By Darlene Donloe
Contributing Writer
LOS ANGELES — Before the world heard Michael Jackson again in a $1 billion biopic, Stephanie Spruill heard him at 3 a.m.
“I need a choir,” he told her in 1980. “Adults. And kids. Every race, creed and color.”
She built it. Then he asked for her soprano voice. “Can you feel it? Can you feel it?
That’s Spruill, soaring over “Can You Feel It” on Jackson’s “Off the Wall” album.
Forty-six years later, her alarm went off at 4:30 a.m. this time to teach an 11-year-old how to sound like Michael Jackson.
That boy was Juliano Valdi, who played the young Michael Jackson in the Lionsgate/Universal Pictures film “Michael” that opened April 24, and recently crossed the $1 billion mark in box office ticket sales. The film details the King of Pop’s life from his youth, through his hit solo career with “Off the Wall,” “Thriller” and “Bad.” The film ends in 1988 as he embarks on his “Bad” solo tour.
For five years, under non-disclosure agreements, Spruill coached Valdi and Jaafar Jackson — Michael’s nephew, Jermaine Jackson’s son — along with the cast playing the rest of the Jackson 5.
Valdi told CNN he worked “intensely” with Spruill until he perfectly mirrored Michael’s signature sound.
Her job, she said, wasn’t imitation. It was transmission.
“I told them there’s only one Michael Jackson,” Spruill said of her first meeting with “Michael” producer Graham King. “But I will give Juliano the nuances, the tone that he needs to be the young Michael Jackson.”
She delivered. When she saw the finished film, she wept.
“I just cried because I said, ‘I know him.’ And when I saw Juliano go out and sing for Berry Gordy, played by Larenz Tate in the movie, that’s really him singing. It’s not a track.”
Spruill doesn’t call herself a vocal coach. She calls herself an “artist developer, a frequency keeper.”
“I didn’t work with Jaafar to sound like Michael, only Juliano,” she said. “You work on the tone, his breath control, the way he shaped his mouth to make that tone come out. Juliano did the work. I teach people the way I would teach myself. Look at the lyrics. What do they mean? What’s the intent of each lyric? It’s about the intent of the song.”
She’s been inside Jackson’s music before. She played tambourine on “Dancing Machine.” Her voice threads through “This Place Hotel,” aka “Heartbreak Hotel.” And that 3 a.m. choir became the pulse of “Can You Feel It.”
“That’s when I started to talk with Michael Jackson, to hear his voice, to feel his frequency, to feel the energy,” she said. “I had a 45-person choir. Michael loved it. He loved my soprano. He asked me if I could go out and sing ‘Can You Feel It? Can You Feel It?’ In the song, that’s me.”
Decades later, she stood in the Hayvenhurst family estate in Encino, in the studio Michael built, coaching Jaafar.
“I told Jaafar, I could feel his uncle’s spirit in the recording studio that he had built on his property on his estate,” Spruill said. “The same one he wrote those hits in.”
For Spruill, the line between then and now isn’t nostalgia. It’s physics.
“He heard me,” she said. “He saw me. He could hear my frequency, and that goes through the genius of Michael Jackson. He not only did it for himself and the world, but I felt him and was so blessed to collaborate with him on that song, and for him to use my frequency, my high voice. It was a gift to work with Michael Jackson and to be on three of his major songs.”
Born in Los Angeles, one of nine kids, Spruill grew up listening to jazz.
“Every day was a jazz day,” she said.
Her dad played trumpet, her mom piano. She played cello; siblings played violin, viola, piano and trumpet.
At 3, she knew she’d sing.
She won a scholarship to the Eddie Canner Foundation, sang with the Young Saints, toured with Danny Kaye, and did the “Ed Sullivan Show.”
Lou Adler spotted her with the David T. Walker Band and put her on tambourine. Playing the tambourine and background work bought her home.
That home, in Altadena, is gone. So is Spruill House Music, her School of Voice & Artists Development. The Eaton Fire in January 2025 took them both.
“I lost all of my awards, the Grammy things, the NAACP award, plus a picture that Michael had written to me,” Spruill said. “All of the accolades I had displayed in my home — all that is gone. Now, I’m like a Phoenix coming out of the fire. I got through this by the grace of God.”
She didn’t tell director Antoine Fuqua about her ordeal until after she had completed what she was hired to do on the film. Through it all, she kept her 6 a.m. call times.
“While working on the film, I had to be up at 4:30 in the morning,” she said. “I was on the set at 6 in the morning until maybe 10 at night.”
Spruill’s credits read like a Who’s Who of entertainment: Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, John Legend, Chaka Khan, Mary J. Blige, Tina Turner, Julio Iglesias, Olivia Newton-John, Gino Vannelli, Donald Byrd, Glen Campbell, Donna Summer, Barbra Streisand, Elton John, Quincy Jones, Ricky Martin, David Bowie and Plácido Domingo.
You’ve heard her, even if you didn’t know her name. She’s on Irene Cara’s Grammy-winning “What A Feeling.” She’s moaning on Billy Idol records. She’s on “9 to 5.” She toured with Glen Campbell. She’s on Aretha Franklin’s “Jump to It,” and Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.” She wrote “Sweet Control” and “Nothing Lasts Forever” for Jon Lucien. The list is endless.
Her film work spans “Forrest Gump,” “Happy Feet” and “Inglourious Basterds.”
She has performed at the White House, for the emperor of Japan, the queen of England, and the king of Spain.
And she teaches.
Through Spruill House Music and her E-book “17 Points to Longevity in Show Business” — “the most comprehensive book of its kind,” she said. “Any serious young artists should use this book as a guide throughout their career.”
She’s writing another book, “Still, I Rise, Baby,” and developing a one-woman documentary on her life.
“It’s my mission to reach the world over and touch everyone with all the artistry in me,” Spruill said. “I have discovered that God and art are the links that bring me closer to my divine purpose, which is to pass it forward. I am an artist developer. I teach people how to be the best and do the best they can with what they have.”
Music means everything to Spruill.
“It’s everything,” said Spruill, a mother of one and grandmother to two. “It’s my life. It’s my breath. It’s my universal language. I’ve traveled all seven continents a couple of times. I learned that everybody loves music. That brings us together. There’s no color line. It’s all about music. That’s why it was such a gift and a full circle moment to work with the “Michael” cast.”
Darlene Donloe is a freelance reporter for Wave Newspapers who covers South Los Angeles. She can be reached at ddonloe@gmail.com.
