Rob Thomas Details How Clive Davis Passed on George Michael and Bon Jovi for “Smooth” Vocal

The late Clive Davis had George Michael and Jon Bon Jovi on a shortlist to sing “Smooth,” but not because he thought they’d do a better job. He just hadn’t yet trusted the voice on the demo. That voice was Rob Thomas, who co-wrote the song with Itaal Shur and had only intended to be its writer—until Carlos Santana and Davis made a different call.

“We were sitting in his office debating whether George Michael or Jon Bon Jovi should sing it,” Thomas writes in a new essay for Rolling Stone. “But Carlos was like, ‘I like this guy’s voice,’ and Clive loved the idea of getting this older generation guitar player together with newer generations.” Thomas has said before that he had Michael in his head while cutting the demo, mimicking his cadence. There’s a version of “Smooth” where that logic held. The one the world got, with Thomas up front, spent 12 weeks at No. 1 and helped push Supernatural to 30 million sales.

The anecdote isn’t just trivia. It frames Davis’s core working method: bet on feel, not on résumés. Thomas points to a second moment, during the making of Santana’s 2002 album Shaman. Davis recorded Tina Turner on “The Game of Love,” then decided her presence wasn’t the right fit opposite Carlos and swapped her for Michelle Branch. “Only Clive would get the magic of Tina Turner on a track then have the wherewithal to say, ‘I’m not sure this is the right look for Carlos.’”

For Thomas, that instinct marks the close of something larger. “Losing Clive is the end of an era,” he writes, noting the gulf between Davis’s self-guided taste and today’s algorithm-fed label decisions. “If you come to a label or a management company today they present you with a five-page report on your fan base, how they skew, and what brands they buy. I’m sure Clive was aware of those things, but they never informed what he did.”