Boing Boing Staging

Hear Michael Jackson's demo for "Thriller," called "Starlight"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_kimWJ7128


It reminds me of that disorienting sensation when you hear a very familiar song in a TV commercial but the lyrics were changed to talk about the product. From Wikipedia:


“Thriller” was written by Rod Temperton, and produced by Quincy Jones. Written by Rod Temperton; an inspiration was the Jacksons hit, “This Place Hotel”. Early titles include “Starlight”, “Starlight Sun” and “Give Me Some Starlight”. The title was changed to ‘Thriller’ after Michael told Temperton he wanted something that would appeal to kids. While still titled “Starlight”, the song’s hook lyrics were “Give me some starlight! Starlight sun…”, but after the song was changed to “Thriller” the hook was rewritten to “‘Cause this is thriller! Thriller night…”. Temperton commented:


“Originally, when I did my Thriller demo, I called it Starlight. Quincy said to me, ‘You managed to come up with a title for the last album, see what you can do for this album.’ I said, ‘Oh great,’ so I went back to the hotel, wrote two or three hundred titles, and came up with the title ‘Midnight Man’. The next morning, I woke up, and I just said this word… Something in my head just said, this is the title. You could visualize it on the top of the Billboard charts. You could see the merchandising for this one word, how it jumped off the page as ‘Thriller’.”

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