▼ THE DOSSIER & KEY ▼
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TRACK FILE
THE LOST CHILDREN
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>> THE READOUT :: WHAT THE RECORD SHOWS
ALBUM POSITION .... TRACK 14
SINGLE STATUS ..... NONE
RECORDED .......... ~NOV 2000
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WRITTEN BY ........ MJ, SOLE WRITER
SONY TRIED TO CUT . YES
IT STAYED ......... MJ REFUSED, WON
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one of only two songs Jackson wrote entirely alone. the label tried to remove it; he refused and won. and the man who arranged it says, on the record, he doesn't like it. all three facts are documented.
>> THE STORY :: THE DOCUMENTED HISTORY, ON THE WIRE
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01
~11.00
Recorded around November 2000 — fan-wiki sourced, not liner-note confirmed. □The session date circulating on the wire traces only to a fan wiki — no liner-note or press date was found to confirm it. Everything else on this page — the sample, the choir, the credits, the fight to keep it — happened downstream of roughly this month, even if the exact date isn't pinned down.
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02
SAMPLE
It opens on a Twilight Zone episode. ■The counting voices at the top — “97, 98, 99, 100... ready or not, here I come” — are sampled from the Twilight Zone episode “Kick the Can” (S3E21, 1962), credited in the liner notes: “Audio snippets from The Twilight Zone, courtesy of CBS Broadcasting Inc.” Jackson's nephew Taj has confirmed it was among Jackson's favorite episodes. ■
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03
CHOIR
The children's chorus is a real live choir. ■Not synthesized, not sampled — a live youth choir, conducted by Tom Bahler. The voices you hear are children in a room.
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04
RESOLVED
The “Prince” on the credits is his son. ■Not an unexplained collaborator — this is Prince Jackson, Michael's son, then roughly 3–4 years old. ⌜Aldo Cascio — of the Cascio family, Jackson's close inner circle through this period — also appears on the track.
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05
SONY TRIED TO CUT IT. HE REFUSED, AND WON. ■⌜Tommy Mottola attempted to remove “The Lost Children” from the tracklist during the final Miami sessions, citing the 1993 allegations as reason to avoid releasing anything Jackson had written about children. Jackson refused. The song stayed. The fuller Battle-narrative sits on ⌜Cascio's file.
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06
THE SPLIT
His favorite. The arranger's least favorite. Both on record. ■⌜Brad Buxer did the arrangement and names it one of his least favorite tracks he ever made with Jackson. Jackson named it one of his own favorites on the album. Both sides of that gap are sourced, not inferred. See the docked intercept for Buxer, candid.
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INTERCEPT ┤ N-06 — BUXER, UNVARNISHED
> BUXER, on the track he arranged: “I did the arrangement on it. I don't even like it, you know. It's weird to me. I don't get it.”
> “It's not something — it's not a Stranger in Moscow... he already had all the ideas in mind… and I just sort of executed it for him.”
REPORTED SPEECH, NOT VERBATIM · Brad Buxer, interview account · press ▤
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? OPEN QUESTION — SOURCING
Frank Cascio's memoir, the documented source for the Sony-cut story above, is a source this site is currently weighing more carefully following an unresolved personal/legal dispute involving Cascio (see his person file). This doesn't undo the sourced facts on this page; it's a caution about how much weight to place on the memoir going forward. This site does not detail the underlying dispute here, which is outside its scope. Fuller context on Cascio's own person file.
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