1984 · Behind the Songs
While the world danced to Wham!’s biggest singles, its twenty-one-year-old singer was quietly proving he could write a ballad that needed no spotlight.
In 1984, Wham! could do no wrong. The duo’s second album, Make It Big, reached No. 1 in both the United States and the United Kingdom, carried by a run of singles that came to define mid-eighties pop: the exuberant “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” the rubbery funk of “Freedom,” the sleek “Everything She Wants,” and “Careless Whisper,” the ballad credited to Wham! featuring George Michael in North America and to Michael alone in Britain. Tucked among those giants sat an album track called “Like a Baby.” It was never released as a single, never got a video, and never anchored a concert. Yet for listeners who played the record all the way through, it was the clearest early sign of the songwriter George Michael was becoming.
The album was written and recorded at Studio Miraval in the south of France, where Michael and his collaborators worked for six weeks beginning in early July 1984. Michael, still only twenty-one, produced the record and wrote the arrangements himself, singing lead and stacking his own backing vocals; Andrew Ridgeley played electric guitars, and engineer Chris Porter captured the sessions. The Provençal farmhouse studio offered distance from the London press and a concentrated schedule. Michael had already proved he could write hits; now he was proving he could shape an entire album. “Like a Baby” emerged from those sessions as one of the record’s gentlest moments, a ballad built on restraint where the singles ran on exuberance.
The songwriting credit, as with nearly everything Wham! recorded, belongs to Michael alone. By 1984 he had absorbed the grammar of Motown so thoroughly that Rolling Stone’s Christopher Connelly later described the album as “an unabashed rehash of Motown,” while AllMusic’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine praised the record as a pop tour de force. “Like a Baby” wears that schooling lightly. It is a portrait of young infatuation, of feeling helpless and new in the face of someone else’s affection. The title metaphor does the emotional work: to love this way, the song suggests, is to be as unguarded as an infant, with no defenses and no pretense.
Sequencing is part of the story. On an album engineered for movement, “Like a Baby” is the still point, the track that gives the listener room to breathe and gives Michael room to sing softly. That softness was a commercial risk in 1984. Wham!’s public image was all big choruses, big hair, and bigger smiles; a quiet ballad about vulnerability could easily have vanished between the hits. Instead it became one of the album’s most quietly treasured tracks, the one fans name when they want to show they know more than the singles.
The credits reveal how much Michael was already doing himself: producer, arranger, lead and backing vocalist, and keyboards on two of the album’s tracks. The band around him stayed small and tight — Ridgeley’s guitar, Porter’s engineering — which kept the sound lean even when the choruses went huge. On “Like a Baby,” the arrangement stays out of the singer’s way. The groove is unhurried, the keyboards warm, and Michael’s voice behaves the way it would for the rest of his career: it begins intimate and opens gradually, carrying the song’s ache without ever forcing it. Listen closely and you can hear the phrasing habits that would later define “A Different Corner” and “Kissing a Fool.”
The album’s success sent Wham! on a world tour that ran from December 1984 to April 1985 and ended somewhere no Western pop act had played before: the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Canton, China, making Wham! the first Western popular music act to tour China. “Like a Baby” was not built for stadiums, and the setlists favored the hits. But the tour’s scale underscored what the album had already shown: Michael was no longer just a young singer performing someone else’s idea of pop. He was writing, producing, and arranging at a level few contemporaries could match, and the deep cuts were where that showed most plainly.
Make It Big went on to sell more than six million copies in the United States, certified six-times platinum, and its reputation has kept growing; in March 2024 the album returned to vinyl for the first time in thirty years. The singles earn the retrospectives, but it is album tracks like “Like a Baby” that reward the reissue buyers — the listeners who want the complete picture of a band at its peak rather than just the highlights.
Play the song right after the singles and notice how differently Michael uses his voice. The verses sit low and nearly conversational, where his tone is warmest; the chorus lifts without shouting. The backing vocals, all Michael, stack into the pillowy harmonies that would become his signature. And the central image — helplessness as tenderness — is pure Michael. Even at twenty-one, he wrote about love as something that disarms rather than something that conquers, a theme he would return to for the rest of his life.
“Like a Baby” never charted, never had a video, and rarely turns up on compilations. But it marks a turning point you can hear: the moment a pop star began writing the quiet songs that would define his solo career. Three years later, Faith would make him the biggest male pop singer on the planet; a decade after that, Older would strip his sound back to confession. The through-line starts here, in a French farmhouse studio in the summer of 1984, with a ballad about being made helpless by love.
For a songwriter who would spend his career moving between the dance floor and the small hours, “Like a Baby” is the earliest small-hours song — proof that George Michael could do tenderness before he ever had to. It remains a fan’s song rather than a hit’s song, and that may be exactly why it endures.