A dream, a call, and two conflicting timelines. ▤

Carole Bayer Sager calls Jerkins the morning after a dream where she saw Jackson in a red shirt through a glass studio window; he arrives at her Bel Air home to find the dream's exact image waiting. Jerkins' own account (three interviews) dates the first session to February 1999 ▤; Bayer Sager's memoir gives February 2000 instead ■ — a year's discrepancy between two credible, named sources, presented side by side rather than resolved. New this round: DamienShields.com independently corroborates 1999 ■, with named, on-record quotes from Jerkins, Jackson himself, Sony's Cory Rooney, engineer Michael Prince, Fred Jerkins III, and LaShawn Daniels — three-plus voices landing on the same early-1999 sequence with no acknowledgment of a 2000 date. Doesn't disprove a later-written memoir simply misdating an event, but it's a meaningfully asymmetric weight of evidence now.

The commitment: "dig deep." ▤

Jackson asks Jerkins directly, "Will you commit yourself to working with me?" and warns him to "dig deep." Jerkins commits — for what becomes roughly the next three years.

The call comes when he's 22. ■

Already the Darkchild of Brandy's "The Boy Is Mine" and Destiny's Child's "Say My Name," Jerkins is brought in as the new-blood engine of the comeback — the youngest chair at the table, handed the biggest job on it.

The rejection, in full — twenty songs, zero survivors. ■

Per Carole Bayer Sager's eyewitness account, Jerkins' first submission was 20 songs; Jackson rejected every one, unsatisfied with strong material and insecure without Quincy Jones helming the project. Neither song she personally co-wrote with Jerkins made the final album.

INTERCEPT ┤ N-04 — BAYER SAGER, ON THE REJECTION

> on the first batch: “They all sounded like Michael, but Michael in 2000, not 1987.”
> JACKSON, per Bayer Sager, on why he kept sending it back: “Dig deeper... come up with your very, very, very best work.”
> on watching it happen: “I started to feel guilty about what I saw happening to Rodney... I had seen it happen before — with Teddy Riley, Jimmy Jam, and Terry Lewis.”

DIRECT QUOTES · Bayer Sager memoir, They're Playing Our Song (2016) · documented ■

Initial friction, and the junkyard method. ▤

Jackson wants something "edgier" and "more futuristic," with songwriter Cory Rooney advising on direction. His instruction becomes "Go to the junkyard and hit on things and make sounds" — Jerkins and his cousin bring bats and DAT recorders to sample industrial scrap and motorcycle engines for bass.

INTERCEPT ┤ N-05 — THE SOUND HE ASKED FOR

> JACKSON, hearing a crane through a car window in Manhattan: "I need you to sample that."
> JACKSON, on the standard he wanted: "I want something the ear has never heard before. Hurt me."

REPORTED SPEECH, NOT VERBATIM · as told in later interviews · press ▤

Sony moves the sessions to New York — to watch. ▤

Sony relocates production from LA to New York to "keep an eye on things"; Jerkins works the Hit Factory while Buxer and Riley hold down their own locations across town, Jackson circulating between all three. The full three-way arrangement — and the deliberate competition behind it — is Phase II's file.

Two years, three cities, dozens of tracks cut for sixteen slots. ■

Hit Factory New York, Criteria Miami, his own rooms in New Jersey — the Darkchild camp works the sessions nearly the entire span of the project, rebuilding tracks over and over as the bar keeps moving. The full session sprawl is Phase II's file.

INTERCEPT ┤ N-07 — THE SESSIONS, IN HIS WORDS

> JERKINS, on the volume: they cut far more music than the record could hold — whole songs, finished, that no one has heard.
> on the standard: Michael kept sending tracks back — not wrong, just not ahead enough. "Threatened" survived because it sounded like the future.

REPORTED SPEECH, NOT VERBATIM · as told in later interviews · press ▤

Mottola's approach, before the publishing deal was signed. ⚠︎

Mottola calls Jerkins' family home directly, offering a Sony/ATV publishing deal; Jerkins signs with EMI instead, and Mottola "called back like two weeks later and cursed me out." Told only from Jerkins' side — no independent corroboration found.

Ten or eleven songs, planned — sixteen, delivered. ▤

Jackson's stated plan throughout was to keep the album to ten or eleven songs; by the end it swelled to fifteen or sixteen as additional tracks were added. Per Jerkins, the extra material diluted the record.

INTERCEPT ┤ N-09 — JERKINS, ON THE BLOAT

> JACKSON's stated plan, per Jerkins: “I'm only gonna have 10 to 11 songs.”
> JERKINS, on what shipped instead: “There were songs that just shouldn't have been on there and we knew that. Cut four or five and it would have been such a solid album.”

REPORTED SPEECH, NOT VERBATIM · as told in later interviews · press ▤

Jackson's advice: get into publishing. ▤

Off to the side of the sessions themselves, Jackson advised Jerkins to get into publishing as a way to sustain and build other businesses.

INTERCEPT ┤ N-10 — JACKSON, ADVICE OFF THE RECORD

> “Get into the publishing business... that's the way you really can sustain and build different businesses.”

REPORTED SPEECH, NOT VERBATIM · as told in later interviews · press ▤

Three t-shirts a song, every song, all out. ▤

In the vocal booth, Jackson danced so hard that headphones came off and he sweated through three t-shirts per song — "every song," "all out," per Jerkins.

HIS SINGLE OPENS THE CAMPAIGN — AND THE CAMPAIGN IS THE STORY. ▤

"♪You Rock My World" goes to radio in August 2001 and pulls a top-ten Hot 100 run on airplay heat. What the label does — and stops doing — with everything after it is Phase III's whole file.

His own estimate: "an easy, easy 25 million." ⚠︎

Jerkins believes the album could have done "an easy, easy 25 million" with a tour and full promotional support, versus the roughly 8–10 million it's estimated to have sold lifetime — his own speculation, not a documented sales projection.

The last producer to chart with him. ▤

Jerkins learns of Jackson's death in his studio in 2009. He notes he was the last producer to have a charting song with Jackson while he was alive.

Inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. ■

June 2025: Jerkins is inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame — a career capstone that sits well outside the Invincible era but is worth carrying here as the most recent line on his record.