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“The Lost Children”

Date range confirmed in Frank Cascio’s “My Friend Michael” (“In November 2000, Michael joined me in New York… Michael had a recording studio set up in another room on our floor and brought in Brad Buxer to work right out of the hotel. One of the songs that he and Brad worked on here was ‘Lost Children’.”)

Michael Jackson, “News of the World” (November 4, 2001)

News of the World: Tell me about the message in your song The Lost Children.

Jackson: I'm saying there are souls out there that are lost. People who have disappeared and have never been found again. I remember when I was a little kid, I was in a department store with my mother. I was no more than five, I think. I turned around and she was gone.

I'll never forget the feeling. I felt my world was ending. So imagine really, really being lost. It's like Armageddon of the brain.

Frank Cascio, friend, “My Friend Michael” autobiography

In November 2000, Michael joined me in New York. We rented an entire floor of the Four Seasons. Michael had a suite, as usual, Grace had a room, and I had a room. The kids usually stayed with Michael in his quarters, unless he was going to wake up very early to go to the studio, in which case they stayed with Grace.

Michael had a recording studio set up in another room on our floor and brought in Brad Buxer to work right out of the hotel. One of the songs that he and Brad worked on here was “Lost Children,” in which Michael expresses the wish that the missing children of the world could be home with their fathers and mothers. If anyone thought Michael had a full-fledged Peter Pan complex, here was the proof that unlike James Barrie’s character, he didn’t long to inhabit a world where “lost boys” lived in an underground fort. Michael wanted children to be safe at home. At the end of the song, my brother Aldo, who was seven, and Prince, still three, carry on a little dialogue. Michael fed them the words and Brad recorded them.

“It’s so quiet in the forest, look at all the trees,” Aldo says.

“And all the lovely flowers,” says Prince.

“It’s getting dark. I think we’d better go home now,” says Aldo.

The source from which “Lost Children” sprang was Michael’s emotional life as a parent. He felt firsthand how important it was for his children to be with him. But Michael had possessed the instinct to protect children long before he became a father. He had always been concerned about their well-being. Fatherhood didn’t transform him: it fulfilled him. And when it came to his art, fatherhood only reinforced the beliefs that were already core to who he was.