super groovy delicious bite: like a prayer

Madonna poured her personal pain into the music and made her most powerful artistic statement with this controversial pop confession. The increasing success of her first three albums ('Madonna', 'Like A Virgin', and 'True Blue') had made her an international superstar; but, at the same time, her marriage with Sean Penn was falling apart. The real life drama of their relationship fed into the creative process for her next album.

Madonna would reveal: "I sort of get into certain kinds of moods. And then all the songs I write come out of that mood. I don’t say to myself, Now I’m going to be in that mood. It just happens...Listen to a song like "Like a Virgin," and then listen to "Live to Tell." There’s a different mood in each one. They’re the same person, but it’s just my desire to focus on something different because of a mood I’m in. All the changes in my so-called image are just different facets of me. It’s a matter of what you choose to focus on and how deeply you want to go into it. It’s a matter of being specific, I guess...[The press focus on image over music] used to annoy me, but now it doesn’t anymore. Because somehow I feel that, as much as people complain and moan and groan and criticize me, they’re affected by me. I’ve touched a nerve in them somehow...I didn’t have the censors on me in terms of emotions or music. I did take a lot more chances with this one, but obviously success gives you the confidence to do those things...Sometimes, the music is sort of there, already written by either Pat Leonard or Stephen Bray. They give it to me and it inspires or insinuates a lyric or feeling. Then I write out the words in a free form, and we change the music to fit the form. Other times I’ll start out with lyrics, or I’ll have written a poem and I’ll want to put that to music. Then I end up changing the words a little bit to make them more musical. Sometimes I’ll hear the melody in my head. I don’t write music and I don’t read music, so I’ll go to Pat Leonard, who is an extremely talented musician, and I’ll sing it to him and make him play it, making chords out of it. Then I write the words to the song...I write all the lyrics myself... I’ve worked with live musicians before, but this is the first time they were all together in one room, and we did most of the basic tracks with a band playing right there. I sang with them too, and we ended up keeping a lot of those vocals. It made it different, because obviously when the musicians are playing with you, you respond differently from when the track is already done, and you’re by yourself with the headphones on, overdubbing things. This approach was more integral to the music. I mean, we had every intention of going back and fixing the vocals, but then we’d listen to them and say, 'Why? They’re fine.' They were a lot more emotional and spontaneous when I did them with the musicians. It’s probably because I didn’t feel the pressure of knowing that this was going to be the final vocal. So I decided not to go back and clean them up. There are weird sounds that your throat makes when you sing: p’s are popped, and s’s are hissed, things like that. Just strange sounds that come out of your throat, and I didn’t fix them. I didn’t see why I should. Because I think those sounds are emotions too...I wrote a lot of songs for the album, and then I went through a process of editing what I was going to keep or not. I feel that there is something that links all the songs together, a common theme having to do with Catholicism, family, relationships, things like that. I had written a lot of other songs, but I didn’t feel they went with the theme, so I cast them aside...My first couple of albums I would say came from the little girl in me, who is interested only in having people like me, in being entertaining and charming and frivolous and sweet. And this new one is the adult side of me, which is concerned with being brutally honest."

'Like a Prayer' went to number four in Australia; and number one in Austria, Brazil, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and the US. The album has sold more than fifteen million copies worldwide.

super groovy delicious bite

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

like a prayer

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