The song George Michael made by “complete accident”
George Michael was known as a prince of pop, but underneath that shiny veneer was a textural and genre-spanning approach to sound that often went unrecognised.
After breaking free from Wham, his solo career got off to the most blazing start possible through the wall-to-wall hits that spawned from his 1987 debut album Faith. You could tell that everything on that record was executed with complete intention – the polished production, the even tighter routines, the guaranteed soaring in the charts.
But in terms of one of the record’s greatest hits, ‘Father Figure’, by his own admission, Michael confessed that its dreamy scores came about in a complete accident of luck. Certainly, everything else on the album, and indeed in the wider pop canon as a whole at the time, sounded much more upbeat and high-octane.
This was how ‘Father Figure’ itself was also meant to come across, until the removal of one key element saw Michael strike gold with a pop tune that brought so many more layers to the table than just the standard formula alone. “Do you know what’s interesting about the making of that song?” he later recalled. “It started off with a rhythm track with a snare, and when you play it like that, it sounds a bit like Prince. But I must have been listening to it without the snare and gone, ‘Oh my God, that totally changes the record!’”
The result was something that reached far into the depths of a new facet of genre that the singer was keen to explore. “It suddenly becomes a gospel record,” he continued. “A couple of things in my career have been a complete accident, where I stumbled upon the sound. I know when something resonates, and one of my saving graces is that I can hear something when I stumble upon it.”
That extent of self-awareness is perhaps rare in the standard human being, but something often possessed by the bucketload in any given artist. They have to be acutely in tune with not just their own psyches, but their own talents and assets in order to have any chance of fortifying success. Naturally, it was something that flowed from Michael’s every pore.
“When I’m actually going for something else, on the way to a different sound, I have the ability to stop and say, ‘No. Actually, that’s much better.’ It’s tiny little things like that that make a record, I think,” he explained, and in this respect, he was not far wrong, either. The major building blocks of sound and songwriting will see you mostly over the line, but the nitty-gritty of intricacies and details is what really makes a gem.
At the end of the day, by its very nature, the vast majority of pop songs follow the strict rules of a formula, as this is the key to unlocking the genre’s seismic success. Michael was no stranger to that rule himself, of course, but his eye for plucking the finer tastes out of songs and bringing them to the forefront of his records was the quality that truly set him apart.
The snarelessness of ‘Father Figure’ was just one example of that, but there were countless to be found across the scores of Michael’s career. The pop snobs may tend to turn up their noses, but you simply can’t resist the indulgence when it comes to a work of genius like that. Accident or not, songs like those were the making of the iconic man.
