Human Nature

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I am by no means the only one whose favorite Michael Jackson song is Human Nature! This amazing song is from the bestselling album of all time: Michael Jackson's Thriller. Steve Porcaro (from Toto) wrote the music and the haunting lyrics of the chorus ("Why? Why? Tell 'em that it's human nature"). John Bettis wrote the rest of the lyrics, creating the song’s story. David Paich, Steve Porcaro, and Steve Lukather (all from Toto) provided the synthesizer parts that give the song its hypnotic, ethereal aura. Michael Jackson perfectly complemented the instrumental arrangement with his airy, playful, deeply feeling singing style. My version here brings a sensual quality to the singing.

Human Nature paints a picture of a city at night ("electric eyes are everywhere") and of a man who is normally trapped inside (by "four walls"), who yearns for human connection ("I'm dreaming of the street") — and who, in spite of people questioning and misunderstanding him ("Why does he do it that way?"), finds that connection in the end, when he tells of being back in his room at morning's arrival, with a new friend ("reaching out, I touch her shoulder").

A song's journey from the attic to the bestselling album of all time. Human Nature is an amazing song that was heading towards ending up in a box in an attic, unreleased. Here is the extraordinary story of how it instead ended up on the bestselling album of all time!

Toto member, Steve Porcaro, created the first demo of his song, Human Nature, which included most of the music, and the striking lyrics of the chorus: "Why? Why? Tell 'em that it's human nature." You can here that original demo version here. The lyrics were very incomplete, so in this demo, Steve keeps repeating the "filler" lyrics he had written. Steve was Toto's "synthesizer" guy, creating the synth arrangements on megahits like Africa. He did write songs too, with one or more of his songs being included on each of Toto's first six albums — but David Paich was Toto's primary songwriter. So when Steve offered his new song to his group, they declined to use it, feeling it was too soft rock, and didn't mesh with the stadium rock style the band was known for.

So Steve stashed away his demo tape. It might very well have lain in a box for years, but for an amazing sequence of events!

Michael Jackson and legendary producer Quincy Jones were just finishing up the Thriller album. They felt the album would be perfect with just one more song, a mid-speed ballad. So Quincy went out hunting for just such a song.

Toto's personnel doubled as master session musicians. (For example, Steve Lukather did the electric guitar solo on another song I recently covered: the 1986 hit song, Somewhere Out There.) They already had been assisting with the instrumental arrangements on many of the tracks of Thriller. And at the time, Toto was also a very hot band with a string of huge hits. So not surprisingly, one of the first directions Quincy turned to was Toto's primary songwriter, David Paich. He sent word that David should send him any demos of ballads he had in the works. David had a couple of songs in progress, but was away on business in Europe. So he asked bandmate Steve Porcaro to put his two "in progress" songs on a tape for Quincy.

As it turned out, the only available audio cassette Steve had contained a copy of his Human Nature demo. So he turned the cassette over, recorded David's demos on the other side, marked that side, "David's Things", and sent the tape on over to Quincy. Quincy listened to David's two songs, but neither really moved him. So he turned his attention elsewhere, forgetting to turn off the tape player.

As luck (or fate) would have it, his player had an auto-reverse capability. So when the tape reached the end of the first side, the player automatically reversed the tape and started playing the other side. When Quincy started hearing those words, "Why? Why?", a thrill went through him. "Your soul responds to that!" was the way he described his reaction. "I get goose bumps just talking about it. I said, ‘What the hell is that? This is where we wanna go, because it's got such a wonderful flavour'.” He called David Paich saying, "I need that Why Why song!!!" It took half an hour before David realized Quincy must have been listening to Steve's Human Nature demo, and was able communicate that back to Quincy (who had thought the song was David's).

Once Steve Porcaro had given Quincy permission to use the song, Quincy asked Steve if he could finish the lyrics. Steve did finish them, but his strength was in his music not his lyrics. Steve himself continues the story.

"As much as Quincy loved the chorus, he was underwhelmed with my verses for a very good reason. . . they were horrible. He asked if I would mind letting a lyricist named John Bettis [who had worked with Quincy previously, writing a Donna Summer song, The Woman in Me, that Quincy produced] take a shot at the verses, which I agreed to. John just knocked it out of the park. His very first draft that he presented to me is what you hear on the record. John turned my tune into a song! He did change my title, ‘Human Nature’, but Quincy wanted to keep it. Michael, Quincy and Bruce, my brother Jeff, Steve Lukather, David Paich and Michael Boddicker turned it into a record. Talk about a fluke.”

Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson, and Steve Porcaro working on Human Nature

When the time came for Michael to record his vocals, Steve Porcaro was present to assist him. It is a session he will never forget. “I was standing next to him in the vocal booth, feeding him lines and guiding him”, Steve recalls. “He pretty much did that in one take, apart from a couple of little things. Michael barely knew the words or melody but he nailed it. And he improvised, the high ad lib parts [improvised lines] he sang were all him, that wasn’t written in beforehand."

And so that is how Human Nature was rescued from the dustbins of history, and placed on the bestselling album of all time (where some of us found it to be the album's best song).

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Michael Jackson loved the music of the song, saying: "Human Nature was the song the Toto guys brought to Quincy, and he and I both agreed that the song had the prettiest melody we'd heard in a long time, even more than 'Africa'. It's music with wings."

To learn more about the song's background, another wonderful listen is this recording of Michael Jackson's first take on the song as he was still learning it, and the songwriters were still adjusting it to fit him. (It's in a lower key, a third down from the released version, because they were using the same key as Steve Porcaro's original demo. Presumably at some point, they decided a higher key a third up better suited Michael's voice.)

More on the lyrics. When Quincy Jones asked John Bettis to finish the lyrics for the song, John, who had gotten his start writing hits for the Carpenters, had an insight that there was an emotional similarity between Karen Carpenter and Michael Jackson — his insight (I believe, correct) was that they both started performing very young, and ended up missing a few steps in their emotional development.

So John based the song’s story on that: it is the story of a man who has been trapped in the “four walls” of a studio all his life, but who, all the while, had been longing for real human connection. He used the metaphor of a man in a hotel room of a big city, dreaming of being out on the street, as a metaphor for Michael Jackson's dilemma. And one line — hard to make out, because it was (deliberately) buried beneath vocal layering — was the key to that understanding of the song: ”She's keeping him by keeping him around”. In the song's story, this might sound like the guy is perhaps in a relationship that he wants to get out of, but by never letting him experience the outside world and anyone other than her, the woman he is in relationship with keeps him in the relationship with her. In actuality, the line is metaphorical: his profession — and all who were enabling it — were unintentionally keeping him in an enforced isolation that had the effect of never allowing him to experience the outside world and real human relationships — perhaps out of fear that, if he took some time off, he might enjoy it so much that he'd never return.

And so that was John’s way of painting the picture of Michael Jackson being trapped by his career in enforced isolation. John would later confess that it was completely audacious to offer Michael Jackson a song that presumed so much about him personally and would be such an intimate revelation if he went ahead and sang the song. But Michael absolutely loved it, even asking John (after he heard the song with John's new lyrics) how it came to be that he wrote a song for Michael that was so on the mark. So John told him his insight about Karen Carpenter and Michael, which Michael agreed with.

John adds to this: "Through the lyrics of the song, I took the liberty of kind of offering [Michael] a piece of advice subtly. I thought Michael should actually go do what the song said to do. I think that would have been fun, first of all, fun for him, and secondly, it's very hard for someone in Michael's world to have the kind of personal freedom to be yourself and explore life and make connections with people and explore relationships. It can be damnably hard when you're a superstar at that level to have genuine human contact. So I was kind of giving him an allegory he could live."

As John tells it, "When I heard much later that it was one of the favorite songs Michael had ever recorded, I always feel gratitude for that." Writing this song for Michael was also John's way of making up to Karen Carpenter for never having talked to her about this before her tragic death a year earlier.

Finally, John adds this personal note, referring to his being present for part of the day when Human Nature was being recorded: "I remember hearing Michael's vocal early on and being struck by how he had made it his own. Not that he found himself in it — I wasn't surprised that he did that. But I was surprised about how he did it, and it's hard to put that into words. There was a certain sense of a young stallion kicking at the walls of a stall. There was a certain strain at restraints to it. First of all, it was complimentary that he put that kind of artistic expression into it, but also he did such a damn good job at it. It was a very virile reading of that lyric, a very masculine reading, and that was very moving to me. There was a masculinity to that delivery that I was proud of him for finding and proud of me for writing. It was all there on the drawing board, I mean, the wheels were right there where they should be but he drove the car differently and brilliantly. He made it his own."

The Why Why song. Human Nature is unique lyrically in having that powerful, heart-wrenching "Why? Why?" in its chorus — that's the heart of the song, and that's the reason why Quincy Jones referred to it as "the Why Why song."

Steve Porcaro tells where the "Why Why" lyric came from. His daughter came home from school, totally distraught because a boy had pushed her off a slide. The experience shocked her, and so she kept asking her father, "Why? Why? Why did he do that to me?!" Steve told his daughter, "it's human nature", and suggested that, strange as it might sound, the boy probably liked her, and that was his weird way of expressing it to her. Steve was immediately moved to translate the whole interchange into song, and so that was the birth of Human Nature.

When John Bettis completed the lyrics, he had no idea of the story behind Steve's "Why? Why?" lyrics. So he came up with a completely different story for the song verses, to accompany those "Why?" questions in the chorus.

And when most other people listen to the song, they aren't aware of either Steve Porcaro's story or John Bettis's story. They just hear those heart-wrenching "Why?"s, and are moved by them, just the way Quincy Jones was, even before there were any other lyrics. That's the power of the song and why Quincy said, "Your soul responds to that!": every soul has deep "Why?" questions that it asks — at some time during life's passage — and so this song has a universal resonance, that gives voice to all those "Why?"s, no matter what the particular story accompanying them might be.

Even more on the lyrics. The first verse begins with a description of the city:

Looking out
Across the nighttime
The city winks a sleepless eye
Hear her voice
Shake my window
Sweet seducing sighs

If this town
Is just an apple
Then let me take a bite

Of course this is a reference to New York City, "the Big Apple". But, in the context of the song's story, it can also have further meanings: the Garden of Eden, sexual knowledge, etc.

Why does he do it that way?

This is spoken from the viewpoint of the people enforcing the man's isolation: they are questioning his desires to be free, to make real human connections, etc., making him doubt his own human desires.

Why does he do me that way?

This is from the viewpoint of the guy under enforced isolation: why are they doing this to me?

Electric eyes are everywhere.

This line has a double meaning: the street lights, sign lights, etc. that are everywhere in a big city; and the people of the street, each of whom has "electric eyes" from the viewpoint of someone longing to make human contact (including eye contact), and feeling a spark every time he does. Some have even suggested another meaning: cameras everywhere, taking pictures of Michael Jackson, the celebrity — but I doubt this interpretation was intended, because it doesn't fit the rest of the song, which is about him roaming the city, unrecognized, and enjoying himself, free of the fetters of superstardom.

Music. Apart from quite a bit of vocal playfulness here and there (this song invites it!), the main musical element I added in my version was the "third-up" harmony line in the chorus, from the second repeat of the chorus onward. Originally, I had no thought of adding anything musically — the song was already perfect! — until I happened to hear Miles Davis's version, where the addition of the third-up harmony for part of the chorus really struck my ear, and I liked it so much that I considered integrating it into my cover. Then when I heard the Glee cast go all the way with the third-up harmony in their cover, that sealed the deal.

Cover design. The song refers to New York City ("if this town is just an apple"), to "electric eyes everywhere" (bright lights, bright signs), and is all about connecting with real people. It struck me that no single location communicates all that better than Times Square at night. So the cover design is an artsy version of that.