Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series.
Michael Jackson’s early solo albums for Motown tend to be a little overshadowed by the Jackson 5’s concurrent hit parade and his later blockbuster albums for Epic. Those four albums contain some remarkable performances by a singular vocalist, though, sometimes covering hits of the day and sometimes getting top shelf material from Motown’s legendary stable of songwriters. Jackson even took on slightly more mature material from Willie Hutch or Leon Ware, journeyman Motown songwriters who’d develop cult followings as solo artists.
Dallas native William McKinley Hutchison got his first big break in the music industry penning the lyrics for the Jackson 5’s 1970 chart topper “I’ll Be There.” Two years later, he wrote a song for Got to Be There, the solo debut by Michael Jackson, then 13 years old. “Girl Don’t Take Your Love from Me” has the kind of lavish instrumentation and yearning surges of emotion that would become signatures of Willie Hutch’s solo albums for Motown, particularly his soundtracks for the blaxploitation classics Foxy Brown and The Mack. Later in 1972, the Jackson 5 released Lookin’ Through the Windows, which closes with Michael Jackson singing another Willie Hutch composition, “I Can Only Give You Love.”
Willie Hutch’s solo work never sold in huge numbers, and he died in 2005. But his music, particularly The Mack’s soundtrack, has been heavily sampled by multiple generations of hip-hop producers. “Girl Don’t Take Your Love Away from Me” has been chopped up and looped by respected beatmakers like 9th Wonder on 2019’s “NoNoNoSoul!!!!” and Jake One on 2008’s “Home.”
Three more essential Michael Jackson deep cuts:
“The Lady in My Life”
Thriller’s seven Top Ten singles represent just one of the album’s many record-breaking achievements, and the Rod Temperton-penned ballad “The Lady in My Life” is one of the only two songs on the album that weren’t released as singles. The song still indirectly made it to No. 3 on the Hot 100 a decade later, when it was sampled on LL Cool J and Boyz II Men’s “Hey Lover.”
“Speed Demon”
“Speed Demon” may have been my first favorite deep cut when I heard it on my brother’s Bad cassette when I was 6.
“Morphine”
The self-produced “Morphine” was the most exciting and forward-thinking of the five new songs Jackson included in his 1997 remix album Blood on the Dance Floor: HIStory in the Mix.
