This song if severely under-rated. It's one of those songs where if anyone else did it'd be called "genius". It's a beautiful melody, a unique melody. It makes me wonder why people say that Invincible was too mainstream and seems like MJ was desperate for a hit. Why then would he include a song like this? I know, Invincible has been described as Michael's mid-life crisis. Some songs are definitely aimed at hitting the #1 while other songs are leave you "Speechless". It's a very hard album to understand. What was MJ trying to do with this album? Either was "Speechless" is a rare type of song. Especially for the King of POP. What sort of POP release has a song like this on it? I love it. What does everyone else think of it?

I think this song is beautiful. But I have to be in a certain mood to listen to it after the first seven excellent tracks on Invincible.

Yeah, it's gorgeous and a fine vehicle for his voice. What a performance!
Oh, hang on. It's from the Invincible album. I'm a deluded fan, obviously. I meant to say it's a pile of shit.

I think "Invincible' as a whole was somewhat underrated, and 'Speechless' was indeed one of the standout cuts. I think many problems undermined the album's success, such as bad promotion and the ultimate breakup with Sony, which meant no further single releases after 'Cry'.
But one of the reasons is also a bad choice of songs.'Invincible' just has way too many songs on it, many of which are very mediocre. If you would take out the good songs, you would have a good album. I know 'Dangerous' was also a 75 minute CD, but that one was brilliant (and also very underrated). Tracks like 'Threatened' or 'You are my life' really add nothing to the album, and come across as pale reworkings of other MJ-songs. 'Whatever Happens', Ýou Rock My World', '2000 Watts' or 'Speechless' are great however.

Cloudbuster said:

LOL ^ that's like so many people around here.

It's like on Speechless MJ just didn't give a fuck about what people thought and he just made the song he wanted to make. Same with The Lost Children and You Are My Life and "crap" like that. I hope he just does a full album one day where he just doesn't give a fuck and makes the music he wants to make.
[Edited 1/21/08 7:04am]

Gomp said:

I absolutely agree. Songs like "You Are My Life," "Privacy," "Cry," and "Threatened" should have been cut. The rest of the album is excellent, however, in particular the ballads and the first three dance songs.

Speechles opens and closes acapella ,the melody is simply breathtaking, and its one of the toughest songs to record according to MJ himself, try to sing the first few lines , its a hard song to sing ,,,I say that Mj did a great perfromance on the song.....its definitely underrated.

I like it, although he sounds like a woman on it.

DarlingDiana said:

I think that's why I favour a lot of his later work. It's more experimental and less commercial.
Oh, hang on. I'm a deluded fan. I meant to say everything post Bad is a pile of shit.

Cloudbuster said:

I agree, goosebumps. I never understood all the hate for Invincible anyway.

i think its a good track , perhaps lyric wise its not a stand out track and there are people who label it as disney like. problem with vince is the lack of strong dance tracks

motownlover said:

This is what Frank Kogan at The Village Voice wrote about the lack of the "usual" from MJ:

http://www.villagevoice.c...66,22.html

The Man in the Distance
Michael Jackson's Invincible
by Frank Kogan
November 28 - December 4, 2001
Michael Jackson
Invincible
Epic

An odd thing about Michael Jackson is that he has a totally spectacular voice but he doesn't feel the need to amaze us with it. At all. His favorite technique for conveying passion is to choke off his words. On dance songs he makes his voice as hard and compact as the percussion, reducing himself to icy shards and chilly wails. And when he lets loose with dazzling gospel-like displays, he undermixes these displays, letting them play in the background while drumbeats or simpler vocals take the spotlight. Or he'll just put whispers in the front of the mix, while scaling heights in the distance.

There are two types of songs on Invincible: sentimental ballads and dance tracks. Several of the ballads are very pretty; the rest are just restrained. Of course, it would never occur to me to write or listen to lyrics like "This one's for all the lost children, wishing them well/And wishing them home" or "You're my daytime my nighttime/My world/You're my life." But even if you're regularly moved to tears by children's faces on milk cartons, these lyrics will probably hit you as blanks. As I said, Michael's not throwing his voice into these songs; he's deliberately spare, doling out gorgeousness in bits. What grabs my attention about a song like "Butterflies" ("I would give you anything baby, just make my dreams come true/Oh baby you give me butterflies"—so, would he give her, like, caterpillars in exchange? birds?) isn't the melody but the weirdly ringing wrench-against-faucet clang on the backbeat. "Speechless" and "Cry" are very pretty, but they give the impression that Michael's standing sideways, so as to let the beauty slide off him.

But these days—while Michael's doing his chilly glide—Lil' Romeo is on continual play on Radio Disney gleefully yelling "I don't need a girlfriend" to the riff of an old Jackson 5 song, and Jay-Z's all over everywhere else using the very same song to proclaim himself Jay-hova, and Alien Ant Farm are on the rock stations rumbling cloddily through Michael's "Smooth Criminal," having a blast interpolating Michael yells. And *NSync in "Pop" are suckering themselves into thinking they're real by doing a Michael-like new-jack-restraint thing, but they nonetheless put forth more energy by twisting their voices and incorporating pops, blips, and boings from their Mr. Wizard chemistry set. So in this world of quasi-Michael expressiveness we've got Michael himself off on his Matterhorn doing a deliberately pale hard-snowshoe dance, and I wonder how—or if—he now registers on the popular eardrum.

He seems to have lost all interest in bouncy pop songs like "Billie Jean," much less ravers like "Beat It" or "Give In to Me." The closest on here is "Whatever Happens," with its Spanish guitar and eerie whistles. It follows on from the useless "Lost Children," and maybe he's trying to lead us from the missing kids to "Whatever happens, don't let go of my hand," with threat in his voice and intense sha-na-na-nas in the background—which in turn sets up the scary-monster song that follows at the end of the LP, except that Michael ruins the transition by audibly thanking guest guitarist Carlos Santana, as if to say, "Look whom I've got on my record." (Michael also got Rod Serling and Biggie Smalls to be guests, which says something about his clout.)

To really care about this album you have to be able to get into the pure hard sounds of the dance-track percussion and the way Michael tends to garnish them with his voice. He and Rodney Jerkins, who co-produced the dance numbers, pull in fuzzes and buzzes and whirs—the edginess of techno—truncated clangs, little frog-croaking bass notes. Back when Michael did all those spare Teddy Riley new-jack-swing tracks at the start of Dangerous, I'd thought he was trying to sound hard and contemporary and street. But now I think he's simply attracted to that kind of sound, and he does it better this time. He'll use strings to effectively not fill out (or not fill in) an arrangement. "You can't touch me, 'cause I'm untouchable"—as in can't be topped, or can't be reached. "You can't break me, 'cause I'm unbreakable." So the music sounds unbreakable, too. But then on the next track, he breaks: "[She] spoke with her body/Her only goal is just to take control/I can't believe that I can't tell her no." (Like back on "Billie Jean," he said that he was not her lover. But when she called him into her room . . . )

The cover shows his face in close-up, white-on-gray, but with the right eye darkly etched, from which I get the eerie feeling that he's looking at me rather than I at him. As always, he's the great poet of boundary problems. He asks the paparazzi, "Why do you go through so much/To get the story you need, so you can bury me?" but then at the end of the album he's the monster, the stalker: "You're trapped in halls, and my face is the walls/I'm the floor when you fall, and when you scream it's 'cause of me/I'm the living dead, the dark thoughts in your head . . . " Eminem couldn't have said it better (well, he could have, and has, but you get my point).

So: icy beauty, vacuous sentiment, visceral terror. A typical Michael Jackson album, but stripped of meat. I find extraordinary beauty in the fast songs, but I don't know if it's a beauty I'll ever care about. The beauty in previous Michael Jackson albums found me. But sometimes this took a while: I was several months into Bad before I suddenly felt it when he sang, "He came into her apartment/He left the bloodstains on the carpet"—but once I did, much of the album seemed deft, sharp, and sad.
[Edited 1/21/08 7:16am]

Cloudbuster said:

LOL.....

I love that song its great and easy 2 listen 2

Wow! Either there are a lot of hardcore MJ fans here or I really misjudged the general opinion of this song.

DarlingDiana said:

I think there are a lot of fans of his music on prince.org. Just don't start a thread on his personal life. The knives will come out then, LOL.

Rodya24 said:

yes they will

For some reason, I never felt Speechless. I don´t know why. Speaking about the less commercial stuff, I prefer Childhood and Gone Too Soon, which is a very powerful song, if you ask me and his voice is unbelievable on it.
[Edited 1/21/08 8:55am]

I think "Invicible", as well as "Speechless", were both very good. I would place "Invincible", within my top 3 favorite, MJ cds'. Off The Wall, being first, then Dangerous and then, Invincible. With that CD, he tried to give up the ghost of trying to top Thriller and just make a good CD. My favorite tracks include, "Speechless", "Break a dawn", and "Heaven can wait". It's a shame that some people regard it as trash.

Speechless was a good song. It just stood inbetween after the horrible Privacy and Cry and You Are My Life and 2000 Watts

Speechless is most definetly one of Mj's most underrated songs!

I could listen to that track from Invincible endlessly!

Speechless, speechless...that's how you make me feel....

a sappy horid song.

i think Invincible is generally an under-rated album on the whole sure it has a couple of songs which dont seem particularly amazing but it certainly only a couple of them

i love speechless though i have to say you need to be in the right mood for it

Speechless is the best song on the album and proof - if proof were needed - that he creates better work when he's by himself.

As has been stated a thousand times before, Invincible's falling point is the up-tempos. Privacy is ploddy and the so-called "anger" sounds contrived (compare it to his vocal delivery on TDCAU for example). Heartbreaker has a great middle-eight section with wonderful harmonies but the rest of the track has little melody to speak of. And the title track is just average.

The ballads are the albums saving grace.

Cloudbuster said:

Almost had it there.

Cinnie said: