Off the Wall: The Album That Made Michael an Adult Artist

By 1979 Michael Jackson was twenty years old and had been a recording star for a decade. At Motown he had sung lead on the Jackson 5's hits and released four solo albums, including Ben, whose title song reached number one in 1972. After the brothers moved to Epic Records in 1975 as the Jacksons, they gained more creative control, and Michael and Randy wrote Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground), a major hit in 1979.

Off the Wall was his chance to make a solo record on his own terms. He wanted it to sound nothing like his child-star records, and he wanted to prove that he could write and arrange his own material. Quincy Jones, whom he had met while filming The Wiz, agreed to produce.

The album opens with Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough, written by Jackson. It begins with a whispered spoken intro and then explodes into a groove built on percussion, bass and bright horns, with Jackson singing almost entirely in falsetto. It reached number one on the Hot 100 in October 1979. Rock with You, written by Rod Temperton, followed it to number one in early 1980 and is the album's smoothest moment.

Temperton also wrote the title track and Burn This Disco Out. Jackson co-wrote Working Day and Night and Get on the Floor (with Louis Johnson). Paul McCartney wrote Girlfriend. Tom Bahler and others wrote She's Out of My Life, the ballad that closes side one. Jackson became emotional while recording it, and the audible catch in his voice at the end was kept on the record.

What unites these songs is energy and warmth. The album sits between disco, funk and soul, but it rarely sounds like a genre exercise. The horn arrangements by Jerry Hey, Greg Phillinganes's keyboards and Louis Johnson's bass give it a live-band feel that ages better than many disco records of the same year.

Four singles reached the Hot 100 top ten: Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough and Rock with You (both number one), Off the Wall and She's Out of My Life. That made it the first album by a solo artist to generate four top-ten US singles. Worldwide sales are commonly estimated at 20 million or more, though estimates vary.

At the Grammy Awards in February 1980, Jackson won Best Male R&B Vocal Performance for Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough. The album was not nominated in the major general categories. Jackson later said in interviews that he felt it had been overlooked, and that this motivated him when making Thriller.

Off the Wall is the album where the adult Michael Jackson sound appears. The layered vocals, the rhythmic hiccups, the combination of dancefloor grooves and vulnerable ballads, all of this becomes the template for Thriller. It is also the start of the team (Jones, engineer Bruce Swedien, Temperton and a core group of session musicians) that would make his biggest records.

Many listeners and critics now rank it alongside or above Thriller. The argument for it is consistency: there are fewer obvious singles, but the album flows as a whole, and its mood is more joyful and less guarded than what came after.

Play it front to back, ideally on good speakers or headphones. Pay attention to the bass and horns on Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough, the chord changes Temperton uses on Rock with You, and the space around the vocal on She's Out of My Life. If you only know the singles, try Working Day and Night and Burn This Disco Out, which show how hard the band could push.

In our quiz, Off the Wall represents the joyful, social, feeling-first personality. The album is the reason: it is music for dancing with other people, not for being watched.