Siedah Garrett wrote Man in the Mirror in 45 minutes. She wrote it for herself, not for an album, not for an artist, not for a commercial purpose, for something she was trying to understand about her own life, about the distance between the world she wanted to exist and the actions she was taking to build it.
3 months later, she sat across from Michael Jackson in a studio and watched him read the lyrics for the first time. She said, “I knew from the expression on his face that the song no longer belonged to me.” This is the story of that afternoon in 1987 when a songwriter sat down at a keyboard and wrote in 45 minutes something she would spend the rest of her life watching change the people who heard it.
Siedah Garrett was 27 years old in the autumn of 1986. She had grown up in Los Angeles, the daughter of a family with deep roots in the city’s black cultural community, and had been writing songs and singing since adolescence. By her mid-20s, she had established herself as a session vocalist, one of the specific people in the Los Angeles music ecosystem who get called when a producer needs a voice that can do something particular, quickly, reliably.
She had worked enough sessions to understand the industry’s mechanics and enough of her own work to know that the session world was not ultimately where she wanted to be. She wanted to write songs of her own. She wanted to say something in her own voice rather than lending her voice to someone else’s saying.
In late 1986, she had been working through a period of personal reckoning, not crisis, but the quieter, more sustained reckoning that comes when a person looks at the gap between who they are and who they intend to be, and decides that the gap requires attention. She had been thinking about change, about what genuine change actually required, about the difference between understanding something intellectually and doing the specific, difficult work of enacting it.
She had been thinking about this without being able to articulate it clearly for several months. On an afternoon in January of 1987, she sat at the keyboard in her apartment to work on something unrelated, a track she had been commissioned to contribute to, a professional obligation rather than a personal one.
She played the opening chord of the commission. She stopped. Something else was in the room. She set the commission aside and put her hands on a different chord. She wrote Man in the Mirror in 45 minutes, not draft by draft, not through revision, in one sustained movement of writing, the way certain things get written when a person has been carrying them long enough that the moment they find the form, everything comes out already shaped.
The melody arrived with the words. The structure arranged itself. The verse built toward the chorus in the specific direction it needed to build, not toward an external message, not toward a preconceived theme, but toward the conclusion that the thing she had been trying to understand for months had reached on its own.
The central insight of the song is not complicated. It is the oldest insight in the literature of personal change, that the world changes when the person looking at it decides to change. That the thing most people are waiting for, the shift in the outside world that will make everything different, begins not with the world, but with the mirror.
You are the person who makes it different. You, specifically, starting now. She had not written this as a message for anyone else. She had written it as a demand she was placing on herself, a specific confrontation with the gap between her values and her actions, set to a melody that moved the confrontation from the intellectual register into the emotional one.
When she finished, she sat for a moment and read through what she had written. Then she called her co-writer, Glen Ballard, who had been working with her on the session commission she had set aside. She said, “I wrote something. I need you to hear it.” Glen came over. He heard it. He said, “Who is this for?” Glen Ballard was a songwriter and producer who had been working in the Los Angeles music industry for more than a decade.
He had a specific practical intelligence about what made songs work, about the relationship between melody and lyric, about what a song needed to reach the person listening to it. And he had developed a reputation for recognizing when something was bigger than it appeared. He listened to Siedah play and sing Man in the Mirror that January afternoon, and he said when she finished, “This needs to go somewhere.
This can’t stay here.” The question of where was answered in the early spring of 1987 by a connection in the Los Angeles production community. Quincy Jones was assembling the material for Michael Jackson’s follow-up to Thriller, the album that would become Bad. He had been working with Michael through the production process, developing original material, evaluating songs from outside writers, building the album’s architecture.
A mutual contact passed Man in the Mirror to one of Quincy’s associates with a note that simply said, “Listen to this.” Quincy listened to it. He called Siedah the same day. He said, “I need you to come in.” He did not tell her it was for Michael Jackson’s album. He did not tell her anything specific about the project.
He told her the date and the studio and said she should bring the song. She arrived at the Westlake Studios on a Tuesday morning in April with a cassette of the demo and a legal pad of handwritten lyrics. She sat in the waiting area for 20 minutes while the session before hers wrapped up. A studio assistant brought her coffee. She held the cassette in her hand and thought about the fact that she had written the song for herself.
Quincy Jones met her in the control room. He had already heard the demo multiple times, had been listening to it, according to people who worked with him in that spring, with the specific repeated attention he gave to things that interested him seriously. He greeted Siedah with the warmth of a man who had already decided something and was now confirming it in person.
He told her, “The song is for Michael. I’m putting it on the album.” She sat down. Quincy said, “Michael is coming in this afternoon. He’s going to read the lyrics. He handed her back the legal pad. Michael arrived at Westlake at 2:00 in the afternoon. He came into the control room the way he always came into rooms, without announcement, without the expectation of ceremony, moving directly to the purpose of being there.
Quincy introduced Saida. Michael acknowledged her with a nod and the specific focused attention of someone who is present and fully in the moment without the performative quality that most people bring to meeting someone for the first time. Quincy handed Michael the legal pad. Michael looked at the title. He began to read.
Saida watched him read. She had watched many people read her lyrics, producers, recording artists, music supervisors, label executives. People who read lyrics the way people read technical documents, scanning for what they need, rather than receiving what is there. She had learned, over years of doing this, not to read too much into the face of the person reading her work, because the face was usually performing something, rather than showing something.
Michael’s face was not performing anything. Michael read the lyrics from the beginning to the end without looking up. He read slowly, the specific slow reading of someone who is not scanning for meaning, but following the words the way you follow a path, one step at a time, to see where it goes. When he reached the chorus for the first time, Saida saw his reading pace change.
Not slower, not faster, but different in quality. A change in the quality of his attention. He read to the end. He set the legal pad on the console. He sat for a moment looking at the middle distance. Then he looked at Siedah. She said, “Years later that she had never been looked at like that before. Not in the specific sense of intensity or scrutiny.
Michael’s look was not intense in that way. It was something else. The look of a person who has just received something that was in some essential way already theirs. Who recognized in the words she had written something that had been true for them long before she wrote it. He said, “Where did you write this?” She said, “At home in January in about 45 minutes.
” He nodded. He said, “I’ve been trying to say this for a long time.” He said it the way you say something when you find in someone else’s words the exact articulation of something you have been carrying without words. With the specific relief and recognition of a person who no longer has to carry it alone. Quincy watched both of them.
He said nothing. The recording of Man in the Mirror happened over several sessions in the spring of 1987. The production was built around a gospel choir. A large ensemble that would provide the specific quality of communal affirmation that the song required. The sense of a voice being joined rather than simply accompanied.
Andrae Crouch’s choir was brought in for the backing vocal arrangements. A decision that located the song’s emotional climax in the specific tradition of gospel music. The tradition of communal transformation through music that had been the foundation of black American spiritual life for centuries.
Siedah was present for the sessions. She had been brought in as a co-lead vocalist. Her voice woven through the recording as one of the voices in dialogue with Michael’s. She sang the song she had written for herself in a studio with the man who had read it and recognized it as his own with a choir of more than 30 voices building behind them both.
She said, “There is a moment in the recording of that song when the choir comes in fully for the first time. When all those voices arrive together that I’ve never been able to describe accurately to anyone who wasn’t in the room.” She said, “The song got larger than any of us.” Michael recorded the lead vocal with the specific quality that had become by the Bad sessions the defining characteristic of his best recordings.
Not the most technically demanding performance on the album. Not the one that showcased the most range. But the most transparent. The voice reporting rather than performing. The singer and the song indistinguishable from each other. After the final take Michael stood in the vocal booth for a moment before removing his headphones.
He stood very still. His face the expression of someone who has just finished saying something they needed to say and is feeling the specific relief of having said it. Man in the Mirror was released as a single from the Bad album in February of 1988. It reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100. It became one of the most recognized songs in Michael Jackson’s catalog.
Not the most technically demanding. Not the most commercially calculated, but the one that most completely expressed the particular quality of an artist who understood that music was not simply entertainment, but a specific kind of address, a direct communication from one person to another about the truth of what it means to be alive.
Siedah Garrett has spoken about the song across the decades. She has given interviews about the afternoon she wrote it, about the session at Westlake, about watching Michael read the lyrics for the first time. She has described what she witnessed with the specific precision of a person who understood, from the moment it happened, that they were watching something they would be asked to describe for the rest of their life.
She has said, “I wrote it for myself, and then I watched it become something for everyone.” >> [clears throat] >> She has said, “What Michael did with that song was understand what it was for at a level I didn’t fully understand myself when I wrote it. He knew who it was talking to. He always knew who the song was talking to.
” Michael Jackson died on June 25th, 2009. Siedah Garrett was among the artists who participated in the public tributes that followed. She has performed Man in the Mirror many times since, at concerts, at memorials, at events organized around Michael’s legacy. She has said that every time she performs it, she still hears his voice underneath hers.
Not a memory, exactly. Something more specific than that. The voice of a man who read 45 minutes of her honest writing and said, “I’ve been trying to say this for a long time.” Subscribe if this story stayed with you. Leave a comment. What does Man in the Mirror mean to you? Share this with someone who needs to hear the message.
Siedah Garrett Wrote “MAN IN THE MIRROR” for Herself. Then Michael Jackson Read It.
Siedah Garrett wrote Man in the Mirror in 45 minutes. She wrote it for herself, not for an album, not for an artist, not for a commercial purpose, for something she was trying to understand about her own life, about the distance between the world she wanted to exist and the actions she was taking to build it.
3 months later, she sat across from Michael Jackson in a studio and watched him read the lyrics for the first time. She said, “I knew from the expression on his face that the song no longer belonged to me.” This is the story of that afternoon in 1987 when a songwriter sat down at a keyboard and wrote in 45 minutes something she would spend the rest of her life watching change the people who heard it.
Siedah Garrett was 27 years old in the autumn of 1986. She had grown up in Los Angeles, the daughter of a family with deep roots in the city’s black cultural community, and had been writing songs and singing since adolescence. By her mid-20s, she had established herself as a session vocalist, one of the specific people in the Los Angeles music ecosystem who get called when a producer needs a voice that can do something particular, quickly, reliably.
She had worked enough sessions to understand the industry’s mechanics and enough of her own work to know that the session world was not ultimately where she wanted to be. She wanted to write songs of her own. She wanted to say something in her own voice rather than lending her voice to someone else’s saying.
In late 1986, she had been working through a period of personal reckoning, not crisis, but the quieter, more sustained reckoning that comes when a person looks at the gap between who they are and who they intend to be, and decides that the gap requires attention. She had been thinking about change, about what genuine change actually required, about the difference between understanding something intellectually and doing the specific, difficult work of enacting it.
She had been thinking about this without being able to articulate it clearly for several months. On an afternoon in January of 1987, she sat at the keyboard in her apartment to work on something unrelated, a track she had been commissioned to contribute to, a professional obligation rather than a personal one.
She played the opening chord of the commission. She stopped. Something else was in the room. She set the commission aside and put her hands on a different chord. She wrote Man in the Mirror in 45 minutes, not draft by draft, not through revision, in one sustained movement of writing, the way certain things get written when a person has been carrying them long enough that the moment they find the form, everything comes out already shaped.
The melody arrived with the words. The structure arranged itself. The verse built toward the chorus in the specific direction it needed to build, not toward an external message, not toward a preconceived theme, but toward the conclusion that the thing she had been trying to understand for months had reached on its own.
The central insight of the song is not complicated. It is the oldest insight in the literature of personal change, that the world changes when the person looking at it decides to change. That the thing most people are waiting for, the shift in the outside world that will make everything different, begins not with the world, but with the mirror.
You are the person who makes it different. You, specifically, starting now. She had not written this as a message for anyone else. She had written it as a demand she was placing on herself, a specific confrontation with the gap between her values and her actions, set to a melody that moved the confrontation from the intellectual register into the emotional one.
When she finished, she sat for a moment and read through what she had written. Then she called her co-writer, Glen Ballard, who had been working with her on the session commission she had set aside. She said, “I wrote something. I need you to hear it.” Glen came over. He heard it. He said, “Who is this for?” Glen Ballard was a songwriter and producer who had been working in the Los Angeles music industry for more than a decade.
He had a specific practical intelligence about what made songs work, about the relationship between melody and lyric, about what a song needed to reach the person listening to it. And he had developed a reputation for recognizing when something was bigger than it appeared. He listened to Siedah play and sing Man in the Mirror that January afternoon, and he said when she finished, “This needs to go somewhere.
This can’t stay here.” The question of where was answered in the early spring of 1987 by a connection in the Los Angeles production community. Quincy Jones was assembling the material for Michael Jackson’s follow-up to Thriller, the album that would become Bad. He had been working with Michael through the production process, developing original material, evaluating songs from outside writers, building the album’s architecture.
A mutual contact passed Man in the Mirror to one of Quincy’s associates with a note that simply said, “Listen to this.” Quincy listened to it. He called Siedah the same day. He said, “I need you to come in.” He did not tell her it was for Michael Jackson’s album. He did not tell her anything specific about the project.
He told her the date and the studio and said she should bring the song. She arrived at the Westlake Studios on a Tuesday morning in April with a cassette of the demo and a legal pad of handwritten lyrics. She sat in the waiting area for 20 minutes while the session before hers wrapped up. A studio assistant brought her coffee. She held the cassette in her hand and thought about the fact that she had written the song for herself.
Quincy Jones met her in the control room. He had already heard the demo multiple times, had been listening to it, according to people who worked with him in that spring, with the specific repeated attention he gave to things that interested him seriously. He greeted Siedah with the warmth of a man who had already decided something and was now confirming it in person.
He told her, “The song is for Michael. I’m putting it on the album.” She sat down. Quincy said, “Michael is coming in this afternoon. He’s going to read the lyrics. He handed her back the legal pad. Michael arrived at Westlake at 2:00 in the afternoon. He came into the control room the way he always came into rooms, without announcement, without the expectation of ceremony, moving directly to the purpose of being there.
Quincy introduced Saida. Michael acknowledged her with a nod and the specific focused attention of someone who is present and fully in the moment without the performative quality that most people bring to meeting someone for the first time. Quincy handed Michael the legal pad. Michael looked at the title. He began to read.
Saida watched him read. She had watched many people read her lyrics, producers, recording artists, music supervisors, label executives. People who read lyrics the way people read technical documents, scanning for what they need, rather than receiving what is there. She had learned, over years of doing this, not to read too much into the face of the person reading her work, because the face was usually performing something, rather than showing something.
Michael’s face was not performing anything. Michael read the lyrics from the beginning to the end without looking up. He read slowly, the specific slow reading of someone who is not scanning for meaning, but following the words the way you follow a path, one step at a time, to see where it goes. When he reached the chorus for the first time, Saida saw his reading pace change.
Not slower, not faster, but different in quality. A change in the quality of his attention. He read to the end. He set the legal pad on the console. He sat for a moment looking at the middle distance. Then he looked at Siedah. She said, “Years later that she had never been looked at like that before. Not in the specific sense of intensity or scrutiny.
Michael’s look was not intense in that way. It was something else. The look of a person who has just received something that was in some essential way already theirs. Who recognized in the words she had written something that had been true for them long before she wrote it. He said, “Where did you write this?” She said, “At home in January in about 45 minutes.
” He nodded. He said, “I’ve been trying to say this for a long time.” He said it the way you say something when you find in someone else’s words the exact articulation of something you have been carrying without words. With the specific relief and recognition of a person who no longer has to carry it alone. Quincy watched both of them.
He said nothing. The recording of Man in the Mirror happened over several sessions in the spring of 1987. The production was built around a gospel choir. A large ensemble that would provide the specific quality of communal affirmation that the song required. The sense of a voice being joined rather than simply accompanied.
Andrae Crouch’s choir was brought in for the backing vocal arrangements. A decision that located the song’s emotional climax in the specific tradition of gospel music. The tradition of communal transformation through music that had been the foundation of black American spiritual life for centuries.
Siedah was present for the sessions. She had been brought in as a co-lead vocalist. Her voice woven through the recording as one of the voices in dialogue with Michael’s. She sang the song she had written for herself in a studio with the man who had read it and recognized it as his own with a choir of more than 30 voices building behind them both.
She said, “There is a moment in the recording of that song when the choir comes in fully for the first time. When all those voices arrive together that I’ve never been able to describe accurately to anyone who wasn’t in the room.” She said, “The song got larger than any of us.” Michael recorded the lead vocal with the specific quality that had become by the Bad sessions the defining characteristic of his best recordings.
Not the most technically demanding performance on the album. Not the one that showcased the most range. But the most transparent. The voice reporting rather than performing. The singer and the song indistinguishable from each other. After the final take Michael stood in the vocal booth for a moment before removing his headphones.
He stood very still. His face the expression of someone who has just finished saying something they needed to say and is feeling the specific relief of having said it. Man in the Mirror was released as a single from the Bad album in February of 1988. It reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100. It became one of the most recognized songs in Michael Jackson’s catalog.
Not the most technically demanding. Not the most commercially calculated, but the one that most completely expressed the particular quality of an artist who understood that music was not simply entertainment, but a specific kind of address, a direct communication from one person to another about the truth of what it means to be alive.
Siedah Garrett has spoken about the song across the decades. She has given interviews about the afternoon she wrote it, about the session at Westlake, about watching Michael read the lyrics for the first time. She has described what she witnessed with the specific precision of a person who understood, from the moment it happened, that they were watching something they would be asked to describe for the rest of their life.
She has said, “I wrote it for myself, and then I watched it become something for everyone.” >> [clears throat] >> She has said, “What Michael did with that song was understand what it was for at a level I didn’t fully understand myself when I wrote it. He knew who it was talking to. He always knew who the song was talking to.
” Michael Jackson died on June 25th, 2009. Siedah Garrett was among the artists who participated in the public tributes that followed. She has performed Man in the Mirror many times since, at concerts, at memorials, at events organized around Michael’s legacy. She has said that every time she performs it, she still hears his voice underneath hers.
Not a memory, exactly. Something more specific than that. The voice of a man who read 45 minutes of her honest writing and said, “I’ve been trying to say this for a long time.” Subscribe if this story stayed with you. Leave a comment. What does Man in the Mirror mean to you? Share this with someone who needs to hear the message.
