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"The Way You Make Me Feel"

Date range (Westlake Sessions for the “Bad” album) confirmed in Mike Smallcombe’s “Making Michael” (“In August 1986, after more than two years of on-off work, Michael was ready to join forces with the A-Team again, as he felt he had enough material to present to Quincy… In November 1986, Michael flew to New York to film a video for ‘Bad’. It was the first time he filmed a video while an album was still in production, keeping him out of the studio for many weeks… With the ‘Bad’ video complete and the Christmas break over, Michael and the A-Team resumed recording at Westlake in early January 1987… Final mixes were completed on July 9, and the next day Bruce Swedien took the tapes to Bernie Grundman’s for mastering.

Michael Jackson, Moonwalk autobiography

“The Way You Make Me Feel” and “Smooth Criminal” are simply the grooves I was in at the time. That’s how I would put it.

Katherine Jackson, “My Family, The Jacksons”

In August, he entered the studio to record his next album.

Writing songs for follow-up to the best-selling album of all time had been a very serious, ongoing project of Michael’s since the end of the Victory tour. I helped inspire one of the tunes.

“I want you to write a song with a shuffling kind of rhythm,” I said to him one day. I tried to sing to him what I heard in my head.

“I think I know what you mean,” he said, nodding.

A week or two later Michael played me the song he’d written.

“That’s exactly what I was talking about!” I exclaimed.

“I know.” Michael smiled.

The song was “The Way You Make Me Feel.”

However, Michael refused to play me any of the other songs he had in the works.

“Please let me hear, please let me hear,” I’d beg him.

“No, Mother, wait until the album comes out,” Michael would reply. “Be surprised.”

Michael, however, was only too happy to tell me of his expectations for his next album. He fully expected it to become the best-selling album of all time.

Stevie Wonder, Rolling Stone (June 25, 2014)

One time, Michael and I were riding in an elevator together, and I was singing "The Way You Make Me Feel" to him, and we started going back and forth trading lines, and I told him how much I loved that part where he sang, "Go on, girl," and Michael told me that he took it from my song "Go Home," which made me feel pretty good.

Mike Smallcombe, “Making Michael”

‘Hot Fever’, later titled ‘The Way You Make Me Feel’, was inspired by Michael’s mother, Katherine; she wanted him to write a song with a ‘shuffling kind of rhythm’. When Michael recorded his vocals during the main sessions later down the line, he sang while dancing around the customary darkened studio, clicking his fingers and stomping his feet on the ground. “He’d sing his line, then he’d disappear into the darkness,” Bruce Swedien recalls. But instead of editing those sounds out of the final version, Swedien kept them as he felt they enhanced the overall sonic value.