Like so many of his songs, George Michael’s Father Figure has had quite the life. Recorded for his 1987 debut album, Faith, it became the record’s fourth single, reaching number one in the US.
Then, following the pattern of other hits of that era, it enjoyed a second life on TikTok, going viral after being used in daring 2024 Nicole Kidman thriller, Babygirl.
But that’s not the end of the story. Last week we learned that Taylor Swift’s upcoming 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl, also features a song called Father Figure, and that Michael is credited as a writer.
The signs are that this isn’t a cover - The Daily Mail reports that leaked lyrics indicate that Swift’s are different - so we’re guessing that some kind of sampling or interpolation has been going on.
However, it turns out that the original Father Figure could itself have sounded very different - and possibly not have enjoyed the same commercial impact or staying power - had it not been for one of those happy studio accidents that we hear about so often.
Speaking to Fred Bonson for The Billboard book of number one hits, from 1992, Michael explained how Father figure could have ended up sounding “totally different” if he’d stuck to his original blueprint.
“The initial concept for Father Figure was to make it a kind of mid-tempo dance track,” he said. “And what happened was I wanted to hear something in my mix so I happened to cut out the snare on the board and suddenly it changed the whole entire mood of the track.
“Suddenly it seemed really dreamy. And this was halfway through writing it because I was writing the song as I was going along in the studio. And I just thought, ‘well, hey, this is actually much better!’ So I worked the rest of the feel of the track around this spacey type sound. And it ended up, in my mind, being the most original-sounding thing on the album.”
Michael would tell a similar story in 2010 when he was interviewed by DJ Mark Goodier for the liner notes for the Faith: Legacy Edition album reissue.
“Do you know what’s interesting about the making of that song? It started off with a rhythm track with a snare, and when you play it like that it sounds a bit like Prince,” he said. “But I must have been listening to it without the snare and gone, ‘Oh my God, that totally changes the record!’ It suddenly becomes a gospel record.”
You can hear what he means. Add snares to the two and four beats in Father Figure and it sounds much more generic, but take them out and the whole feel of the song changes. Throw in a gospel choir and a breathy, Middle Eastern-sounding synth riff and you’ve got a soulful, off-kilter classic.
And with his ear for a hit, Michael knew he was onto something as soon as he lost that snare: “A couple of things in my career have been a complete accident, where I stumbled upon the sound,” he told Goodier. “I know when something resonates, and one of my saving graces is that I can hear something when I stumble upon it. When I’m actually going for something else, on the way to a different sound, I have the ability to stop and say, ‘No. Actually, that’s much better.’ It’s tiny little things like that that make a record, I think.”
Whatever magic Michael made in Father Figure, it seems that Taylor Swift has now heard it too, but it seems likely that we’ll have to wait until 3 October - the day The Life of a Showgirl is released - to find out what she’s done with it.
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