ROD TEMPERTON lived his life outside the spotlight, largely by design, but also by happenstance. He wrote several delicious funk and soul hits for HEATWAVE in the late 1970s but quit the band at the peak of its fame because he didn't feel like playing live anymore. He went on to became a top-shelf songwriter, with some of the most enduring copyrights of the 1980s but also with the unique achievement of having written the two songs on MICHAEL JACKSON's THRILLER that no one remembers. He was the guy in QUINCY JONES' inner circle that you only knew about because you read the small print in the album credits. Later in life, while continuing to work, he earned the nickname "MR. INVISIBLE" along with headlines like "Have you seen Rod Temperton?" By all indications, he didn't want to be seen. The reason people bothered to ask, of course, is that TEMPERTON, who died last week—fittingly, his death went unreported for several days—also wrote the title song of JACKSON's two greatest albums, including a little ditty called "THRILLER." And "ROCK WITH YOU." And this. And this. And this. And so many other tracks that helped define the sound of '80s pop. He was, as THE GUARDIAN worded it, "the effortless orchestrator of the perfect pop illusion." His lyrics were simple odes to dance and romance, more functional than poetic; he said he hated writing them. His melodies, beats and arrangements were indelible, often transcendent, odes to dance and romance. The stuff of perfect pop. "It just came straight out of him," Quincy Jones said Wednesday, "as if it were second nature." Any songwriter will tell you it's never as easy as that. But the best of them, including Temperton, make it sound like it is. RIP... A great BBC RADIO 2 documentary on Temperton from a decade ago... "BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY" in VR... An augmented-reality synthesizer... THE DECEMBERISTS crowdfund a board game... LAVA RECORDS CEO JASON FLOM fights for the wrongfully convicted.