Michael Jackson — “Someone in the Dark”: The E.T. Ballad the Courts Kept from Radio

1982 · Behind the Songs

Recorded for a storybook album about a homesick alien, “Someone in the Dark” became one of Michael Jackson’s rarest records — and won him a Grammy anyway.

In the summer of 1982, Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was the biggest movie on the planet — a story of a lost alien and the lonely boy who befriends him that reduced entire theaters to tears. Michael Jackson, then twenty-three and between the triumph of Off the Wall and the recording of Thriller, loved the film. He identified, friends said, with its central figure: a gentle stranger from another world, misunderstood by everyone around him. So when the opportunity came to narrate an audiobook-and-soundtrack companion album for the film, Jackson said yes. The result was E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a lavish package produced by Quincy Jones and distributed by MCA Records — and at its heart, a ballad called “Someone in the Dark.”

The song was written by two of the finest craftsmen in the business. The music came from Rod Temperton, the English songwriter behind some of the funkiest hits of the era — including Jackson’s own “Rock with You” — and the lyrics from Alan and Marilyn Bergman, the Oscar-winning husband-and-wife team whose words had graced some of Hollywood’s most beloved songs. Jackson recorded “Someone in the Dark” in June 1982, cutting both an opening and a closing version for the album. The production team was formidable: John Williams and Jackson himself worked alongside Temperton, Freddy DeMann, and Bruce Swedien to shape a record that had to serve two masters — a children’s storybook and a pop album by the biggest young star in music.

The Lawsuit That Swallowed a Record

What happened next is one of the strangest stories in Jackson’s catalog. MCA released the E.T. album on November 15, 1982 — the very same month Jackson’s own Thriller arrived. That timing violated the conditions Jackson’s label, Epic, had set for the project: the storybook album was not supposed to come out until after Thriller had its moment. Epic sued MCA for two million dollars, and the courts forced the E.T. album off the market. By then it had already sold more than 450,000 copies in the United States — a genuine hit, abruptly turned into a collector’s item.

“Someone in the Dark” was caught in the legal undertow. The song was prohibited from release as a single, which meant that one of the most beautiful ballads Jackson ever recorded — the critic Mark Bego, writing in the Toledo Blade, would call it exactly that — never got its chance at radio. The only commercial trace of the song as a single came in the form of promotional 7-inch copies sent to radio stations, which have since become some of the rarest Michael Jackson records in existence. A song about a lonely alien became, fittingly, a ghost: present, beloved by those who knew it, and almost impossible to find.

A Grammy in Spite of Everything

And yet the record refused to disappear quietly. The E.T. album climbed to number 37 on the Billboard 200 and number 82 on the UK Albums Chart during its brief window of availability. Then, at the 1984 Grammy Awards, it won Best Recording for Children — giving Jackson a Grammy for an album his own label had tried to bury. It was a sweet vindication, and it hinted at something larger: even in the middle of the Thriller phenomenon, Jackson’s artistry could not be contained by contracts or court orders.

The song itself lived on through reissues. The opening version of “Someone in the Dark” later appeared on the 2001 special edition of Thriller, on the Thriller 25 anniversary set, and on the career-spanning Ultimate Collection — each appearance introducing the ballad to listeners who had never held the storybook album. What had once been a legal casualty became a catalog treasure, passed from one generation of fans to the next.

The Aftermath: Masters and Independence

The E.T. affair had consequences that echoed through Jackson’s career. He was furious with Epic president Walter Yetnikoff over the label’s handling of the project — furious enough, according to Jackson’s attorney John Branca in the Thriller 40 documentary, that Yetnikoff made an extraordinary concession to keep his star happy: from Off the Wall onward, Jackson would own all of his masters. It was a virtually unheard-of grant of power to a recording artist, and it reshaped the economics of Jackson’s career. A children’s storybook about an alien had, indirectly, helped make Michael Jackson one of the most powerful independent forces in the music business.

The album’s packaging, too, deserves a footnote in pop history. Beyond the music, the E.T. set included a 22-by-22-inch poster and a twenty-page storybook filled with movie stills and lyrics, with photography by Dick Zimmerman and engineering by Bruce Swedien, coordinated by Freddy DeMann and Ron Weisner. It was designed as an object to be held and treasured — which may be why the surviving copies, pulled from shelves by court order, became such prized artifacts.

What to Listen For

Put on “Someone in the Dark” and listen first for the tenderness in Jackson’s voice — this is not the percussive, rhythmic singer of Thriller but the vulnerable balladeer of “She’s Out of My Life,” singing to a frightened creature in the woods. Notice Temperton’s melody, which gives Jackson room to float, and the Bergmans’ lyric, which treats loneliness with unusual dignity. Then consider the paradox: one of Jackson’s most heartfelt performances, attached to a record the courts would not let live — a song about being lost in the dark that spent decades finding its way into the light.