Donny Osmond recalls Michael Jackson’s blunt career | Music News

Donny Osmond says Michael Jackson once gave him advice that was tough to hear during a low level in his career back in the Eighties.

On July 30, the 67-year-old singer shared a clip from his look on The Adam Carolla Show, where he mirrored on how exhausting it was to transition into grownup radio in the Eighties after his early success.

Osmond had first risen to fame with his brothers Alan, Wayne, Merrill, and Jay as half of The Osmonds in the Seventies, before branching into a solo career and co-hosting the hit selection collection Donny & Marie with his sister.

“The name Donny Osmond was a joke, years ago,” Osmond said in the interview. “I mean, if you said you like Donny Osmond music, you were ousted.”

Osmond explained that when his 1988 single Soldier of Love started circulating in New York, radio stations hesitated to affiliate it with him. “In fact, WPLJ in New York, they got a hold of ‘Soldier of Love’ as an import,” he remembered. “They played the record to test it because they liked the song, but they just didn’t want to say my name.”

The battle with his identify had been identified years earlier by Michael Jackson. Osmond recalled a dialog from 1983, when Jackson had lately launched his solo career to large success with Thriller.

“I remember asking him, ‘Mike, how do I get back on the charts?’” Osmond said. “He said, ‘Your name’s poison, Donny. You gotta change your name.’” Osmond admitted: “It was very offensive. It was tough to hear that. But he was right, because in ‘89, radio stations all across the country played my music, but didn’t say my name.”

“They did me a favor by not saying who I was, and it became a hit. Then they found out it was me,” he explained. Soldier of Love went on to attain quantity 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, giving Osmond his sixth and last top 10 single. He adopted it with “Sacred Emotion,” which peaked at quantity 13 in 1989. His last major chart entry got here in 1990, when “My Love Is a Fire” hit quantity 21.

DON’T MISS:

The tremendous loving cause Michael Jackson would cowl his youngsters’s faces

Donny Osmond leaves British presenter crimson confronted as he corrects her on live TV

Donny Osmond shares ‘inevitable’ retirement plans on The View after residency

Although his industrial peak ended, Osmond continued performing steadily. He offered the singing voice for Captain Li Shang in Disney’s Mulan (1998), starred in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in 1999, and later returned to the manufacturing in 2023 as the Pharaoh in Edinburgh. He also loved an 11-year Las Vegas residency with Marie.

Reflecting on his bond with Jackson, Osmond said: “If you look at the Osmonds and the Jackson 5, the comparisons of the two families are just uncanny. There are nine children in each family. Mike and I are both the seventh child of nine. Our mothers’ birthdays are on the same day. Michael and I are the same age.

“We would get together and just laugh and reminisce about the comparisons and the similarities,” he recalled. “Michael said one thing to me sooner or later, and he said, ‘Donnie, you’re the only particular person on this planet that is aware of what my childhood is like,'” he remembered.