Human Nature

"Human Nature" was written by Steve Porcaro, keyboardist with the band Toto. "I had written the song for my daughter Heather. Something had happened at school and it just inspired me. I wrote the song while we were mixing "Africa" and was just tinkering on the piano and wrote 'Human Nature.' It was one of a batch of three songs I had written in a certain time period. I had written the lyrics, which were the same verse I was singing over and over again. I had the 'why, why' chorus with the slap echo. Like most of my songs it was an unfinished song."

Steve Porcaro and fellow Toto member David Paich worked with producer Quincy Jones on the Thriller album, doing some synthesizer programming and playing. Said Porcaro: "Quincy had been asking David for songs and he was sending a messenger almost every day to David's house - where I was living at the time - to pick up anything David was working on. And so David was sending him stuff. One time, he had gotten a call that the messenger was on his way and he called down to me and told me to throw something we'd been working on onto a cassette. I didn't have any blank cassettes, so I took a cassette that had 'Human Nature' on one side and turned the B-side over, rewound it and put on these two songs of David's. and then gave them to the messenger." Jones played both sides of the cassette and was excited about "Human Nature." Quincy called David the next day and was raving about this tune that went 'why, why.' It took David half an hour to tell Quincy that it wasn't his song! But the song was incomplete lyric-wise and Jones asked Porcaro to finish them. Porcaro recalls: "I forced myself to write the lyrics and Quincy was less than thrilled with them and he asked me if I would mind if he brought in John Bettis to finish them. I was completely thrilled with what John did with the lyrics."

Quincy Jones assembled an impressive array of talent to work on the Thriller album, including four members of the band Toto. These guys knew the ropes because they were session musicians before they formed the band, and in 1982 they were red hot, scoring hits with "Rosanna" and "Africa" from their album Toto IV, which would win the Grammy for Album of the Year at the 1983 ceremony (Thriller would win the next year). Four members of the band played on this track: David Paich: synthesizer Steve Porcaro: synthesizer Steve Lukather: guitar Jeff Porcaro: drums Paich, Steve Porcaro and Lukather also did the arrangement. In our interview with David Paich, he explained that Jackson gave them lot of support and creative freedom. "Michael was very involved in it, and he's a perfectionist," said Paich. "He was always in the room with us, privately, saying, 'I just want you to have total freedom to do whatever you want. Just think of Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel - do whatever you need to do here. Sky's the limit.'"