Of all the songs on Bad, the one that sounds most like a personal confession is the one Michael Jackson did not write. “Man in the Mirror” arrived from two Los Angeles songwriters, Siedah Garrett and Glen Ballard, and it asked the most famous man in pop to do something deceptively simple: stop pointing at the world’s problems and start with himself. Jackson took the song so completely to heart that audiences have treated it as his autobiography ever since. It became the fourth single from Bad, a two-week Billboard Hot 100 number one, a Grammy Record of the Year nominee, and — two decades later — the song the world reached for on the day he died.
A Notebook, a Rhodes Piano and One Last Try
The story begins at Quincy Jones’s house. As Jackson’s producer gathered songs for the follow-up to Thriller, he invited a group of songwriters to his home and gave them a brief that Siedah Garrett never forgot: “I just want hits, that’s all I want.” Garrett took the challenge to her writing partner Glen Ballard. She had been carrying a title in her notebook for over a year — Man in the Mirror — and when Ballard sat down at the keyboard and began playing a figure, the words finally had somewhere to go.
Ballard, who had already pitched repeatedly for the album and been turned down, later remembered how close he came to not writing it at all. Garrett called him and insisted they try once more for Michael. “It took about an hour, honestly,” he told Songwriting Magazine. He worked at a Rhodes piano, threw in a couple of lines of his own, and the pair cut a rough demo with Garrett singing. Ballard shrugged it off as a long shot. Garrett did not. The next day she drove the tape up to Jones’s house in Beverly Hills herself and played it for him — and Jones loved it. Within days, the song was in Jackson’s hands.
There was one more twist. Ballard had written the song in A-flat, programmed on his Linn 9000 drum machine, but Jackson wanted it down a half-step, in G — a small change that would turn out to matter enormously, as we will see. Jackson also asked the writers to expand the song, requesting a longer middle eight and some lyrical adjustments. Garrett and Ballard delivered. It was one of only two songs on Bad that Jackson did not write himself — the other is “Just Good Friends,” his duet with Stevie Wonder — and the only one that came from completely outside his camp.
Building a Gospel Record at Westlake
“Man in the Mirror” was recorded in May 1987 at Westlake Studios in Los Angeles, in Studio D, with Jones producing and Jackson as co-producer. The credits read like a masterclass in late-eighties session craft: Greg Phillinganes at the piano, Dann Huff on guitar, Ballard and Randy Kerber on synthesizers, Ballard programming the drums, and Ollie E. Brown adding handclaps and cymbals. But the record’s soul came from its singers. Garrett stayed on to sing backing vocals, and Jones brought in two pillars of gospel music: the Winans — brothers Carvin, Marvin, Michael and Ronald — and the Andraé Crouch Choir, with Crouch himself arranging the vocals.
The arrangement is a slow fuse. It opens as a polished pop ballad, Jackson pleading over a gentle groove, and then, at 2 minutes and 53 seconds, the whole record lifts: the key rises a semitone from G major to A-flat major — full circle back to the key Ballard originally wrote it in — and the choir floods in behind him. ShortList would later call it one of the greatest key changes in music history, and it is hard to argue. The modulation does not feel like a producer’s trick; it feels like the moment private resolve becomes public testimony. By the final minutes, Jackson is no longer singing a pop song so much as leading a revival meeting, ad-libbing over the choir as the track stretches to 5 minutes and 19 seconds.
The critics heard it immediately. Reviewing Bad for Rolling Stone, Davitt Sigerson singled it out as one of Jackson’s greatest works, “a straightforward homily of personal commitment” — all the more striking, he noted, because it was a song Jackson did not write. Jon Pareles of The New York Times called it a “catchy, uplifting piece of pop-gospel.” The record has often been described as one of Jackson’s own favourites from the album, and everything about his performance suggests why: he sings it not as a star delivering a message, but as a man arguing with himself.
The Video That Left the Star Out
If the record was a confession, the video was a newsreel. Conceived, directed and edited by Don Wilson, the clip for “Man in the Mirror” is a montage of the twentieth century at its best and worst: famine in Africa, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., the Kent State shootings, the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party — cut against figures of hope and change such as Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, John Lennon and Lech Wałęsa, and moments like the rescue of baby Jessica McClure and the signing of the INF Treaty. Jackson himself is essentially absent from the screen; there is no choreography, no glove, no moonwalk.
Wilson designed the montage to work like an argument: played in reverse, he explained, it begins in innocence and shows how inaction and injustice produce chaos — he wanted viewers to feel tearful, and perhaps moved to act. Not everyone was convinced. Pareles, writing in the Times, attacked the video as a landmark of bad taste, arguing that it repurposed real suffering to sell a pop record. The argument has never entirely gone away, and it is worth having: “Man in the Mirror” walks a genuine line between witness and exploitation, and its video is where that tension lives.
Number One, and One Night at Radio City
Released on January 16, 1988, as the fourth single from Bad, “Man in the Mirror” debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on February 6 and climbed steadily through the winter. On March 26, 1988, it reached number one, where it stayed for two weeks — the fourth consecutive American number one from Bad, an album that would become the first in history to produce five Hot 100 chart-toppers. In Britain it was a slower burn, peaking at a modest number 21, though British radio embraced it. The single has since been certified triple platinum in both the United States and the United Kingdom.
Three weeks before it topped the chart, Jackson had already given the song its defining performance. On March 2, 1988, at the 30th Grammy Awards in New York’s Radio City Music Hall, he performed live on television for the first time since the Motown 25 special five years earlier. He began with a slowed, smouldering “The Way You Make Me Feel,” then turned to “Man in the Mirror,” backed by the Andraé Crouch Choir with Garrett herself among the singers behind him. As the song built, Jackson conducted the choir with huge sweeping gestures, spun, dropped to his knees, and sang like a man trying to lift the room. The audience of his peers rose in a standing ovation. Bad won nothing that night despite its nominations — the ovation was the trophy. The following year, the single itself was nominated for Record of the Year at the 31st Grammy Awards, losing to Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”
2009: The Mirror Looks Back
On June 25, 2009, Michael Jackson died at the age of fifty, and the world went looking for the song that could carry what it felt. It found this one. In the days after his death, “Man in the Mirror” became the number one single on iTunes in both the United States and the United Kingdom, the most downloaded of all his songs. In Britain, where it had peaked at number 21 in 1988, it re-entered the chart at number 11 and climbed to number 2 the following week, held off the top only by Cascada’s “Evacuate the Dancefloor.” By January 2016 it had sold 567,280 copies in the UK alone, on its way to triple-platinum certification. And on July 7, 2009, as Jackson’s memorial service at the Staples Center in Los Angeles drew to a close and his casket was carried from the hall, the music playing was an instrumental version of “Man in the Mirror.”
There is something fitting, and a little heartbreaking, in that choice. The song’s lyric is a vow made by one person to himself — and in 2009 it became a vow sung by millions back to the man who had sung it to them. Garrett and Ballard’s partnership endured, too: Jackson recorded another of their songs, “Keep the Faith,” for Dangerous in 1991.
Why It Endures
Many protest songs point outward; “Man in the Mirror” points inward, and that is precisely why it has outlived its era. Its politics begin with personal responsibility — feed the people on the street, notice the kid without shoes — before they scale up to anything larger. Time‘s Josh Tyrangiel, ranking Jackson’s ten best songs in 2009, called it “one of Jackson’s most powerful vocals and accessible social statements, not to mention the best-ever use of a gospel choir in a pop song.”
It endures, too, because of how honestly it was made: a title carried in a notebook for a year, a song written in about an hour by two writers who thought they had already missed their chance, a demo driven across town by hand — and a superstar who knew a great song when he heard one, even when it wasn’t his. Jackson did not write “Man in the Mirror.” He did something rarer. He believed it, on record, in front of everyone — and nearly forty years on, every singer who covers it, and every crowd that sings it back, is still answering the question it asks.