Sheila E.: 'We Are the World' Producers Used Me to Try to Get Prince

The sessions have begun at A&M Studios in Hollywood, California on the night of January 28, 1985 and did not end until well after sunrise on the morning of January 29. By that point, it was clear that nothing like “We Are the World” could ever happen again. The Greatest Night in Popa new documentary on Netflix brings it all back to vivid life: co-writers Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie along with Stevie Wonder, Tina Turner, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and an impossibly long list of other superstars. crammed into a room to record the most jam-packed pose cut in human history, produced by Quincy Jones.

With the release of the new documentary — and the 39th anniversary of the recording — we've thrown our own look back at the seasonal mega-collab in the new episode of Rolling Stone Music now, speaking with Bao Nguyen, the director of the documentary. Quincy Jones' longtime collaborator Tom Bahler, who covered the vocals for “We Are the World.” and one of the singers of the evening, Sheila E. Here are some highlights. to listen to the full episode, go here for your podcast provider of choice, listen Apple Podcasts the Spotifyor just press play above.

Sheila E. felt cheated by the producers of the song. In the podcast, she expands on the revelations from the documentary, in which she explains that she felt duped by promises of a solo vocal part that never arrived. Instead, the producers kept pressuring her to call Prince, her close collaborator at the time, and have him come down to the session – which, of course, he never did. “Lionel and Quincy kept saying, 'Why don't you call the Prince,'” she says Rolling rock Music now. “Everyone in turn was trying to get me to call him back and get him to come down…. I just thought, wow, they were all my friends. That's cold-blooded.” (Lionel Richie, one of the producers of the new documentary, did not dispute Sheila E.'s account, according to Nguyen.)

Bruce Springsteen spoke about the documentary after Lionel Richie contacted him personally. “In a way, life imitated art,” says Nguyen, “because [the original song] they got all these artists to call each other to say, like, 'This is going to be a hit.'”

When it came to choosing parts for the many vocalists, Quincy Jones left the choices mostly to arranger Tom Bahler, but he had some final ideas of his own. “I have two requests,” Baller recalled Jones telling him. “One is, Lionel was the first to write this, he started it, so he should be the first voice we hear. Then, because Michael came in and they ended it together, Michael has to sing the first chorus. And then, that's his humor, he said, “And I think you should bring Diana into the second half of the first chorus, because some people think it's the same person.”

Much of the behind-the-scenes footage of the session had no sound — but the filmmakers were able to painstakingly restore the sound after learning that ZOE Magazine reporter David Breslin had kept his own lo-fi recordings of it all. “The producer of the record said to us, ‘Oh, let me address this ZOE magazine reporter and look what he's got,” Nguyen says. “It's like, 'Oh yeah, I've got hours and hours of my Dictaphone.' And so we were lucky.”

Viral TikToks suggesting Michael Jackson was unhappy with Huey Lewis' performance are not accurate. As the documentary explains in great detail, Lewis did not play his solo on the song prior to recording, when it became clear that Prince – who the producers had hoped would take the part – was never going to appear. If anything, Jackson's stoic expression during that part of the session merely reflected his own shyness and everyone's anxiety about the sudden change.

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