Michael Jackson:

“Human Nature” was the song the Toto guys brought to Q, and he and I both agreed that the song had the prettiest melody we’d heard in a long time, even more than “Africa.” It’s music with wings.

Songwriter Steve Porcaro:

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.

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.

Keyboardist/Emulator Michael Boddicker:

That was Steve Porcaro’s track. He used a Yamaha CS-80 with glide (chromatic instead of portamento) at the head — it’s got that nice little CS fuzz around the sound. That fuzz was also part of a multi-layered sound I used for the four-chord basic string vamp on “Billie Jean” — Michael Jackson himself played that part on a CS-80 in one take. No punches. No repairs. No sequencers or time correction. Seven minutes. Perfect performance.

We fattened the pad a little on the body, and the line that counters the vocal on the second half of the first “Human Nature” chorus is my sound playing a line written by Rod Temperton. The sound and part were later supplanted by background vocals, but the basic, main lines, solo and most layers are from Steve Porcaro — based on a demo he wrote when he was 17 years old!

“Human Nature” begins in the key of D-major, but after the swirling vamp at the end of the song, it ends in D-minor.