Behind Jackson's Life and Lyrics
What do Michael Jackson's lyrics say about him as a person?
"Early Show" weather anchor and features reporter Dave Price sat down with one of Jackson's music collaborators, Glen Ballard, who co-wrote "Man in the Mirror," and music critic Steven Ivory, to discuss Jackson's music and what they saw as the troubled, complicated man behind it.
Ivory said on "The Early Show" Tuesday, Jackson's complexity as a person can be discerned best in the pop star's lyrics.
Ivory, who was 15 when he met Michael Jackson, said Jackson wrote about his feelings.
"It was always about the groove if it was an up tempo thing," Ivory told Price. "But he just wrote what he felt."
Jackson often wrote about what he felt in the branches of a tree at his former California home, Neverland Ranch.
"I call it my giving tree," Jackson had said. "Because I like to write songs up there. I've written many songs up there."
Jackson wrote about universal themes like love, pain and hope, Price said, but his ideals of change and healing were often at odds with what was happening in Jackson's own life.
"It's quite interesting in pop music," Ivory said. "Some of the most inspiring songs come from artists who don't always live that way."
Ballard said Jackson's music is "enormously graceful and vibrant and sexy all at the same time," reflecting the King of Pop's soul.
"He really was sharing his fantasies, his dreams," Ballard said. "His hurt, everything he had."
In a 60 Minutes interview, Jackson said his most honest song he'd ever written was "Childhood," with autobiographical lyrics about what Ivory calls the "bittersweet angst" Jackson endured as an adult.
Ivory said, "What a clever and tragic title."
But how will Jackson be remembered -- by his music, his life -- or both?
"What's left is this legacy of great music," Ivory said, "And also this legacy of this darkness and this dysfunction that affects a little of all of us, and we all have a little in us. And hopefully we can just balance the two as we go through life."