In news that can only be described as a thriller, new tracks from the late King of Pop Michael Jackson have been discovered in a storage unit. On the tapes that were found are a dozen tracks that have never been made available publicly…and may never be.
The Michael Jackson songs are said to have been recorded between 1989 and 1991, which would put them between Bad and Dangerous. Of note here is that the unit in which the tapes were found once belonged to music producer and songwriter Bryan Loren, who collaborated with Jackson around this time. The most memorable song here is undoubtedly The Simpsons hit “Do the Bartman”. So if we could get audio of Michael Jackson singing “Can I Borrow a Feeling?” or “We Do”, that’d be great…While that’s unlikely, there is a song that apparently features Jackson rapping on a duet with LL Cool J.
The man who ended up with the unit, a former California highway patrolman named Gregg Musgrove, said of the Michael Jackson tapes, “I’ve gone to all the fan sites. Some of them [the songs] are rumored to exist, some of them have been leaked a little bit. A couple aren’t even out there in the world.”
Musgrove would compile the contents into a list, which can be found on The Hollywood Reporter. But each track is marked to indicate whether the song is complete or not (some only have the chorus finished), along with a note on whether Michael Jackson himself is featured in any form of the “creative process.” As Musgrove added, “I’m listening to this stuff, and I would get goosebumps because nobody’s ever heard this stuff before. To hear Michael Jackson actually talk and kind of joke back and forth, it was really, really cool.”
We’ve all heard stories of music and movies being discovered in oddball places, but this is the sort of setting they make A&E shows out of. That it directly centers around one of the best-selling artists ever will only shed more light on it. Unfortunately, due to a stipulation by the Jackson estate, anyone who ends up purchasing these tapes doesn’t own the copyright. Thus, Jackson fans won’t get the satisfaction that Beatles fans did when they released “Now and Then” as their final single just last year.