It’s come to this.
Way back on May 2, 2010 I reported exclusively that in the summer of 2007 Michael Jackson recorded vocals over songs written by family friend Eddie Cascio at his New Jersey home. The Estate accepted the vocals as genuine, and they were.
But crazy fans wouldn’t hear of it. So they filed a class action suit against the Estate that has dragged on for years. They ruined the album that three of the songs were included on, and poisoned everything around the recordings.
Two weeks ago, knowing a settlement was coming, the Estate pulled the songs off of streaming services. This seems to have been part of the settlement. I do not know if the Estate actually paid something to these warped fans. But today the settlement was announced. The Estate didn’t want to keep fighting with these people while they’ve got a hit Broadway show, a movie in development, and so on.
Poison is the right word here. These fans hated the Cascio family for being Michael’s surrogate family when he was alive. But Michael loved these people, there was no question about it. There’s also no question that he recorded the vocals on Eddie’s songs that he wrote with James Porte. I actually heard the songs with James’s original vocals a year earlier. They were very good songs. They still are. But now they’ve been forced into obscurity.
By the way, experts verified that the vocals were Michael’s. His security guards wrote in their book that they’d seen Michael working with Eddie Cascio in his basement studio. Even with all the accusations, no one has turned up saying they were the real singer, like a Jackson impersonator. The fans won’t accept that this is what Michael sounded like in 2007.
