Although it was Rooney’s job to produce hit songs for artists, he felt that Jackson needed more than just his name at the top of the charts.
He felt Jackson needed both an ally at the record label, and a friend.
“I could have taken advantage of the situation and tried to produce six songs and get Michael to record them, but I didn’t care for that. I just wanted to give him anything at that time that he needed. And I felt like he needed to have fun and to have a friend more so than some guy trying to push songs on him. That was genuinely what I truly felt in my heart. We had a great time.”
Six weeks earlier, back at the Marvin’s Room studio in Los Angeles, Jackson had promised he would send Tommy Mottola more of his newly crafted material. True to his word, shortly after wrapping up the “She Was Lovin’ Me” sessions with Rooney, Jackson sent Mottola another track.
“I was in Mottola’s office talking to him about something, and he was eating lunch, and he said, ‘Oh while you’re here, Michael sent another record. Lets listen to it.’”
“So he puts in the CD and all you hear is, ‘Your love is magical. That’s how I feel.’ It’s, you know, the song ‘Speechless’. It was just amazing. Tommy was like, ‘Oh my god did you hear that voice? Now that’s the Michael I’m talking about!’ I mean that intro alone with just his voice blew Tommy away. And then it just drops in, ‘Speechless, speechless, that’s how you make me feel.’ It just really blew his mind.”
“Speechless” was just the second track from Jackson’s new project that Mottola had heard. At this point he had not even heard Jackson’s version of “She Was Lovin’ Me”.
Jackson was highly protective of the music he put his voice on, and although the vocals were complete, Rooney had not yet completed the final mix for the track.
However, it was at that time that the collaborative relationship between Jackson and Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins took over.
“It was up to me to finish the music (for ‘She Was Lovin’ Me’
, to make the music track better and stronger,” explained Rooney. “And I completely lost the opportunity to do that because I got so caught up in trying to help Rodney Jerkins deliver for Michael.”
“’She Was Lovin’ Me’ was a great song, but it wasn’t going to be the first single. It wasn’t what the record label was looking for. Michael wanted it to be a single at some point, but he wanted that big rhythmic thing for the lead single, you know, and we hadn’t got that yet for the record.”
Rooney strongly believed that Jerkins was the man who could deliver the type of track that Jackson was striving for. However, following their first meeting regarding a possible collaboration, Jackson was not convinced.
“It’s not that he isn’t talented – he is very talented”, Jackson said of Jerkins, tells Rooney. “But his work sounds like everything else that’s out right now. I need a new ‘Michael Jackson’ sound. I don’t want to sound like Brandy and Monica. I want to take people somewhere they’ve never been sonically.”
So, instead of polishing the music for “She Was Loving Me”, Rooney spent a good part of the next year nurturing the relationship between Jerkins, his “Darkchild” writing/production team, and Jackson.
To point him in the right direction Rooney recalls giving Jerkins some advice which had previously been given to him by Carole Bayer Sager – a friend and a co-writer of Jackson’s.
“Carole told me that Michael is a storyteller. She said Michael loves to tell stories in his music. If you listen to ‘Billie Jean’, it’s a story. If you listen to ‘Thriller’, it’s a story. If you listen to ‘Beat It’, it’s a story. He loves to tell a tale.”
And so Jerkins and his team put that advice into practice, writing stories in the forms of hard-hitting R&B songs for Jackson.
The results included songs such as “Your Rock My World” (the first Darkchild track recorded by Jackson and ultimately the lead single from the ‘Invincible’ album two years later), “Unbreakable” (Jackson’s personal preference for the lead single), “Heartbreaker”, “Privacy” and “Threatened”; among others.
“Before you knew it, the record was done,” recalls Rooney.
“Then [Michael] and Tommy (Mottola) started to fall out. And because everyone in the world knows that I worked so closely with Tommy, people started to try and put things between us.”
“Mottola kind of like played a little game and pulled me so far off the MJ project, and started a Jennifer Lopez album, a Marc Anthony album, and a Jessica Simpson album at the same time. So, I was so caught up in that, that the ‘Invincible’ ship started to sail and I couldn’t double back to finish ‘She Was Lovin’ Me’.”
By the time ‘Invincible’ was due out in late October 2001, things had turned completely sour between Jackson and Sony.
Jackson’s concepts, including an 18-minute short film for the track “Unbreakable”, were being overlooked and marketing for the album was being kept to a minimum. Sony refused to buy an advertising slot during Jackson’s 30th Anniversary Celebration concert, which would have been seen by 26 million Americans.
Later, Jackson accused Sony – namely label president Tommy Mottola – of sabotaging the album’s sales, among other things. And because of Rooney’s close working relationship with Mottola, all kinds of rumors began to swirl; including an allegation that Rooney was acting as Mottola’s personal “spy”.
Rooney insists these rumors were completely untrue, and tells that Jackson pleaded with him not to let the media and agenda-driven record executives ruin their friendship.
“Michael reached out to me personally and said, ‘Cory, do not let these people do to us and our friendship what they do to everyone else.’”
Rooney maintains that he saw himself as perhaps Jackson’s only true ally at the label.
Once the ‘Invincible’ album had been released, Rooney began to wonder what the fate of the unreleased “She Was Lovin’ Me” would be.
“Every time I talked to him or ran into him after ‘Invincible’ came out he would bring up the song. He would say, ’Listen; what ever you do, do NOT give the song to the record label, because all they’re gonna do is end up throwing it on some compilation.’”
“The last time I spoke to him was around eight months before he passed away. We talked about the track and laughed and joked about a couple of things. He told me that he was in Vegas and that he was going back and forth. I told him I was going to be in Vegas at a certain time and I was hoping we could meet when I got there. But I actually never made it out to Vegas.”
“In that final conversation we talked about using ‘She Was Lovin’ Me’ for his next project. He was talking about getting in a position where he was going to start lining up new songs and things like that. He said, ‘This record is so good we gotta figure out something good to do with it.’”
Unfortunately Michael Jackson never had the chance to hear “She Was Lovin’ Me” in it’s final state. Instead Rooney, with the help of Jackson’s nephew, Taryll, brought the track’s music to completion following his death. The pair have done an incredible job.
Jackson delivers an emotionally powerful vocal on the track, packed with pain and frustration. The verses gently tell the intimate story of Jackson’s encounter with a woman whom he believes was into him, before unleashing a rage of guitar-infused fury in the choruses.
“Anyone who has heard that song says it’s one of the best songs they’re heard from Michael in the last ten years of his career,” says Rooney – and they’re right. It’s the King of Pop rocking out at his best.
“She Was Lovin’ Me” remains unreleased to this day.