluence of those things that, like, really, like, I took to heart.

And, by the way, it still works because my middle kid, I remember I was watching the thriller video with Improletes, around Halloween and you know he's like seven or so in 2018 yeah and he was still scared like he didn't finish the video like he was out of the room oh seven okay yeah yeah yeah I'll never forget he actually said to me I'll watch that video again when I'm 21 which I definitely bring up him legal drinking age you'll finally be able to yeah he can vote he'll be able to vote yeah maybe we're in a car in certain states and watch the Michael Jackson video for thriller maybe because I was slightly older when I first saw it, but to me, like, the scariness has always been, to me,

baked in with the campiness and the wink-wink referentialness, I mean, even just having Vincent Price on the track, the scariness is a little bit like melded with irony, with like, this is somebody who was scary before. And, you know, since 30 years ago when he was a horror movie star, you know, horror has changed and therefore having this throwback horror movie laugh even, that kind of ha-ha-ha-ha-cackle, it feels like a reference that you're meant to, you know, hear. as ironic or referential, but not like scary, scary, scary. I'll admit, I was scared. But you're legitimately scared.

When Michael Jackson turned around with his arm around all array and like did that face, like, I couldn't take it. In the movie theater, that is scary. Oh, no, I was like, Mom, you know, why did you show me this? That was a surprise. That was a surprise. The only other thing I want to say about Michael, before we get started here, is that it's a little annoying to me, once again, going back to our age, because we're

similarly age. It's annoyed to me like when pretty much every R&B star, every rap star, at some point in their career if they're successful. They're comparing themselves to Michael Jackson. Let me tell you, you might have the sheer stats to be Michael Jackson, but it's hard to explain, and we even have to explain to some people who work on the show, because not everybody on this show was alive in time to see this. You don't understand how big Michael Jackson was. This is a time when we have three broadcast networks. The radio plays songs, but you don't have, like, infinite access, because you can't drive around with a record player in your car. You just don't have access to everything at all times, and here is

a guy who comes along who was already a big star but like child star in the 70s already big child star never went away. It's like a second actor. This is a second career for him basically. This is the beginning of his second act and I'm telling you there's just no level there's no way to sort of describe how in a 1982 world how big Michael Jackson was. It was just on another level which I you know I try to see I imagine that the Beatles in the 60s is on this level but like this is that level. You're right. All the things we take for granted to you about being across media. It's not just music. It's also television, which in the 70s was like this double whammy. But now in the 80s, we have music videos, we have Pepsi commercials, right? We have all kinds of things where it's

branching out into other forms of life touch points. So you're not just hearing it on the radio a lot, by the way. You're also seeing it in all these other ways. You're seeing in all these other ways. Before we dive into breaking down thriller, let's talk a little bit about where Michael is in his career at this time. This is the early 80s after he released his fifth studio album off the wall, which it should be pointed out, it sold 10 million copies. It was already a massive hit. It was already, I believe Quincy said,

it was already the biggest black album that had ever been recorded. Wow. He's breaking records that nobody thought would be broken. And he wanted to make a bigger record. I mean, that's the thing that kind of follows him through the rest of his life, is always trying to exceed the previous smash,

not necessarily to a healthy degree, but bad had to be better, bigger than thriller. Right. And then dangerous, et cetera. By the way, every word has to be kind of playing I'm even more scary than I was last time. Totally. You know, my other son, who was really into Michael Jackson when he was about five or six,

I remember he said, hey, I wrote a Michael Jackson song. And the song that he wrote the title, I'll never forget it, it was, you're scared of me. And I was like, you're absolutely on that Michael's a try because he went from being a thriller. He was off the wall, a thriller, and he's bad, then he's dangerous. You know, like, it's just, and it's interesting. You're right. It sort of goes along this progression. But I love what Questlove said about this.

it was in one of his Instagram posts he sort of wishes that Michael could have been here longer and that he thinks that Michael would have been here longer if he had not enjoyed the success that this album brought along in Quest Love's view he's like

I wish it sold a little bit less so that he wasn't always trying to chase the biggest album of his career every single time if he had peaked with off the wall and then dipped a little bit maybe some back and forth might have been healthy interesting yeah exactly I think all artists

sort of feel that. All artists are sort of like, oh, snap, that was such a huge success. How am I ever going to top that again? In Michael's case, he actually does top it. Off the wall should have been almost any other artist's peak, and yet he tops it with the greatest selling album of all time. So one almost understands why he thought, I can do it again. I can speak to that on like the most minuscule level compared to Michael Jackson, but in my own, when I put songs out in my life and something does well, the problem is like the next thing you put out, if it doesn't do as well, part of you feels a little bit like it affects you. Did I do something wrong? Did I do something wrong? It's not just the luck of the draw. It's not just the marketing or the video. But then you think about

all those things. So there's a little bit of chasing a previous success. And then you may never, that may have been the most successful thing you overdo for the rest of your life. Which is frightening. I think that's absolutely terrifying. Which is terrifying. Right. So if we feel this way or we have a little insight into it, you can imagine what Michael Jackson at the top of the world would feel. All of the lights and all of the press and the entire world watching how much pressure was on them, but yet somehow with the album Thriller and all that pressure, they somehow delivered. And it's important to point out that the album Thriller was recorded in eight weeks. You know, Quincy says, we didn't suffer from the paralysis of analysis. He was like, we didn't get in our own way. We did an album. We took off the three

worst songs, and then we replaced them with three more songs, and then we put those nine songs. And one of those were three replacements, I think, was Billy Jean. It might have been beat it or Billy Jean, but one of the huge smashes from that record. One of the replacements was beat it. Was beat it. Okay. That's so crazy to me. And here's a guy who's absolutely chasing all of the greats. Like he's chasing all of the grates. You know, when Quincy met Michael for real, like, you know, not just in passing at an award show, it was while he was working on the Wiz. And he saw that Michael had something special.

And Michael said, you know, I want you to produce my next album, which was going to be off the wall. I want you to produce it at Epic. And Epic stood in his way. Epic said, no, Quincy's too jazzy. Oh, interesting. But he fought for Quincy and he eventually got it. And by the way, to hear Quincy say it, black and white execs were like, not Quincy Jones. We have all these other people you could work with.

It turns out off the wall proved everybody wrong, as Quincy also puts it, he saved everybody's job at Epic. And he was working with a guy who just had a big view of what he was capable of in ways that have only recently made sense to me personally. Interesting. I heard this within the last calendar year, and it made so much sense. Michael was trying to be Elvis and Fred Astaire and James Brown and everybody all in one. He was like, I see it. He was like, I'm going to be bigger.

Yes. He was like, I'm going to transcend race. I'm going to transcend music genre. I'm going to have all of it. The crossover was a big important thing, in this record especially too. Yes. Because this is the record where they do crossover into the wide audience. So we just mentioned beat it.

It was no accident that they brought Eddie Van Halen, The biggest guitar player. They're working with Paul McCartney. One of my favorite pictures from this period is a picture of Michael Jackson, Quincy, Paul McCartney, all these people in the studio.

Mike has like the biggest sweater. He has a huge sweat stain on a t-shirt. It's a huge sweatshirt. I was picturing the like sweet sweater. No, I wish. No, he's got a huge sweat stain on his t-shirt. Quincy says they were dragging engineers in and out of the studio

just because they were exhausted. But Mike and Quincy together, the other words, chasing perfection. One thing that Quincy does as a producer, unlike maybe a modern producer, is bringing in dozens and dozens of the best and the brightest across functions. So one thing we will be talking about in this... Because that's what a good producer does. Especially like a 70s...

Especially back then when you have instruments, you know, you have musicians. Well, he has an arrangement background. He has a film scoring background. He has a jazz background. He has an incredible, incredible career just to land a little or add to a little bit of what you were saying. One thing he does is he's the orchestrator of this project. So he is thinking, how can we get to the top?

How can I bring in the best songwriters across these, what ends up being nine songs? So there are different writers on every song, different instrument players. So there is a core team, but there's also specialists. And that's one thing he orchestrates. And you also have, you know, I don't want to understate it. You also have the genius of Michael Jackson in the room. I mean, I think obviously everybody knows that few people have that voice. Few people have that vision.

But when you listen to the early demos before, like, the lyrics are written on some of these songs, You know, if you go back and listen to the Billy Jean demo. He already knows where things go. He's just scatting and he's like putting in words that mean nothing. But you can hear the song that's eventually Billy Jean coming about. I think that if you think of these two songs, this one and that one, as the ends the extremes of the spectrum of what Michael is capable of and what he delivers, because that's an perfect example of him sort of bringing everything to the song, like, from his brain.

and then it's translated by Quincy and the team. This is a case where it's a little bit the other end of the spectrum where he kind of is more of a performer, which as we've talked about on many episodes. On this show, we always have our unsung heroes. We've got three this episode. And like I said before, Quincy is maybe the fourth in the background, but because we have a future episode to focus on him,

we will save him. And we've given him his flowers a little bit. Today, Rod Temperton deserves some flowers. Now, Rod Temperton is a gentleman from Cleethorpe, England. And he formed a band around 1977 with two American brothers called Heat Wave. One of my favorite groups, always and forever. Boogie Nights, the groove line, which kind of plays in my head all the time.

I'm blowing decisions. I mean, like, the list could go on and on about this group. Well, let's listen to a little bit of Boogie Nights, which is one of my favorites of theirs, and becomes relevant in the next part of the story. So Quincy Jones hears this music, and he loves it, and he gets in touch with Rod Temperton. A little surprise, as Temperton explains it to find out that he is a white man from England. He's in a band with two Black American brothers and the three of them for the core of that unit.

He's not singing in it, but he is their core songwriter. Quincy loves Heat Wave, and he brings him in to start working together as one of his core songwriters in his group. As I mentioned, as we talked about, Quincy assembles the best and the brightest across disciplines to make music. That is one of his major talents. So one of the first songs that Rod turns in

is called Rock With You. And here's Rod's demo with him humming the main. melody so charmingly. They just had to play a snippet for you. So sweet. It's so cute. Now, in his defense, it's a demo. Listen, it's a demo. Can we just have a moment to talk about laughter on one song? Because we need to explain ourselves a little bit. Out of context sometimes when we're laughing at something, it's not because it's bad. It's because music has humor in it. Music musicians have a sense of humor. Also, he's recording a demo. He doesn't know that this song will later be required by one of the greatest singers of all time with all the genius of Quincy Jones mastering it.

And he's not deluded into thinking that he's nailing it either. But it is funny to hear somebody sing. Oh, it is so charming. Well, this turns into Rock with You, which is on Michael Jackson's Off the Wall record. One thing to point out is how there's a real similarity between Off the Wall and Boogie Nights. They both have that sort of like floaty, jazzy intro. Absolutely. Boom right into that baseline, which is also very similar. But it's okay, because Temperton's borrowing from himself. So he's interpolation. I was driving into work today.

I was like, can people get sued for basically interpolating themselves? I guess that they don't own their masters. The answer is yes, and anything's possible. But in this case, especially back at the era and the time. And the people involved were like, yo, you can almost picture Quincy saying, I love that song, Boogie Nights. Can you make me one? And he said, sure, I can make you a Boogie Nights.

So Rod Temperton is actually on off the wall. He has three tracks on it. He does rock with you. He does burn this disco out. He also does the title track. He does off the wall. Quincy says, I want you to work on everything I'm doing. So he becomes part of the Quincy team, the Q team. So he goes and does a few huge hits like Brothers Johnson Stomp.

Yep. He does Live in Me by Rufus and Shaka Khan. He does Baby Come to Me, which is Patty Austin and James Ingram, that duet. And he does love is in control, which might be my favorite Donna Summer track. I don't know about you, but that's a big one for me. And he does this one, and just because we have the demo for it, Another one of my favorite songs, George Benson's Give Me the Night. But this is the 1980 demo with Rod humming so charmingly.

It's so cute. It's so very, very charming. So that's Rod. He's part of the core Thriller Dream Team that gets brought in. He writes two other songs for Thriller, actually, and it's the only songs that weren't released as singles. So Rod Temperton wrote The Lady in My Life. baby be mine. We've had many discussions about I love both of those songs. Both of these songs, like if you've got to drop one song from like the greatest album of all time, it would probably

for me, be the lady in my life, but you're a lady in my life kind of guy. I'm firmly a lady in my life. I know which song I would drop. If I may, if I may, I would tell you right now, the song that I would drop and I say as a Beatles fan is easily the girl is mine. I think it needed to be

on Paul's album and say, say, say, which was on Paul's album, should have been, Should have been on Thriller. What were they thinking? Can you imagine a Say, say, say replaces the girl as mine on Thriller. It's an even better album I make the case. It's an untouchable record.

But people overthought it. And they were like, hey, hey, Michael, why don't you give me the soul track? And I'll give you the Pulps song. Like, I'm sorry. But you know what? We have a mutual friend with Sir Paul. And if he wants to come on one song and make a case that this was the right decision, we will gladly accept him.

Well, hey, we're going to get into how Thriller was made. We're even going to talk about how it began its life as a little song called Starlight. So after the break, we'll be back with the stems. Stick around. Welcome back to one song, luxury, walk us through it. Tell us how did Thriller get made? So Rod Temperton, so he writes the two songs out of the nine songs on Thriller, seven are singles, and he writes the two that aren't singles, but then he writes, he goes and writes the title track again. He wrote the title track for off the wall, and he writes the title track for Thriller. And that song is called Starlight. It's so different with that lyric. Tell us about Starlight.

Well, here's a deal. Temperton is quoted as saying, look, Michael Jackson, he loves movies. So I came up with the idea that I should write something really theatrical, a really dramatic, you know, melody structure. That is a great word.

This is a dramatic-ass song. This is like a Broadway musical-ass song. It's got so much going on. It's like a movie and a musical all-in-one. No, you're right. You're right. Quincy, not a big fan of Starlight. You can do better ride.

I believe in you, buddy. Don't miss the devil wears product to in theaters. Merrill Street, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci are back. In light of the recent scandal, I'm here to restore your credibility. I did not hire you, and all I need to do is bide my time until you fail. On May 1st, I'm going to make something of this job. Rain. Take the bridges. I burn night my way. Forever. I just love my job. Get tickets now. The Devil Wears Prada 2 in theaters May 1st, directed by David Frankel. At the point it was called Midnight Man. I think that's a great title. I kind of like.

Midnight Man. Maybe that should be the name of something else. But then Rod had a better idea. According to an interview that he gave in 2007 to the Sunday Telegraph, he said, I woke up and I just sent this word. Something in my head just said, this is the title. You could visualize it on top of the billboard charts. You could see the merchandising for this one word, how it jumped off the page as thriller. That's the word. He found the word. He found the word. He found the word. He was looking for the word. But he felt like it was a really crap word to sing. It's a weird word to sing. It's like thriller? That's pretty. part of the genius of Michael Jackson, right? Because he steps up to the mic. They're like, try it out, see if it works, and he made it work. But he, that's like a singability. He made that word work. Let's talk about it for a second. Singability is a real thing. I'm sure there's an acting equivalent of like, it's on the page it looks great. And then you go to say it and it just sort of lands flatter. It feels weird. You don't have the right bounce or rhythm. Same thing with singing. So not everyone necessarily might have made that word thriller work. Yeah. Jump off the page as it were in the song. And so part of Mike's magic in this song is making that top. It's, it's making that top. title work and go to Rod's vision of it being on marquise and merchandising. Yeah. And he said that once he had the title, the lyrics were written just in a couple of hours. But now, let's talk about the lyrics because in a weird way, thriller, it doesn't technically mean in film language what it means in the song. This song could have been called horror, horror film.

But, you know, somehow they took the word thriller, which is usually like, you know, like, espionage and, like, you know, people like, you know, affairs of the heart that lead to violence. Like a thriller technically is like the step before it gets into gore and horror, right? Like it's not terrifying. Yeah, it's not terrifying. But try and tell that to, you know, anybody our age and younger, no, thriller absolutely means horror means Halloween. Interesting. There is a really interesting process going here where the demo is its own entity and it's a fully formed song.

But then the production is its own fully formed process. And then the performance and the final product is its own sort of third thing. So it's similar to how Depeche Mode had Martin Gore make these fully formed demos. But then in the studio, Alan Wilder in their heyday, back in this first albums, would take over on the production side largely, among a handful of others that we've talked about on those two episodes, go back and listen. But then Dave Gann was the singer who would go in and be the interpreter and bring his character and his personality and his fully formed voice and really own the song.

So the song became a Depeche Mode song. A very similar thing is happening in this song. So that second unsung person I want to talk about, Anthony Marnelli is his name. He does film scores now, but at the time he was known for his synthesizer programming. And then the important thing in 1981, 82, and this is all going down, is to know how to work synthesizers. We've alluded to this a little bit on previous episodes. It's still a new thing. And not everybody can turn the right knob, find the right, you know, there's the attack, decay.

All of the parameters of a synthesizer are still an expert's realm. So Anthony Marinelli has a great series, a great podcast and series of videos where they go deep into thriller and the making of thriller. So a lot of the facts on this episode, I want to get full credit, are coming from him. And from his direct conversations with... We will tip the hat. And literally the name of his show is called In the Room, because they were in the room. So that is such a special thing. And boy, do they nerd out in the most wonderful way.

So one way they nerd out is talking about how every single sound was made and every single song. And what we know about the demo, the process of going from demo to production. Greg Fillen Gaines himself, and he is our third unsung hero that I'll be talking about momentarily. He is one of only three performers on the song outside of the horn. So everything you hear on the synths. So you have Michael Jackson. Yeah, Michael Jackson singing. You have Greg Fillin Gaines on everything that's a keyboard.

Really? And then we have David Williams on guitar. David Williams. Yeah. And then we have the horn section, no shade on them. They're very important. But everything that isn't a horn is coming from one of those three people. So Phil and Gaines says all the parts came from Rod.

He's very deferential in the most very respectful way. We added occasional additions, but as Marinelli himself says, we just stylized what Rod did. They both, as the main people making the music underlying this song, underlying Michael's voice, and of course he will get his own flowers separately on this episode. They full credit to what was on the demo, just being faithfully reproduced. And so that's a big part of how this song got made. So because Rod wrote so much of this song, what do the splits look like? Is it like the Martin Gore example where it's like 100%?

I can't imagine that's the case with Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones in the room. 100%. Rodney Lynn Temperton is the songwriting credit. Yeah, he is the sole writer of this song. He's also the sole writer of off the wall. But that's the publishing. I mean, obviously, I guess it would be the master recording. That would be a different kind of split, wouldn't it not?

So the way master and publishing works, in a real nutshell, is that the ownership of the song is the publishing. And so the ownership is 100% raw temperate. estate at this point since he passed on a few years ago. The master is a completely separate thing, right? That's owned by, I guess, Epic Records. That's its own, if you want to sample the record, you got to go to Rod Temperton, you got to go to Epic Records, whoever owns that now. As Michael Jackson goes, like, what is his percentage?

Like, he does get a percentage of the master. Michael makes a lot of money. Of course. But I'm curious, like, what percentage of the master does he make since he's not making publishing on Thriller? It is not a one-sentence answer. First of all, I don't know the nature of his confidence. But I can tell you, he didn't make a dime off of the publishing for the song Thriller.

He doesn't make any money off of the song thriller, except for, of course, the millions he made from the sales of the single because of the master and nature of his contract from that. And I'm sure the album sales, which include the song. So there's lots of ways he benefits from the song financially, but not in the songwriting credits and not in the publishing royalties. I got it. All right. We've waited so long. We want to get into the stems. where do you want to start?

This is interesting. We usually start with drums because we kind of build from the ground up. But this is like a cinematic song and it's got all these effects and things. So let's talk about that the way the song starts

with all these intro effects. Yes. Another unsung here. There's a lot of people that made this song. What it is. So one of them is the engineer Bruce Svidian,

who for the wolf sounds, apparently brought in his great Dane, but it didn't work out. The dog was not interested. So apparently it's Michael who's making these sounds. That's Michael Jackson. And you know what you? You can kind of hear the bump.

It sounds like it is like, you know, somebody wearing headphones, not a dog. So that does, it does pan out. It does make sense that he'd be making these like, ooh, pretty impressive wolf sounds, Mike. It's a very dynamic range. Now that sounds like a dog. I do believe they use like a sound effects, like record or something, BBC sound effects record. So there's also a door slamming and opening and closing. Absolutely.

That's a big, that starts the song. So what's crazy about that? Oh, did you want to say something? No, I mean, that to me is the opening of the song. It's as iconic as the rest of the song. This sound took one day. Apparently, I was reading an interview with Svidian who talks about how he rented a bunch of creaking doors

from the universal lot and then spent a day just recording them opening and closing to get that perfect opening sound and shutting sound because the song ends with it shutting. Let's hear how it ends. Okay, that's worth it. I mean, I believe it or not, All these sound familiar because when you heard the song 100 million times, these sounds stand out.

Right. And aside from that barking dog possibly, you know, it is important. They wanted to make new sounds and not just like recreate stuff off of records off of like classic 60s, corny sound effects records. Yeah, you heard a million times. Exactly. So there's also this intro sound of a falling synth, which is apparently the one musical contribution that Michael made himself is he apparently pushed the button on the ARP 2600. to make this falling sound here. And then you've got the organ that's being played by Greg Philan Gang, so we'll get you in a minute. So there's all these effects that start the song

and are kind of interspersed throughout. But now let's start with the real backbone of the song, and that's that drum machine. This is a lindrum, L.M2, and it sounds a little like this. Sounds like Happy Birthday by Stevie Wonder. I hear that, yeah. I mean, this lindrum is on.

We've talked about the lindrum on several episodes. This is Prince's main man. Now, by the way, it should be said, going back to Anthony Marinelli, again, if you're as much of a music nerd as we are, I really highly recommend for this record, especially, it's the deepest dive. It's hours and hours of content. And he talks about how this Lind drum, he opened up the guts of it

with drum machines back in the day to get different sounds in the pre-software era. You had to go in and rip off the chips, and you could put new sounds in. So he actually took an 808 clap, and that's what you're hearing. There's a clap on beat four. he found that from an 808 and he soldered it in and he got a snare and a high hat from the

LM1. So he's doing all this stuff that in 1982, like you need a guy like this to know how to do it and to be able to do it to make these sounds exist. So this is a hybrid drum machine, pretty special thing. And that's pretty much going through the entire track. That drumbeat is pretty much laying the foundation. The story of the song being written, we mentioned Rod Temperton, so he's got his drum machine over in Germany. The next thing he did on top of the drumbeat was coming up with a baseline. So he tells the story. I came up with the core baseline that runs through the piece. And then I started building chords on top to grow the tune to its climax. I wanted to build and build like a stretching elastic band throughout the tune to heightened suspense. So let's listen to that

baseline, which was written by Rod, but is played by someone else, the third unsung hero of this episode. And we'll talk about him right after this. That's the best part. It was interesting. I don't know that I knew that very last sort of cha-cha-cha hit. Yeah. Because you're too busy listening to the... It's like meringue. I just saw as... I didn't know the bah. I didn't know that part. I didn't know that part. That's so funny. It's like this little Latin dance. I imagine Bugs Bunny doing his little cha-cha-cha dance to this. Yeah, exactly. So that underlies the entirety of this basically six-minute almost song. Let's talk a little bit about

Greg Philanagan's. His career begins when he meets a young man called Stevie Wonder, who was already at the peak of his career, I should say. Greg Philanagan's is a young keyboard player, and he lands in the studio and is a big part of songs in the Key of Life. And this is a career launching thing for him. And he ends up being Michael's music director and does a lot of work with him. So that bass is being played on an ARP 2600, which is an older kind of 70th, and they brought it in. It just got that. He dialed it in, he got the right sound. Just to drive the point home, we're still in an era where, synth sounds are not always appreciated

for their own sake. A lot of time people are using synths sometimes in the avant-garde and kind of the more artsy music and certainly in synth-pop. There's something exciting about new sounds that don't exist. But a lot of musicians are just trying to get it to replicate other... An actual piano or something. Yeah, totally.

So they are trying to get it to sound like a bass guitar a little bit. That is part of the intense. And growing up, I definitely thought it was a bass guitar. Yeah. It does have that feeling to it. But it's a, that is in fact, the ARP 2600... It felt a little plucked. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it has a little pluckiness to it.

You're right. All right. How about the synths? Because to me, the synths are like a major part of this song. It's nothing but synths and horns and vocals. Yeah, this is a big thing. So, Marinelli talks about, this is really interesting I thought. He talks about how he worked with Michael to get some of the sounds that he then dialed in for Greg Philingains to then play on the keyboards.

So what they did, he tells the story that before, I think we might have been the night before they were recording. Marinelli was listening, was with Michael listening to records. So they were putting on Prince records, they were putting on the time, and they were listening for the sounds that were used. And then Michael would raise his hand and go, I wanted to sound like that. I wanted to sound like that. So Greg Philan Gaines is playing all of the synths that we hear on this song. Props to Greg. He's playing the roads.

We love what you did on this song. Playing the bass line. Stop it. Do you think he knew how iconic and huge and epic and all that stuff that what he just played was? Because it sounds almost modest. Right. It is modest. that one layer of roads.

Now this is stacked and I'm going to play some more of those stacks. So let's add some drama. Stacks are so important. We haven't said that once this episode. The stacks from the vocals to the sense to everything.

The stacks are huge in this song. To me that is the Quincy of it all. Knowing how many stacks, is it three layers? Is it eight layers? We've got to talk about the stacks. Because we have a turnaround right at the end of the chorus

and we have a bridge. But the rest of the song is a two bar groove on a single, vamping on basically two chords. but one baseline the whole time. So all of the variation and variety is happening in the vocal, the melody, and these synths and these sounds

that are swirling in and out with little varieties. Quincy was too jazzy and it turned out, no, no. It took a jazz brain to freaking stack this record the way that we know it today. And wait until we get to the vocals. They're coming, guys, they're coming. Hang in there.

I want to hear some of these synth stacks. The jazz will be jazzing in a moment. All right. I feel like Sylvester. I'm trying to say that. So let me just talk about this stack. This includes for sure a Jupiter 8, there's a prophet five, and there's probably a Yamaha CS80, and a Sinclaver.

Some people thought that I said Sinclavia wrong. Some people say Sinclaver in America, and some people say Sinclaviour in Europe. You know what? We're going to say Sinclaver on this episode. I'm fully Sinclaver. Fully Sinclaviour, but go ahead. That's in the mix, too. Let's hear all of these layers.

Let's hear the Sinclaver next. It's this organ sound. And don't worry, I'll play that in the stack that we all want to hear in a second. but one more isolated pad and then you'll hear how it all comes together. And you know, one cute thing I heard from the Marinelli podcast is that I think, because Greg Philan Gaines is performing that with two hands, so he has no fingers left to make that filter sweep go whee, how the sound changes. So I think Marinelli reached over him in the recording and sort of is fiddling with some of the knobs.

It's very cute. And now let's hear the stack. It almost feels weird and wrong for us to not then come in with. the bass. Yeah. Well, let's bring in the bass. Wonderful. That's wonderful stuff. It's wonderful, wonderful stuff. The synths in the verse are fairly straightforward. I'll play you a little bit of that. And this is all layered, so you can hear all of the different takes that Phil and Gaines has done on the different machines. Just lots of long legato pads are happening for the most part during the verses. One of my favorite parts is what the sense are doing under,

My creatures crawl in the dance. Can you play a something from that section? Gritch is calling the dance start to walkeret. We'll get more vocals later, don't worry. That was just a little tease. A little tease of the vocals on their way. That bridge is the only like harmonically rich, complicated section. We had to go somewhere right in the middle of the song because the other, the three minutes on either side are just the vamp, vamp, vamp.

But it's so good. It's so good. It's so jazz. That was very jazz. It's so show tunes and jazz. And when we get into the vocal stack, it's the jazz. It's the jazz music. It's also R&B.

Listen, Quincy says he's like, we have to do something that sounds post-disco, and they absolutely accomplished it. I mean, like, after this, there's no going back to, you know, the sounds of chic. Even now Rogers is not doing chic anymore, you know? No one's looking for a single word

that describes everything, but, like, the gospel is in there. The jazz is in there. A lot of Broadway musicalities sort of derived from that. I would argue that beat is still kind of disco. It's not like they did a clean, like, it's not the, it's not the, black version of the knack, you know, doing my Sharona.

Yeah. But he definitely, I think he accomplishes this is going to be the sound of the new decade. Right. So one fun thing that Michael did add to the process, I'll just give one last example of why I've taken such pleasure in Anthony Marinelli's podcast, because there was this wonderfully long process of getting to the bottom of, where did that frog sound come from? And we all know the frog sound, and if you don't, there's this frogy sound that. that is especially clear towards the end.

I will play for you now. I know what this is. I'll play it in the mix. So wonderfully throughout some of the episodes on his show, they were trying to nail down, where did the sound come from? Somebody had a memory that Michael was in the studio playing with a little Cassio,

like a little kid's toy, and they finally were able to track it down, and I found the moment where they discovered, here it is. It's not Frogger, is it? That's it, man. Let me hear it. There you go.

You can hear it well. It's a video game sound. What video game is it? It's not a video game. It's a Casio MT60. Oh my gosh. It's preset 13, but it's this little like $50, you know, kids, kids toy from back in the 80s. Can we hear it again?

Can I just hear it again? It's so perfect, though. It adds a sort of ominous layer. It's ominous in this context, but I argue you put that in another song. That just sounds like some 80s goofiness. It's a little bit similar. But now you know that it's a frog from a kid's toy. You'll never be able to hear that Cassio sound ever again.

Let's hear a little bit of the guitar stems. This is David Williams on guitar. Now you have heard David Williams' guitar part. By the way, what a cool, funky guitarist. By the way, he had his own career. We haven't said a whole bunch about him. But, like, you know, he was a guitarist and a singer and a producer. But he was one of these session guitarists who gets used a lot.

And damn, that is a funky guitar. That's a funky guitar. And that's all he's doing throughout the track. God bless him, he did it right. Yeah. As we said about Ringo, sometimes you can do too much and it's unusable. I'm going to build it towards the end in this last sort of two minutes where the outro is and the Vincent Price of it all is. He's playing that and I'll build in some of the other elements one at a time.

So you can hear how all of these parts, there's so many things that are interweaving. Let it keep right. right. Love it. Happy Halloween, everybody. One song, Thriller. We're getting into it. Bring in the drums. In the second half of that, it gets a little more intense. We have the theremin coming. That's a theremin? Oh, thank God. It's a theremin sound. It's not an actual theremin. I thought the theorem is so famous for like how it looks what it's being played and all that kind of stuff. But you rarely hear it on any song of note, but I didn't know it was on Thriller. I didn't know that was. It's not a pheromine, literally.

It's a pheromans sound being used by one of those scents that I mentioned. But I just love how that stack has so much going on. And when you break down all the little elements, like this little wubble, here's the plucky thing by itself. So I play the guitar by itself. Here's the little plucky thing. Remember we talked about funky pockets on the Stevie Wonder? Right?

On its own, that sounds kind of crazy. But listen to the beat. Suddenly it makes sense when you have that groove underneath it. It's important to point out. David Williams is he's responsible for the, minimalist solo that famously anchors Billy Jean and so many of these songs. So, like, we've got to give David his props. He's on Bad, Dirty Diana, smooth criminals, so many songs.

There's a reason why Quincy keeps bringing him back. Absolutely. Quincy ain't bringing back no slouch. He brings it. Just a couple more really quick, fun sounds and then the horn. So here is what I have labeled the whoop-wop-wop, which is happening on the mini-mog. That's a little fun moment, too, by the way. It is fun. I just like that.

Bapababababab. Yeah. Yeah, it's got its own melody. It's satisfying on its own. I love that. Speaking of bub-b-b-da-ba. Should we hear those horns? Yeah, let's go to the horns.

All right. Because the horns, I've long said that the last great decade of saxophone on pop records is the 80s. There's a great horn section here. I think there's a fluegel horn. There's a trumpet. Tell us more about these horns. that's what I found too. We got this horn arrangement is by Jerry Hay and him and Gary Grant are on trumpet and flugelhorn along with Larry Williams' saxophone and flute, which I don't hear a flute in here, but I guess it's credited. And then Bill Reichenbach is credited on trombone. I heard that the horn section on these sessions is also the horn section on Ducktails, the theme song to the cartoon. I love that. I love that. And let's hear some of the brass parts, which really,

make the entire thing come to life, especially all those synth sounds get this added dimension when the brass is added to the mix. Let's hear that crucial moment at the top of the song, where they come in at the top of that build. I love it when they fall. I'll get that to you in the stack. So they add a lot of brightness, right? Because there's a lot of sort of the synths are a little bit darker. And then there's these little punctuated moments like this. That's part of the genius of Temperton, arrangement of this song is that in his demo, he has added all of these little ideas to all these little pockets. So they're all in there and they're just being translated. I use the word just very loosely. They're being excellently and expertly translated by all these musicians.

But all of these little melodic ideas were actually right there in the demo. So there's a little spot where there isn't singing. Let's put some horns in there doing a little punctuated, syncopated thing. I'll play that again because I do love that part. Second chance against the big... In the bridge, we have more of a legato thing. I'll play it for you, and then I'll add some instruments back. It's a professional, my friend. It is jazz, right?

It's just like... It's Quincy Jones with his jazz arrangement history. And some pop... Film scoring history. ...disco sensibilities. This is a film that is a jazz musical, pop, rock, funk, disco, horror song. I think this is as good a point as any to bring... up the fact that this is actually the last single off of the album.

Seven singles. The first single is the worst song on the album. In my home opinion, it's the girl is mine. It did nothing. Billy Jean came out and really sold this album. That's the second single. The seventh single is thriller. That's crazy to me.

They were to sit on this later. And it's not even, it doesn't even come out at Halloween. Right before Halloween, they bring out pretty young thing. Because they're like, we got to really get, you know, that September money. But it's, you know, the song came out in November and the video came out in December, I want to say. Thriller. It's just, it speaks to this album that they were able to sit on this song as long as they did. And then it gave it a whole new life.

Like this song, I mean, this album, I should say, sits on the top of the church for something like 37 weeks. That's almost a whole year, you know. And this is at a time when people are buying records. The lifespan from first single to the last single leaving the charts, which was Thriller, is almost 18 months, which is unheard of a lifespan that long. That's a year and a half. To those who don't know that.

We could not do a episode about a Michael Jackson song without talking about his amazing vocals. Somebody has heard this song a million times. I was just like, holy smokes there. He's singing like five, six, sometimes eight different parts to like one note. So Blake, I will give him. you the floor, but can you play us some vocals from this song? Yeah, so I've got this beautiful harmony stack where there's about 14 voices.

And we're going to break it down. Let's listen to some of these most beautifully stacked harmonies that humans have ever heard. Okay, sure. So he doubles himself perfectly, by the way it should be. Yeah, I mean, the perfection in key is insane. Let's hear some jazzy extensions. Gella, della, cella. Oh, my God, it's so good.

All right, let's add another harmony to that, or a harmony to that. Gela, della, della, gela here tonight. Oh, my God. My music theory is not, I don't have perfect pitch, but that might have been like a tritone harmony. It's insane. Let's add another one. That was the low and the lead, and here's the mid. Gela, della, jella, della, della, here to night.

I mean, it makes sense. He used to sing in the Jackson 5. He used to have to like, you know, they said when he was on the set of The Wiz, he knew his lines, but he knew everybody else's lines. And I have to believe that in the Jackson 5, he knew his part, he knew Tito's part, he knew Marlins part, like he knew all the parts. And here he's just singing all of the parts through the studio magic of Quincy Jones at the board. Yes, it's insane. There's more to come. I know, there have more stacks.

Let's go. Here's the next one. There's actually four more. I'll just give them to all at once. So we can get to all 14 voices on the jazziest stack in a pop record, I think, perhaps ever made. Geller, della, chella, teller, here to nothing. Oh, my God. This is one of those moments.

This happens maybe not every episode, but certainly on a lot of them where we listen to something. And I just don't have anything to say because it just renders me speechless. What could you say? Can you play us just the low ones? Like, how about the four that were at the bottom that we didn't hear by themselves? Della, Della, Chela here tonight. Like, just the fact that he found that note, when I don't really hear that note in the mix, but I know that it's there because it helps create that perfect tonal quality.

To me, that's, I used to be in a duop group in college. And sometimes as an alto, they would give me a note to hit. And I'd be like, I just don't, where's that note coming from? But in his, I mean, he's been singing since he was a child. It just, you get the sense it's probably just second nature to him that he knows exactly what note. And he can break that. And between him and the people in the room, they can break that note into like eight parts, ten parts. Yeah.

And I wouldn't be surprised that part of it is sort of a back and forth with Phil and Gaines, kind of helping find the note. Because that does sort of help set up. His fingers are used to these spicy chords with like 9th and 11th and 13th and crazy stuff. Suspensions. Here's another note. Get a, della, jennah, Ben, yes.

You need that note to hit the note that we all hear in our ears, and yet you don't even know that that note is hiding in there. It's crazy. This is a talented man. Oh, my God, it's crazy. I could do this all day.

Can I hear my own personal favorite? Sure. One of my personal favorite. Yes, please. You close your eyes. I want to hear this. I want to hear how he builds this one. Let's hear a bunch of close your eyes.

You close your eyes. Let's build on the eyes. to close your eyes, right? Yeah. This one's lower actually next. So that was the mid. Here's the low. You close your eyes.

How many parts is that? Is that like three? We have two different notes being sung by four takes. Wow. So two takes per note. So he's doing two notes, but he's doubling each note. That's right. That's how we get to these high numbers.

And now here is, now this will be six Michael's singing three notes. All right, the Jackson six. You close your eyes. So smooth. So, so gorgeous. Can I hear his vocals on Nine Creatures crawling? Nine creatures calling the dead start to walk in their masquerade. Yeah.

This is the end of your life. This is the end of your life. I don't think I ever heard that line. This is the end of your life. And then, of course, this is the weekend. Oh! And then the horns do this. That's the jazziest death anyone's ever experienced.

If you got to go out, Death by Jazz. You got to go out Jazzy with the funk of 40,000 years. Death by Flugelhorn. I never knew he said night creatures. I thought he said nine creatures. So, you know, just. But, uh...

History's being unraveled. Um, I want to hear, um, you start to freeze. I want to hear that stack. You start to freeze. The way he holds that note is really important right now. He holds it. Just like straight. No, no wobbling.

Just like, eh. With this is important because when you're building these stacks, it would dis discus. disturb what your stacking would start to fall apart a little bit. So he just keeps it consistent and smooth. And then he adds this low one. I guess is it, you start to free. You start to free.

I can't do it. I can't do it. You start to freeze. Yes, I do. You start to freeze. Makes no sense by itself. But in that stack, it's perfect. You start to free.

Yes, a different note. And then there's a fourth note and then I'll play them all together. You start to freeze That's the one you kind of hear You're right, that is the lead That's the one you hear But it sounds better Because you start to freeze

You're right You know what that's actually You start to freeze And the you start to freeze You've got to hit all of them In the stack you're right There's actually four of those And there's only two harmony notes

I thought there was like a fourth harmony note But here's everything together You start to freeze Again you know It takes me back to the hollow notes episode. They started a duop bad. I think there's something about knowing the different parts that you can really make

those notes really freaking sugary sweet. I don't know how else to describe it. Jazz. I have no better word for it. Jazz. I know it's also gospel. I know it's also music. And blues and all those other wordful things. But those are killing me. Horror disco song. Can we hear a little bit

of just a verse? You can choose whichever verse. I just want to hear it. Because those stacks come in at a chosen point. They're not always there. Let's start from the top. It's close to midnight. Something evil's lurking in the door. That growl.

For your life inside of, can a thriller? I mean, with NoStack, it's a killer. It's a killer, performance. It doesn't even sound comp. That sounds like one take.

Oh, man. No, that just sounds like one take. Yeah. It might be conch and not positive. And then when he throws it, you try to scream. Yeah. Like, all of a sudden, you're like, oh, snap. Yeah.

No, it was interesting hearing that after we heard the stack because I could hear how him kind of having, singing the lead differently, differentiates it from the backing vocal. He's not trying to blend into the stack in that moment. When he does the, you try to breathe, even bending it down like that, dropping it down like that.

You know, the thing I like about our show is that when you actually take something, even seemingly untouchable classics, I imagine that he sang, you know, some form of a, you know, a couple of takes through the song and then went back and added in those stacks. Right. It just makes it seem like, you know, art, as wonderful it is, it's not, it actually isn't magic. It just takes time and practice. And it's iterative. And at some point, and at some point, and at some point, you add to what you add to it, you subtract, right?

And you know, Quincy says everybody goes in the studio thinking that at some point, they're creating the greatest album of all time. Yeah, you kind of have to have that delusion in order to You kind of have to think that. He says almost every single time you come out of that studio and it's not the greatest and you wonder why more people weren't, you know, didn't discover it, didn't listen it. But I love the fact that we're able to break down how these classics got made. Exactly. One other fact to what I love about this song, and we should play a little bit, is how Vincent Price ends up on this song.

Like basically, you know, there were these lyrics that were like written very last minute by a rod in the taxi on the way to the I love that story, yeah. Yeah. And he forgot he had a meeting that morning, and he promised that he would write them. And he was like, oh, damn, his meeting ran late, so he dashed them off in the cab. And Quincy's like, I need somebody noteworthy to say these crazy, like, horror-themed lyrics. And his wife at the time is Peggy Lipton, mother of Kadada and Rashida Jones. And she's basically like, I can get you Vincent Price, which is a good guy to get on the phone.

Perfect. And then Vincent Price does his part in two takes. His part used to scare me immensely as a kid. But he does two takes. And if you listen to this, we have some snippets of what he did. And you'll hear some lines that didn't make the final cut, but I think they're very fun. The demons squeal in sheer delight. It's you, they spy, so plump, so right.

For though the groove is hard to beat, yet still you stand with frozen feet. You try to run, you try to scream, but no more sun you'll ever see. I mean, like, there's so much. I would play the whole thing. But I also want to play the beginning where you can hear them talking to Vincent in the studio. Let's play a little bit of that. Okay, taste rolling. Anytime you run.

Hi, this is Michael Jackson. This is Vincent Price. Michael Jackson is. The thriller. Do we both say it? Say it together? I love it that they're just working this out in the booth. I'm going to play a little bit from the...

Is that Michael trying to sound scary? I think so. The thriller. Was that frightening enough? But apparently, like, legendarily, he kind of has a famously actually low voice. Yes, he doesn't talk like that in regular life. So why isn't he employing right now? But I think it's the same way, like, you didn't roll up in the studio wearing sweatpants, you know, as so many wood.

He has to be Michael Jackson. All the time. Let's listen to the very end of it. I love it. It's camp. He's got his fingers up here the whole time like twirling his mustache. Like a cartoon going to. And I think you have a hot take.

What were you going to say? Well, no, just when he said like the can you dig it. They should have left that in. They should have left that in. Maybe it was an issue with the warriors. I don't know. I think that really, the campiness just goes over the top of that point. That's just like clearly.

Guys, it's not a common. track. Very unsurious at this point. Dastardly devil that he is. Such a historic day in the studio. I'm so glad that we had these parts. Yeah, well, so famously Vincent, he goes on Johnny Carson, and he talks about like how much money he got paid. So apparently he was given a choice

between either $20,000 up front, or you can get a percentage on the album thriller. Oh no, and what did you choose? He took the 20K. According to legend, according to these interviews. And so he goes on the tonight show and Carson says he could have made millions out of royalties and

Price goes, I can't do his voice. It's only how well I know. His campy deep voice. He had such a crazy accent considering the man is from St. Louis, Missouri. But that was the era where everyone was talking in that mid-Atlantic, whatever, movie voice.

Yes, absolutely. But he always seemed to, I feel like he walks around the world talking with reverb on himself too. You know what? I actually have him without reverb. You want to just hear a little bit of that? Yes, I'd like to hear it. He still sounds spooky, but a little bit less so. The foulest stenches in the air, the funk of 40,000 years,

and grisly ghouls from every tomb are closing in to seal your doom. Okay, that's still creepy. I take it back. No, no, that man, he's no reverb to scare me. We've been talking about the music video for Thriller. Perhaps the most famous music video of all time. I mean, it really is a short film. It clocks in at 14 minutes. It was directed by John Lannis, who, listen, I know about the Twilight Zone movie,

I get it, but when you think about this man did the Blues Brothers. He does... American Roller London. He does coming to America, which is arguably one of my... It might be my favorite comp, just straight up comedy of all time, not counting Pew's Big Adventure. So John Lannis was just having a run. It was the most expensive video at the time that it was made.

The production value was incredible. The wardrobe, the iconic red jacket, the zombie dance. I mean, to this day, the choreography of the zombie dance has done all around the world, just put choreography and music videos on a different level. Michael turning into that wear cat, not to be confused with a werewolf. His transformation was the height of special effects, movie special effects at the time. Actually, I have a fun story associated with, so this 14 minute video, right? So back in the day, the song is only five and a half minutes long, so they needed 12 more

minutes of music to sort of pat out the video. They needed basically the multi-track stems which we now have. At the time, though, Quincy, for whatever reason, wasn't letting land. the director get access to them. So he tells this story. Michael and I went to the recording studio at three in the morning. We walked past the guard. Hi, Michael.

Hi. Hi. And they put the tracks in a big suitcase and walked out with them, drove across Hollywood, duped them, and then drove them back again. So they snuck into the studio to get the master tapes. So they could extend it. I mean, the impact of that music video can't really be overstated. I mean, like, a couple of things.

One, music videos is film. We've stated that. Two, MTV wasn't playing a lot of black artists at the time. Rick James famously begged them to play Super Freak, and they were a little bit reticent to play it. But after Michael Jackson's thriller, not only does it open the door for, you know, a lot more black artists, but also one can make the case of many have that MTV and Michael Jackson sort of rose together.

And that because he brought this, you know, this song and this team that was like cinematic, it brought some artistic seriousness to MTV as well. But there's also a conscious effort to cross over. We mentioned before, like, having Eddie Van Halen on Beat It, there was a conscious effort to have more... Yeah, he was like... He was like... So you guys like guitars, huh?

All right, I'll put some guitars on my record. Right. Absolutely. All right, Diel, as we wrap up this episode, what is the legacy in your opinion of Michael Jackson's thriller? We want to make it clear. Michael is a musical genius, even outside of just being the guy who sings the song. He's in some ways telling his producer, you know,

hey, I want it produced like this, and I want it to sound like that. And I think that that's an important thing to point out. I totally agree with you. And in some sense, one of the things that the story of the song, when we get this deep into it, I hope translates to other people, is that the mystery of creativity, I think sometimes we overly ascribe this kind of like total creative genius that came from a single person's brain and nobody else was a part of it.

Michael's genius, Quincy's genius, Rod's genius, Marinelli's genius, all of these people participated in making this final product, which required, it'd be like pulling apart a movie and saying this is one person's movie. There's no such thing as one person's movie. And sometimes you're like, every now and then somebody's like, oh, that movie was written by so and so. But I do think it's important to say that even though Quincy's job title as producer,

Michael Jackson's title as performer, Rod is songwriter. These guys are all sort of like stepping into each other's shoes a little bit to help push it towards this thing. Absolutely. It's a collaborative effort. It's overlap, but it's a team effort. Once you're in the studio, like your job title,

it doesn't go away by any means. but like especially with these truly classic albums and truly classic performers, everybody's sort of like pushing each other to do something that they haven't done with their other stuff. Because Quincy Jones produces a lot of R&B albums. And Rob Timberton writes for a lot of people. And very few things come together quite the way the thriller came together. Perfectly put. I mean, I don't think it can really be overstated.

It's a song that has its own holiday in ways that, I mean, like, there are a lot of songs about Halloween. But I would argue that this is the song that sort of owns Halloween. If you do a Halloween party as a DJ, and I know this, and you don't play thriller, you will get some angry looks. No shade on Monster Mouse, but this is the one. No shade on the monster match. This is the one. Yeah. No shade on some of the songs that have come since.

I mean, look, this is Halloween from the night before Christmas. Okay. This is Halloween. This is Halloween. Fucking scream in the middle of us. This is Halloween. Everybody makes me. There's Dead Man's Party by Oingo Boinga.

There's Pose to Death by the Faint. I mean, like, there's so many. I would argue that Love Cats by the Cure and a lot of songs by The Cure often get played at Halloween parties nowadays. I can say this as a DJ who basically made his living trying to, you know, get a couple of hundred dollars for doing parties. But there is no song quite like Thriller, which, again, technically has nothing to do with Halloween. There are few songs like Thriller that can, you can say, own, their holiday. And I think that's one of the legacies. I also think, obviously, the legacy.

This is the title song off of the biggest album of all time. It is a song that helps put a nail, no put in the coffin of the R&B of the 70s, and it is the music video that open up MTV to black music

in a whole new way. First music video in the Library of Congress, actually. Yeah, 2009. Not surprising. Not surprising, yeah. Okay, luxury. It's time for one more song. This is a segment where we share a deep cut or a hidden gym with you, the One Song Nation, and with each other sometimes for the first time. Do you want to go first? Sure.

I mean, look, one of my favorite Quincy Jones songs is actually on his solo record. This is called the album is called The Dude, and this is the lead off track. Love the dude. The song is called I Know Carita, and I love this song so much. So Quincy Jones. It's so Quincy Jones. Lewis Johnson on bass. I think that's Charles May singing one of my favorite songs of all time.

What about you, Mr. D.L. Today, my one more song is from a band that really turned me on to a new type of sound in my early 20s. It's a Mission of Burma, and this song is called Academy Fight Song. Wow. It's one of those bands that I just love that I feel like still don't get enough shine outside of our music nerd circles. Yeah, no man is Roger Miller. As always, if you have a song for one more song, you can find us on Instagram and TikTok. You can find me on Instagram at Diallo and on TikTok at Diallo Riddalrydle.

And you can find me on Instagram at Luck. luxury L-U-X-X-U-X-U-R-Y and on TikTok at LuxuryXX. You can also watch full episodes of one song on YouTube right now. Just search one-song podcast. We'd love it if you hit like and subscribe. And if you made it this far, I think it means you like the podcast. So please don't forget to give us five stars. Leave a review.

And please share it with someone that you think might like the show. It really helps keep the show going. Luxury, help us in this thing. I'm producer, DJ, songwriter, and musicologist, Luxury. And I'm actor, writer, director, and sometimes DJ, Diallo And this is One Song. We will see you next week.