Credit: Spotify
Sun 24 May 2026 14:00, UK
They say never to meet your heroes, and George Michael might have agreed with that, being the unsuspectingly shy guy he was, but then Aretha Franklin walked into the room.
As it did at every turn, her presence set the room to a standstill, and no one could quite believe what they were seeing – the ‘Queen of Soul’ was right there in the flesh – a moment, for Michael, that both solidified the stratospheric status of his own fame while also terrifying him, but she was actually there to see him.
They had a single to record, after all. That was as unbelievable to the former Wham frontman as it perhaps was to the rest of the world, so much so that he had genuinely attempted to pass off the collaboration to both Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder first, too scared to be confronted by the greatness that was Franklin herself.
But alas, the duet role on the song ‘I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)’ fell back to him, and as such, he had no choice but to face the woman he regarded in the holy air of his musical hero. It was fear, of course, but there was a true humility about it, too. “Basically, about two years ago, I was asked if I would like to produce and write something for Aretha – there was no talk of singing then,” Michael said at the time. “And at the time I just didn’t think I could do it.”
Yes, even the concept of writing a song fit for the queen, where he likely wouldn’t have needed to have much contact with her at all, was too much for the pop star to cope with at first. Michael subsequently had to find a way of declining the offer of a lifetime without it coming across as offensive – not an easy task when Franklin was involved.
“I said I’d love to,” he nervously explained, “but Aretha was my favourite female singer of all time, and I just didn’t think I could sit behind a desk and tell her what to do. I didn’t have the confidence, and at that time I’d only just started producing.” Was it a bullshit excuse? Who knows, but Michael wasn’t going to worm his way out that easily.
Naturally, it took the voice of the woman herself to finally convince him. “But we spoke on the phone then for the first time and agreed it would be nice to do something on record,” Michael conceded, possibly with a bead of sweat running down his forehead at the memory. “After that, it was just a matter of getting sorted out which song it was.”
Further reading: From The Vault
As such, ‘I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)’ was born out of two days in a studio in Detroit in May 1986. The eagle-eyed may point out that this fell merely a month before Michael’s final farewell concert with Wham, just a month later, and under this lens, you could argue that his collaboration with Franklin was all the more essential in this regard.
Michael was already well and truly a transcendent star in his own right – he didn’t need Franklin to back him up for that, but the sheer fact of her cajoling him to work with her was symbolic of the leap he was about to take, both in treading new ground alongside the greatest female singer to ever exist, and in the scores of his own seismic career. In short, it was a very good year.
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