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SeekingThrill

Madonna Genesis

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MADONNA

1980:

Madonna teams up with her old college boyfriend, Stephen Bray (who had just moved to NYC looking for work), as she needed a drummer for her new band and they form a number of groups together: The Millionaires, Modern Dance, Emmemon, and finally Emmy. They live and rehearse in the Music Building on 8th Avenue. Eventually, they start working together - without the rest of their band – to write music and record demos. (Madonna by Andrew Morton)

1981:

According to Bray (in an article written by Bruce Baron for Goldmine Magazine in 1999), he and Madonna wrote the songs this year for the demo that will eventually land her a deal with Sire Records.

1982:

February: Madonna fires her manager Camille Barbone this month for "taking too long to get me a recording deal." Camille had been Madonna's manager for almost a year and (according to Barbone) was close to getting her a deal with Columbia Records. (Madonna, Andrew Morton)

March: According to several of the unauthorized bios (but contrary to Bray's recollection), Madonna spent the spring of 1982 putting together a demo tape of 4 tracks to shop around to club DJ's. She does this by resuming her musical collaboration with Steve Bray – she working out the lyrics and he focusing on melody, chord progression and and chords. After several weeks work, they felt they had enough material to ask a couple of the musicians who had worked with her over the previous 18 months to help them record a demo tape. They took over a studio and recorded a 4-track demo for her to take around town. These four tracks:
 

 “Burning Up”" Correction: "Don't You Know?"
• “Everybody”
• “Ain't No Big Deal”
• An early version “Stay” - which will later combine its chorus with “Don’t You Know” [verses] and appear on Like A Virgin)

 

April: Madonna meets DJ Mark Kamins at Danceteria. They enjoy a brief sexual relationship and Madonna persuades him to play her song "Everybody" at the club. Kamins - either by being genuinely impressed by her demo or just pussy-whipped - takes her songs to Chris Blackwell at Island Records. Blackwell passes on the tape and after a meeting with Madonna tells Kamins later that "she smells too bad."


 

Undetered, Kamins takes the tape to Sire Records. Seymour Stein (the president of Sire) shows muted interest initially but assigns A&R executive Michael Rosenblatt to check it out. Rosenblatt listens to the tape and says it's "ok, but not great" and agrees to sign Madonna to a 2-song deal for $15,000 (some reports say $5,000). He also says that Kamins and Madonna must pay the professional recording costs out of her advance. Also of note, Rosenblatt says in an interview with Andrew Morton that it was "Ain't No Big Deal" on the initial demo that got her the contract, not "Everybody." However, those were the two songs he wanted them to professionally record for release.

Kamins is allowed to produce the songs – a move which infuriates Steve Bray who wanted producer credit for tracks that he had help write. Since Kamins had an arrangement with Madonna that he would produce for her if he got her a record deal with a label, her hands were somewhat tied and it is not believed that she made the choice of who would produce at this time.(Madonna, Andrew Morton)

 

May/SUMMER: Madonna and Kamins record both songs for release on Sire. There is reportedly trouble in the studio as Kamins was not a very experienced producer and had trouble directing Madonna in her studio singing. As a result, "Ain't No Big Deal" is considered the weaker of the two songs after all was said and done, and Rosenblatt decides to release "Everybody" instead (as both the A and B sides of the single), relegating "Ain't No Big Deal" to the vaults for the time being. (Madonna, Andrew Morton) <--- Despite coming from an unauthorized bio, I think this is probably very accurate. It seems weird that Sire would ditch a second recorded track and also not ask Kamins to produce the rest of the album later on.

October 6: "Everybody" is released commercially and serviced to the dance club circuit. The single cover does not feature Madonna (it is an illustration by her friend Martin Burgoyne), and this was reportedly not by accident. Many at Sire realized Madonna sounded "black" and therefore, the single was initially worked heavily at WKTU in NYC - a station known for its heavy black and Latino listener demographic. Fab 5 Freddy - a graffitti artist and rapper at the time - said in an interview that all the young black and Puerto Rican kids were listening to this song on their boomboxes in the street. He said they - along with the gay dance club patrons - were her first core audience. The single is a minor hit and ends up selling 80,000 copies despite limited radio airplay. (Madonna, Andrew Morton, 2001) <---- How ironic considering her response at urban radio now!


 

LATER: "I was living on the Upper West Side, 99th and Riverside, and about 7:00 at night I had the radio on in my bedroom, on WKTU, and I heard “Everybody”. I said 'Oh, my God, that's me coming out of that box.' It was an amazing feeling.

—Madonna talking about hearing "Everybody" first time on radio to Rolling Stone magazine

 

October/November: Madonna (aggressively) gets to know everyone at Sire and what they do there. She accompanies Sire's dance department head, Bobby Shaw, around the NYC club circuit while he does "milk runs" (dropping by to plug Sire artists with local DJ's). During one of these runs at the dance club, The Funhouse, Madonna meets one John "Jellybean" Benitez DJing there. They hit it off and will begin dating later on, however a professional relationship takes root almost immediately. (Madonna, Andrew Morton, 2001)

November: After some (initial) good dance club response to “Everybody,” Seymour Stein and Michael Rosenblatt offer Madonna a record contract to do a full-length album. They decide that “Burning Up” should be the next single, however they prefer having a different producer (other than Kamins) at the helm of the project. Although it is not clear if it is Warner’s disappointment or Madonna’s that “Ain’t No Big Deal” didn’t turn out better, Mark Kamins is not considered for the job of producing the rest of the album. Warner brings in Reggie Lucas, a black songwriter and producer who had scored a #1 R&B hit (and won a Grammy award for Best R&B Female Performance) for Stephanie Mills’ “I Never knew Love Like This Before” one year earlier. (if you listen to this song by Mills, the opening has a signature bell-sound that is very close to the opening of "Borderline" - I am assuming this is NOT a coincidence since Lucas wrote both tracks)


 

Lucas brings in two songs for the album – “Borderline” and “Physical Attraction” – that he wrote. These tracks, along with Madonna’s “Everybody,” “Burning Up” and a new song she had just recently written about Mark Kamins called “Lucky Star” (her reportedly nickname for him since he landed her a recording deal) – all which became the foundation for the new album. They will later add "Think of Me" and "I Know It" (written by Madonna) during these recording sessions. (Madonna, Andrew Morton, 2001)

 

LATER: According to Steve Bray (Goldmine Article by Bruce Baron, 1999), Madonna wrote “Physical Attraction” on her own, but he assumes there must have been some kind of deal to give Lucas 100% writing credit. Bray says he clearly remembers Madonna having written that song and the US Copyright office also shows Madonna as the only songwriter. Bray also reveals that “Everybody” was credited solely to Madonna even though it was a Bray/Madonna collaboration. He said they had an agreement that she would take full writing credit for “Everybody” and in return he would get full writing credit for “Ain’t No Big Deal.”

 

November 17-23: Madonna goes to Sigma Sound Studios in New York City to begin her work on the debut album. There she records several rough versions of “Burning Up” and “Physical Attraction.” The latter is decided to be the B-side of the “Burning Up” single.

December 16: Madonna performs “Everybody” live for the first time ever at Haoui Montaug’s No Entiendes cabaret show at Danceteria tonight. SEE VIDEO HERE Seymour Stein, Michael Rosenblatt and other Sire personnel are present. Although they are not “bowled over” by her live performance, they decide that Madonna has a strong visual presence and deserves a music video. Rosenblatt contacts Ed Steinberg and offers him $1500 to make a music video for the “Everybody” single. Despite the well-known reports of the video being shot at Danceteria, it was actually shot at the Paradise Garage (a gay club in NYC) because they allowed them to shoot there for free. The video isn’t serviced to MTV, but does get play in clubs across the U.S. which helps the single on the dance chart. (Madonna, Andrew Morton, 2001)


1983:

January: At some point this month, Madonna does a series of live show dates around NYC – particularly at the Roxy and also at the Peppermint Lounge. She sings “Everybody” and “Physical Attraction.”

February: Madonna travels with Mark Kamins to the UK to drum-up club support for her upcoming single, “Burning Up.” She performs for the first time ever in the UK at the Hacienda Club in Manchester. The audience (reportedly) does not respond well. She also promotes in London at a club called Heaven, as well as Camden Palace and the Beatroot Club.

February (mid-to-late): Upon returning to NYC, Madonna begins finishing her debut album by finishing the recordings for several tracks. During the production process, Madonna had different ideas and concepts for the album but Lucas went ahead and produced it his way. Keyboardist Fred Zarr (who was the keyboard player in these studio sessions and who also played on the original 4-song demo with “Everybody” that got Madonna signed) said that Madonna and Lucas were constantly at loggerheads in the studio. He says that Madonna felt Lucas largely “overproduced” the tracks, and she preferred a simplier, more direct kind of sound.


 

Madonna, unsatisfied with the finished product, took the completed album to her friend John “Jellybean” Benitez who remixed and re-arranged several of the tracks including “Burning Up,” “Lucky Star” and “Physical Attraction.” Madonna also decided that she wanted the newly recorded version (done with Lucas) of “Ain’t No Big Deal” to be the single to launch the album in the summer (to come after “Burning Up” was released). However, Steve Bray (still angry with Madonna over the producer situation) had already given the song to a female disco group named Barracuda on Epic Records who were recording it for their album.

In a panic for another track, Madonna turned to now-boyfriend Jellybean for help. Jellybean had a song that he had the rights to, called “Holiday.” Phyllis Hyman, who was currently recording for Arista, had already passed on the song. He played it for Mary Wilson (of The Supremes) and she passed on it as well. Only days after she turned it down, there was a problem with one of the eight songs that were slated for the Madonna album, and they had to find another track. Jellybean convinced Madonna to record “Holiday.” (Madonna, Andrew Morton, 2001)

 

March 9: Sire releases “Burning Up/Physical Attraction” today. The single cover is designed by Madonna’s friend and illustrator Martin Burgoyne from photographs of Madonna taken by David Cunningham. Almost immediately after, Madonna does a small club tour (3-song routine) in NYC and in Florida – in Fort Lauderdale and Copa in Key West (accompanied by Sire's Bobby Shaw) with back-up dancers Erika Belle and Bags Rilez.


 

A video is also commissioned for "Burning Up" (although it doesn't debut on MTV until the following October) when interest for Madonna starts to build in the mainstream. Sire brings in designer Maripol to be the stylist for Madonna, while Madonna's close friend Debi Mazar does the make-up. One of Madonna's many on-again-off-again boyfriends, Ken Compton was cast as the love interest in the video. Steve Barron (who had just come off of directing Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" video) was hired as the director.

 

April: This month was the deadline for the completion of the album and Jellybean turned it in just in time (after modifying the production to Madonna’s liking).

May: Madonna performs “Holiday” at Studio 54 this month to build buzz for her new album – currently titled Lucky Star – due in the summer.


 

LATER: The album’s name is changed at the last minute to MADONNA. The name is considered “more iconic” by the record label. It is rumored that the change was SO last minute that there are some pressings that still have the title as Lucky Star – but these were only released briefly in small, overseas markets. (Madonna, Andrew Morton, 2001)

 

June (early): Madonna does promotional appearances at clubs in the UK again (mostly in London) where she performs “Holiday” - including Camden Palace (on June 1) and The Music Machine.

June 17: Madonna performs live at the Celebrity Club in NYC.

July (early): “Holiday” is chosen as the single to launch the album with and is serviced to dance clubs this month.

July 27: The debut album is released.

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True Blue

 

1984:

December 9: Patrick Leonard (and also of note, Jai Winding) did keyboards for the Jackson’s VICTORY WORLD TOUR which ends tonight in Los Angeles. They even composed (with Michael Jackson) an overture for the beginning of the show. The tour ran from July 6-December 9) and criss-crossed the U.S. and Canada. Shortly after, Freddy DeMann contacts Leonard to work on Madonna’s upcoming tour. Leonard initally declined until DeMann had him actually meet her and they hit it off.


1985:

May 4-5: On the Virgin Tour in the U.S., (on her tour bus from Houston to Austin, Texas), Madonna is finishing writing for "Love Makes the World Go Round" a song she has co-written with Pat Leonard, her musical director on tour. (Time Magazine, 1985)

May 18-19: According to Bill Lanphier, bass player on the Virgin Tour, Madonna and Pat Leonard recorded a demo of "Love Makes the World Go Round" in Chicago while on tour. He also said they wrote "some things" together while on this tour. (MTribe interview with Bill Lanphier)

July 13: Madonna is the only artist to perform a new song at Live Aid for Africa when she sings “Love Makes the World Go Round.” She co-wrote the song with Patrick Leonard - the musical director and keyboard player for The Virgin Tour which had wrapped up a month earlier.

August: Madonna began work with her collaberators on this album after her honeymoon with Sean Penn. This will be the first album Madonna co-produces. One of the first songs she will write with Leonard is titled “Get Up Stand Tall” which is copyrighted in 1985. This demo eventually becomes “White Heat.” It is inspired by Sean Penn's love of old James Cagney films.
 

* Madonna will also write and produced several unreleased tracks with Stephen Bray from these sessions:

• “Working My Fingers To The Bone” – this track DID NOT become “Where’s the Party” as is believed. Bray said it is a different song altogether. Smash Hits reviewed it and said it was comparable to the Jackson’s “Shake Your Body Down to the Ground” and was supposed to end up on the You Can Dance remix project.

• “Pipeline”

• “Each Time (You Break My Heart)” – this track was given to Burmese-born UK singer/model Nick Kamen (Sire) to record and had Madonna on backing vocals. The song went to No. 5 in the U.K. in November 1986. It went to No. 2 in Switzerland (Feb. 15, 1987). #25 in Austria, #8 in France, and #6 in Sweden. The track is HUGE in Italy. It will see its U.S. release in May 1987. The original demo with Madonna on lead vocals is reportedly very similar.

* Madonna and TV star Don Johnson talked about composing a song together during telephone conversations they had. This led to the rumor of a track called “Love Over the Phone.” They apparently wrote words but no music.

* Songwriter Gardner Cole (and his good friend Peter Rafelson) had been working for a whole year on a song called “Follow Your Heart.” The demo originally had a male vocal (Jason Scheff from the band CHICAGO). Cole played the track for his manager who worked at Weisner-DeMann Mgmt. Freddie DeMann overheard the song and suggested he re-demo it with a female vocal and he’d suggest it to Madonna. Donna Delory did the demo and Madonna recorded it in late 1985/early 1986. She changed some of the verse and the B section lyrics. Pat Leonard made the song more up-tempo and changed the groove.

LATER: Madonna will tell Us magazine (Sept. 7, 1987 issue) that she wrote "Open Your Heart" recollecting her memories of when she lived on NYC’s lower East side and sat on her stoop trying to make friends with the hardened ghetto Hispanic kids. This seems to be a strange statement since she only re-wrote some of the lyrics

LATER: Peter Rafelson, co-writer of "Open Your Heart", says in an interview that he originally wrote it for Cyndi Lauper, whom he was a fan of. He said he worked with Gardner Cole because he said he had access to Lauper but after working on the demo for a whole year, he never got it to her. Rafelson says Cole was going to submit a demo tape to Madonna (but without “Open Your Heart,”) so he broke into Cole’s studio and put the song on the tape without Cole knowing. Madonna picked that song out of any other on the tape – even though it was not listed on the label. Rafelson says it was called “Open Your Heart” from the very beginning. The original lyrics were about a girl he knew who did not speak much English.


October 29: Rolling Stone reports that Madonna is seeking a film she could star in with hubby Sean Penn. If they can’t find a script they agree on soon, she will make a new album before she makes a movie.

December: In an TV interview to promote The Virgin Tour VHS release, Madonna says that for next year she has several things planned:
 

“Next year, I’m gonna do the movie, Shanghai Surprise, and then the album’s gonna come out in the spring. I did a soundtrack for a movie that Sean just finished in Tennessee that’s gonna be out in the spring. I did the title track from that – it’s called “Live to Tell,” and then I have the album coming out, and then the movie I am doing in January will also come out – August, well, they plan an August release but who knows.”



1986:

January: Patrick Leonard and and Bruce Gaitsch came up with the music for “La Isla Bonita” one day after seeing the preview of Top Gun that the studio held for writers. They weren't interested in writing for a macho war movie, so they instead decided to write a song about an island paradise. Leonard played it for Michael Jackson and got no response from him. Gaitsch suggested they send it to Madonna who was in China (Hong Kong & Macao) this month shooting Shanghai Surprise with Sean Penn. She loved it and wrote the words. What inspired her was the groove and the lyrics. She was in China for a while and wanted to be somewhere else...an island somewhere. Madonna's demo was the first with music and vocals together. Bruce also mentioned that he felt very lucky to work with such a big artist. It ended up becoming a huge hit worldwide, one of her biggest, and won an ASCAP award.

March 6: In a press conference in London (during the filming of Shanghai Surprise), Madonna is asked about her recording commitments:
 

“Well, I just spent 2 and half months working on a record and I haven’t completed it yet, I still have a lot of mixing to do on it. And then I left to finish this movie and as soon as I finish this, I am going back to California to finish the record which will be out in June. It’s called Live to Tell.”


March 30: If you've missed seeing Madonna every five minutes on your local video channel, stay tuned. The Material Girl is back on the airwaves again this weekend singing “Live to Tell,” a new ballad from Orion Pictures' upcoming At Close Range. Why did Madonna lend her talents to the clip? Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the star is hubby Sean Penn. The video features performance footage of Madonna, as well as scenes from the movie. The song will also be released as a single from Warner this week. (L.A. Times)

April 9: Madonna is a married woman. But that isn't the reason she's passed on an experience many other young females would jump at - a Blind Date with Moonlighting star Bruce Willis.
 

As we reported, Madonna and hubby Sean Penn originally were set to star in "Blind Date," the Tri-Star film to be directed by Blake Edwards. Then Sean opted out, and Bruce entered the picture. Shooting starts May 5, but the cameras will roll without Madonna. She reportedly visited Bruce on the set of his ABC show and told him her recording schedule wouldn't allow her time to do the film. The studio's talking to other actresses, but wouldn't name candidates for Bruce's costar. (Inside NY)


April 18: At Close Range (Orion) is released in theaters. Sean Penn took the pop ballad “Live to Tell” (performed by wife Madonna) and placed it in the film after Paramount Pictures declined the track for its film Fire with Fire (1986).

May 21: This week’s edition of the UK magazine Smash Hits says Madonna is back in America (after filming Shanghai Surprise) putting the finishing touches on her upcoming album.

May 30: Madonna performs her second day of shooting for an upcoming video, “Papa Don’t Preach” on Staten Island, NY. The song is from her soon-to-be released True Blue album. (Boca Raton News) The director is James Foley.

June 16: The new Madonna single, “Papa Don’t Preach” is due out today. (LA Times)
 

LATER: HERE'S THE story behind the song, "Papa Don't Preach," Madonna's chart- topping anthem about an unwed mother. Brian Elliot, who wrote the song, has a studio across the street from North Hollywood High School in California. His large front window doubles as a mirror where schoolgirls regularly stop to fix their hair and chat. "Their gossip is unbelievable," he said. "I developed an empathy for the things they get themselves into." Elliot based the song, in which the narrator says, "I've made up my mind, I'm keeping my baby," on a composite of overheard conversations. Elliot says the song is a plea for compassion and that he was astonished when a columnist charged him with glamorizing teen-age pregnancy. "If someone else had sung it, it would have had an entirely different resonance," he says. "But Madonna is larger than life." (Orlando Sentinel, August 19, 1986)


June 29: Madonna says the album’s title is taken from a favorite expression of her husband’s and is a tribute to Sean’s “very pure vision of love.” It also pays musical homage to Motown and 60’s “girl group” hits like Chapel of Love. “La Isla Bonita” is a celebration of “the beauty and mystery of Latin American people.” (NY Times)

June 30: TRUE BLUE is released and the video for “Papa Don’t Preach” premieres on MTV today.

August: Shep Pettibone is asked to do a 12” remix of “True Blue” and a remix of “Into the Groove” for an album of remixes.
 

LATER: Pettibone first met Madonna briefly when Mark Kamins was producing “Everybody” for her. He was also friendly with John “Jellybean” Benitez who produced “Holiday” and “Crazy for You.” Shep was asked to remix “True Blue” for a 12-inch single and “Into the Groove” for an album of dance remixes. “I made it a point to let her know what I could do,” says Pettibone. “After that point, I became the person she wanted to remix her records.”


August 11: Brian Elliot has written a song called "Papa Don't Preach." It is sung by [Madonna] on her latest Warner Brothers video. And it is now a mere No. 1 on the charts.
 

"What happened is that the girl I wrote the song for didn't record it. Madonna did. I'm not complaining, believe me. It probably wouldn't be selling 50,000 copies a day otherwise. But picture this song sung by someone soft and scared and waif-like in the middle of `West Side Story.' It becomes a very different song than the one it is when someone like Madonna sings it." (San Francisco Chronicle)


August 17: Madonna and Felix Howard were seen filming a video for her new “Open Your Heart” in the Echo Park around Toluca and Court Street. Madonna plays a performer in a sleazy girlie theater who dances her way out of trouble with the help of Howard. The video and song, expected to be released next month, are from Madonna's True Blue album. She told a bystander at the video shoot: "This shows my new look. I see my new look as very innocent and feminine and unadorned." (L.A. Times)
 

LATER: Jean Baptiste-Mondino directed the video for “Open Your Heart.” The video was produced by David Naylor. This is their first collaboration and they were actually introduced to each other by the song’s co-writer Peter Rafelson. Cinematography was done by Pascal Lebegue, and production design by Richard Sylbert (Carnal Knowledge).


August 20: Madonna Album Is A Worldwide Hit - Madonna's True Blue is the first pop album released this year to go through the roof. The album, which reached #1 on the Billboard charts in just five weeks, has sold over 2 1/2 million copies in the United States and is as big a hit internationally as it is here. It has already reached #1 in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Britain, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines and Switzerland. The album's second single, ''Papa Don't Preach,'' holds at #1 for the second week, and Warner Brothers Records plans to release the title cut as the third single. If the momentum continues - and there are no signs of its slackening - True Blue stands a good chance of topping the six million sales figure of Like a Virgin. (NY Times)

September 5: Madonna films the video for “True Blue” today in NYC.

September 8: True Blue is certified 2x platinum by the RIAA for sales of 2 million copies.

October 2: The video for “True Blue” debuts on BBC (the non-fan-made version).

November 15: True Blue is certified 3x platinum by the RIAA for sales of 3 million copies.

December 1: According to Japanese music magazine ADLIB issue December 1986: The sales of the True Blue album in Japan to date: 520,000.

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Like a Prayer

 

1987:

August 16: Madonna (in London for the Who's That Girl tour) celebrates her 29th birthday today at the Groucho Club. On hand were actor John Hurt, Lady Helen Windsor (daughter of the Duke of Kent and first cousin of Queen Elizabeth II) and singer Boy George. Also, present was Pat Leonard and his 3 and half year old daughter Jessie. He will tell a British magazine later in 1989:
 

"Madonna and Jessie have been friends since she was born. Madonna's a godmother almost. They play and dance. In fact, in London at Madonna's birthday party they danced for about 2 hours together. In fact, she got her drunk on champagne - I could kill her. Ha ha!" He will also say of the song "Dear Jessie" - "The music was very playful and it sounded like a child and Madonna came up with 'pink elephants and lemonade'. I was saying it's got a very Beatles-like attitude like "Dear Prudence" (an old hippy-esque Beatles song) and she said, "Dear Jessie." Jessie now listens to the album and proudly announces, "It's my song." <--- I suspect the "pink elephants" reference may be Madonna's mea culpa that she got Jessie drunk. :lol: (thanks to Danny86 for the magazine scan - not sure what magazine it was but I think it was British)


September 22: Prince returns to Minneapolis today from a trip he took to NYC and Paris. He has just finished a screenplay for a film called Graffiti Bridge that he wants Madonna to co-star in with him. A few weeks later, she arrives in Minneapolis to discuss possible collaborations. After studying the script, she calls it "a piece of shit" and tells a flabbergasted Prince that she's not interested in doing it. (paraphrased from Dance Music Sex Romance: Prince: The First Decade By Per Nilsen)
 

LATER: In an interview with Rolling Stone (03/23/89), Madonna says:

Prince and I didn’t really finish anything though. We started a bunch of stuff then we would go on to the next thing. We just tried to start as many things as we could. We worked for a few days; then I had to leave to do some other things. I decided that I didn’t want to do a musical with him at that time.

Meanwhile, I went and did Speed-the-Plow on Broadway. He came to see the play and brought me a rough mix of one of the songs we’d worked on. I thought it was just fabulous. I’d sort of forgotten about it. So I called him up and said I loved it and that after I was finished with the play, I wanted to get together with him and work on it for my album. As it turned out, we did it in a very funny way. We sent tapes to each other back and forth between L.A. and Minnesota. Then we would talk on the phone, and he would play stuff for me over the line. I loved working that way.

But “Love Song” does have a spirituality about it, the kind that exists between two people. It’s really about that push and pull of a relationship.

 

In another interview in 1989 (scan courtesy Danny86, but magazine unknown), Madonna will also say this about Prince and "Love Song":

Originally, we were going to do a musical together and we were going to write the music for it - that didn't really pan out. We just kept getting together. He seemed to fight the idea of just writing songs for a record together because he's done that with so many people. He came to see me in the play I did last summer in NY and he, just for the hell of it, put together a tape of some of the rough things that we'd done in all our meetings that we'd had. "Love Song" was one of the songs and I just said, "You know, this is crazy, it's such a great song - why not put it on the record? It seemed to relate to all the other songs because it's about a relationship that's a love/hate relationship. So he agreed to it and we kind of sent the tapes back and forth to each other and we'd keep building it. It was like he would write a sentence and I would add on to it and then send it back to him and he would continue the story, basically. It was fun. I played the keyboards myself and because I don't know that much, it kind of came out strange and interesting.

There will also be rumors later that Prince registered a song called "By Alien Means" in 1988 that was a product of these meetings with Madonna but no hard evidence ever comes to light to prove them.


November 26: Sean Penn shows up at her NYC apartment drunk after disappearing for 4 days expecting to spend Thanksgiving with her. Madonna claims this is the final straw in regards to their marriage. (NY Daily News)

December 4: Madonna files for divorce (the first time) in Los Angeles Superior Court today.

December 16: Madonna reconciles with Sean Penn.

December 20: In an interview with the L.A. Times published today, Madonna says she's been wearing "all black" lately to reflect a starker, more dramatic state of mind. This look will carry over to her next role she's currently filming in The Bloodhounds of Broadway.

1988:

January-February: Pat Leonard will tell a British magazine that Madonna and he wrote the bulk of their songs for this album in a 2 week time period. It is likely around this time because Madonna will tell Songtalk magazine in 1989 that she wrote "Cherish" just before she left for NYC to start rehearsing for Speed the Plow:
 

Pat Leonard to the British magazine: "Everything is very quick. We wrote 'Like A Prayer', 'Spanish Eyes', 'Til Death Do Us Part', 'Dear Jessie', 'Promise to Try' and 'Cherish' in a two week period. I was working on another album at the time [probably Marilyn Martin - see details below], so she'd just come in on Saturdays or days off. Nothing took more than 4 hours ever. She sits on the couch, takes a pad out and writes the lyrics and sings it and we're done." He also says a track they will do for this album is left off the LP, "Supernatural": Pat says, "It's almost a novelty piece. The lyrics are about sleeping with someone who's dead in a spiritual sense. It's about sleeping with a ghost. It's a real kind of weird funk tune with a very strange groove."

In the same article, Steve Bray will also add: "I come up with some ideas and send them to her on a cassette and she'll check them out and then we'll get together and work on the arrangement on the ones she's chosen. I've always kind of made the ribcage or skeleton of the song already - she's there for the last things like the eyebrows and the haircut, I guess." Bray will tell the interviewer that he and Madonna wrote 4 songs for this album and two did not make the final cut: "Love Attack" and "First is a Kiss" - the latter is a "safe sex song." The tracks didn't make the record because they didn't fit the mood. Bray says, "She's very much into a confessional attitude. It's like a musical National Enquirer episode, that's what I'm calling it. It's behind the scenes, definitely, in Madonna's psyche." Bray also denies Madonna planned to write such an album. "She writes in a stream of mood, really. This album, she needed to do it. I'm sure of it. I'm sure it was a kind of cathartic thing to do." He contrast her mood with when they wrote True Blue together: "she was very in love, it was obvious. If she's in love, she'll write love songs. If she's not in love, she definitely won't be writing love songs. That's why the love songs we recorded aren't on the LP. She didn't feel that they were real enough for her at the time." (thanks for that scan, Danny86)

 

Note: “Possessive Love” (Madonna/Pat Leonard/Jai Winding): This track was originally recorded by Madonna in 1988 but was also given to Atlantic singer Marilyn Martin. It was released by Atlantic as a single but did not do very well. Madonna’s original remains unreleased. Martin sang back-up vocals on “Cherish.”

Martin recorded her version of “Possessive Love” in 1987 (with Donna Delory on backing vocals) and the track appeared on her Atlantic sophomore album This Is Serious which was released in March 1988. This song was track 1 of the album and was featured as a single release. The album did not sell and she was subsequently dropped by her label.


February 23: Madonna begins rehearsals for Speed the Plow in NYC.

March: Pat Leonard gives an interview in Musician magazine this month (for their May 1988 issue) in which he says that he and Madonna have laid the groundwork for the next album.
 

“We’ve written eight new songs so far. And they range from a string quartet to a shuffle. There’s a couple of gospel things that we decided to experiment with. And some things that sound very Manhattan Transfer. There’s one that’s very harmonically dense and much more jazz-oriented than anything you’ve heard from her before. So I think the new album is going to be quite different.”


May-August: Madonna will tell Songtalk magazine in 1989 that she wrote "Oh Father" during the time she was in the play:
 

Interviewer: I love the beginning of "Promise to Try," which is just you and an acoustic piano.

Madonna: Yeah, isn't it pretty.

Interviewer: Yeah. That song and "Oh Father" seem to be companion songs.

Madonna: They are. Yeah, they absolutely are.

Interviewer: Did you write them at the same time?

Madonna: No. We did "Promise to Try" first. Pat and I. Once again, he just sat down and started playing. And I started singing. And we built it from there. We'd start stuff and we'd come back to it. With "Oh Father" he wrote the tracks, and I was doing the play in New York (Speed the Plow). He came to New York and I was in a very, very dark state of mind. We got together in this really dingy, awful little studio in the garment district in New York. It was grotesquely dirty and cramped, and that's what came out of me.

 

In another interview in 1989, Madonna will say this of "Oh Father":

Lots of times, Pat Leonard will come up with a piece of music like 'Oh Father' - we did very little to change it musically - he just throws the music at me and I just listen to it over and over again. And somehow, the music suggests words to me and I just start writing words down. Other times, I will come to Pat with an idea for a song, either lyrically or emotionally, and say "let's do something like this" or I'll have a melody line in my head which I will sing to him and he will sort of pound out the chords. It takes a lot longer to do it that way because I don't play an instrument but ultimately, it's a lot more personal. Then with Steve Bray it's the same thing. Sometimes he'll come up with a track and he'll have a verse and chorus but he won't have a bridge so we'll write the bridge - musically - together. (thanks for the scan Danny86)


July: In an interview with Fame magazine (for their December 1988 issue) was done (in part) this month:
 

Q: Then you’re not thinking of abandoning music to pursue an acting career?

M: Of course not. I’m just letting my creative juices take me where they will. There’s a writer’s strike going on right now and there aren’t a lot of great movies available to do so that just works out fine for me because I haven’t done a record in at least two years. I mean, I’ve had records out but it’s all from my album and I didn’t write the stuff over the past year. I'm going into the studio to record some stuff that's really different. As long as I can write songs, I'll make records. When I get tired of that, when it gets old or I don't have anything to say, then I won't do it.


September 2: The Miami Herald says today that Madonna will begin recording her new album next week.

September 25: Madonna returns: Madonna's three-month run in David Mamet's Broadway play "Speed The Plow" ended in August and she's ready to dive back into music. She's starting work on a new album in Los Angeles with co-producer Pat Leonard. The album may be released early next year. (Orange County Register)

September 29: According to Liz Smith, Madonna is locked up in an L.A. recording studio with her producer, Pat Leonard; they are working on her next album (still not titled) which will come out in January or February.
 

LATER: Madonna will tell Songtalk that "Act of Contrition" was purely conceived in the recording studio on a whim:

Interviewer: "Act of Contrition," the closing track of Like a Prayer, has backwards masking and other mysterious elements. Did he [Prince] have anything to do with that one as well? The credits only say, "Produced by the powers that be."

Madonna: Yeah, he [Prince] did. He played guitar on it. He also played guitar on "Keep it Together."

Interviewer: I noticed on "Act of Contrition" that you have the choir from "Like a Prayer" reversed on that.

Madonna: Yeah, we turned the tape and played everything backwards.

Interviewer: Your idea?

Madonna: Yeah. And then, of course, the whole thing, the saying of the prayer (on "Act of Contrition") and everything, that was totally conceived of in the studio, in the control room. Pat put out a microphone, and I just started fooling around; and that was free-form, too. Whatever was on my head. It's totally unedited.


October 11: Madonna cut some tracks of her new record at D&D Recording in NY with Kieran Walsh doing the engineering chores. She is completing the album in Los Angeles. (Manila Standard)

December 16: Madonna has a new album, titled Like A Prayer, coming out in February. (The Freelance Star)

mid-December: Madonna will work with Mary Lambert on the video to "Like A Prayer" - the first single for the album.
 

Madonna later says of the video:

“Well, originally, when I recorded the song, I would play it over and over again, trying to get a visual sense of what sort of story or fantasy it evoked in me. I kept imagining this story about a girl who was madly in love with a black man, set in the South, with this forbidden interracial love affair. And the guy she’s in love with sings in a choir. So she’s obsessed with him and goes to church all the time. And then it turned into a bigger story, which was about racism and bigotry. I wanted to put something in about Ku Klux Klan, use burning crosses… but then Mississippi Burning came out [released December 9, 1988] and I realized I was hitting the nail on the head a little too hard. Too obvious. So I thought I should take a slightly different approach. My original idea was much sadder. Kind of: this is reality, and reality sucks.

Then Mary Lambert got involved as the director, and she came up with a story that incorporated more of the religious symbolism I originally wrote into the song. The whole album has a lot of religious imagery in it. The video still has the sadness, but it’s got a hopeful ending. I mean, I had these ideas about me running away with the black guy and both of us getting shot in the back by the KKK. Completely insane. So Mary made it more palatable.”


1989:

January: People Weekly reports Madonna has filed for divorce from Sean Penn and that she may provide a musical response with a track called “Till Death Do Us Part” on her upcoming album.

January 25: Madonna signs an unprecendented $5 million deal with Pepsi-Cola for a series of TV commercials and sponsorship of her next world tour. Joe Pytka directs the first commercial. Madonna later tells Rolling Stone (who interviews her today) that is currently overseeing editing of the “Like A Prayer” video – among other things.

February 18: The blitz-tied to the March 21 release of her new album-officially begins March 2 with the splashy worldwide premiere of her already ballyhooed 2-minute Pepsi commercial. (A teaser for the spot will air during Wednesday's Grammy telecast on CBS)
 

Bob Merlis, Warner Bros. Records vice president and national publicity director, says:

"I want to emphasize that the record company is not the handmaiden of the corporate sponsor," Merlis said. "Our release plans have not been affected by their involvement. We're incredibly glad for the exposure this will afford, but the single was decided on before they were ever involved. That is not a means to get out the music."

Not to be overshadowed by all this, Merlis and manager Freddy DeMann hope, is the star and her music.

Added Merlis: "The irony is that the album is very human, shows her as a real person with foibles and emotions. She's not a god, and that comes across-believe it or not-in the Pepsi commercial."

Boasted DeMann: "It's the best album she's ever done, the first time she's really opened up to the world, taken her deepest thoughts and translated them for the world." (Los Angeles Times)


March 2: The “Make A Wish” Pepsi commercial premieres on The Cosby Show tonight to a worldwide audience of 250 million. It is the first time an artist uses a new song (“Like A Prayer”) in a promotional campaign before its official release.

March 3: The video for “Like A Prayer” debuts worldwide on MTV. Mass controversy ensues almost immediately.

March 18: Carole Robinson, director of program publicity for MTV and VH-1 says the “Like A Prayer” video is one of the station’s most requested videos. (Billboard)

March 21: The album is released.

June 21, 1989: Madonna's appeal has a look and a sound. Now, it also smells. A patchouli aroma envelops the new Madonna mystique. The east Indian oil was used to scent the packaging for her "Like a Prayer" album, which has sold 5.8 million copies since its March release.

"It was Madonna's idea," said a publicist for Warner Brothers, her record label. "She wanted to create a flavor of the '60s and the church. (The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution)

 

 

 

 

Songtalk Interview (1989)

The Creating of "Like A Prayer"

"The image gets in the way," she answers, when asked why people don't generally think of her as a songwriter. It's an image she's worked hard to establish in people's minds, taking her from the Midwest to Manhattan and presently to a home high in Hollywood's highest hills. As we speak, Madonna is more than famous: she's gone from the musical to the mythic while still alive, as much a part of our collective awareness as were Marilyn Monroe, John Kennedy or the Beatles in their day.

It hasn't happened by accident. She's wise to the notion that it takes more than talent and charisma to shoot a star beyond all others into this pantheon; it takes controversy. "People are asleep," she said, "and you've got to do what you can to wake them up." She has awakened more than her share of sleepers in a variety of ways, from dancing before burning crosses and sporting stigmata on her hands in the video of "Like a Prayer" to visually fusing, in her "Open Your Heart" video, the madonna/whore dynamic inherent in all images since her first appearance wearing lingerie and crucifixes.

As soon as one controversy begins to fade, she launches a new one: As the "Like a Prayer" video started to shed its shock value, she released a video for "Express Yourself" in which she expressed herself nude and in chains. But what a lot of people still don't understand about her is that beyond this rainbow of shifting images and calculated controversies is a serious songwriter who writes or co-writes the majority of her own material, from first singles like "Lucky Star," which she wrote alone, to "Like a Prayer," written with the enormously gifted Patrick Leonard. (Leonard, along with her old friend from Detroit, Stephen Bray, are her main collaborators.)

I spoke to Madonna on a typically bright Angelino afternoon; she was on break from the making of Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy. She seemed openly relieved to be asked questions about her songwriting as opposed to the usual ones about her recently broken marriage, and remembered clearly the exhilaration she experienced writing her first song.

Madonna: I don't remember the name of my first song but I do remember the feeling that I had when I wrote it. And it just came out of me. I don't know how. It was like somebody possessed me. It was like I wanted to run out in the street and go, "I wrote a song! I WROTE A SONG! I DID IT!" You know what I mean? I was so proud of myself. (laughs) And then after that, they just kind of gushed out of me. Because I always wrote poetry in free-form verse and kept journals and stuff, but to be able to put it to music, that was a whole different thing.

Interviewer: How old were you then?

Madonna: About twenty-one.

Interviewer: It's interesting to learn you have written so many of your own songs. I don't think people realize that you're a songwriter as well as everything else you do--

Madonna: You mean they don't realize I'm a songwriter as well as a slut? (laughs) It's the image that gets in the way. What am I supposed to do? The information is on the label. If they don't read it, that's not my problem. I'm not going to put a sticker on the outside of the album that says, "Listen--I wrote these songs!" You know, they pay attention to what they want to pay attention to.

Interviewer: This album, Like a Prayer, seems to be the most honest album you've done. Do you agree?

Madonna: I didn't try to candycoat anything or make it more palatable for mass consumption, I guess. I wrote what I felt.

Interviewer: Have you candycoated things in the past?

Madonna: It's not that I candycoated it. I just chose to write in a certain vein. It's like anything--it's like movies: There are brutally honest, frightening movies and there are really slick, commercial films, and I like both of them as long as they're well made.

Interviewer: In the past, were you writing more about a character than about yourself?

Madonna: A side of myself. And a character. I'm constantly inventing scenarios that are a combination of something I know and something I imagine. But it's just a side of myself that I chose to show. I definitely have that slick, glamorous, manufactured side that I feel very comfortable with showing to the public. But there's the other side to me, too.

Interviewer: Is it harder, in songs to reveal you inner self?

Madonna: No, it's not harder. In the past I wrote a lot of songs like that, but I felt they were too honest or too frightening or too scary and I decided not to record them. It just seemed like the time was right at this point. Because this was what was coming out of me.

Interviewer: When you say, "what's coming out" of you, do you mean that you're the kind of songwriter who is always working at it, or do you wait for inspiration?

Madonna: I wait for inspiration. I set out to record an album and that was my state of mind at the time.

Interviewer: How does your writing process work? I know that many of your songs were written with Pat Leonard. You've mentioned that sometimes you'll come up with a melody and bring it to him and let him figure it out--

Madonna: Yes. In my very retarded fashion I will sing it to him. Or hum the melody line to him, and he will put it into a chord progression and we'll come up with the song that way.

Interviewer: These are melodies that just pop into your head?

Madonna: Yeah. And I start singing them just from my head. Or if I think of a lyric, like a hook or a line, I'll just put it to a melody and he'll bang it out on the piano for me.

Interviewer: You must have a great working relationship to be able to connect with him at that stage of the process.

Madonna: We have a very good working relationship because we both come from the Midwest, and we both worked our butts off to get where we are. But, you know, he's the one who studied music. He knows how to read music, how to write music. I don't know any of that. I'm completely instinctual and he's completely intellectual. So it's a really good combination.

Interviewer: Does he every give you a finished melody to write words to?

Madonna: Yes, he does. But inevitably we fashion it to me. I don't think he's ever written a melody that I just took and said, "Okay, that's finished, I'll just slap some words on it." It always needs to be worked.

Interviewer: One of my favorite songs on the album that you two wrote is "Oh Father."

Madonna: Isn't that great?

Interviewer: It's beautiful. And it's one of those songs that has a near perfect marriage of words and music.

Madonna: That's the great thing about Pat. I mean, Pat puts together these really strange chord progressions and these really great time signatures, and I'll listen to it and I won't even think about it. I'll just put it on, and I'll just keep playing it over and over again; it's like free association. I'll start singing words to it and making them fit. I don't thing of structure. I don't think of first chorus, first bridge.

Interviewer: Did you come up with the melody for "Oh Father"?

Madonna: No, no, Pat thought of that melody.

Interviewer: It's interesting that you were free-associating on that song and yet the words are so specific and thematic--

Madonna: Yeah, well, we definitely plugged into each other. I know, because I've tried to work with a lot of people. It's really a relationship. It's a relationship that works. There's definitely a chemistry.

Interviewer: You mentioned how melodies will pop into your head. Do you have any idea where those ideas originate? Do you feel that they come from beyond you?

Madonna: (laughs) I'm such a sponge; and I love so many different kinds of music, and I've listened to so many different kinds of music all my life, it's really... You know how you just keep memories in the back of your head all the time? I'm sure it's everything that I've ever heard. And then it comes out in my own bastardized fashion. What I am is what I've digested throughout my life. What comes out of me. I don't think it's beyond, I just think it's all stored up.

Interviewer: Have you every experienced writer's block?

Madonna: Sometimes, yeah. Oh yeah, definitely. And when that happens, you just have to stop and go out or something. Go to a movie.

Interviewer: Some writers say that when nothing is flowing, they stay there anyway and try to force it--

Madonna: I do that, too. Sometimes me and Pat will sit through it. We'll say, "Let's write a crappy song today." But then there are times when you just have to let it alone. And go get some inspiration. Ultimately, you can't force it. But there is a certain amount of discipline required. When I have to write an album, I sit down and say, "This is it." I sit down and write the album. I give myself a block of time. But every once in a while, it's really tough.

Interviewer: Do you have any technique for staying in shape creatively?

Madonna: Yeah, just living. Just experiencing life, being really open and observant.

Interviewer: Is it tough for you, being one of the most famous people in the world, to stay open and observant?

Madonna: You can be open and observant in any situation. I mean, in a work situation, watching people on a set of a movie or whatever. I mean, humanity is everywhere. There are endless possibilities of ways to absorb the information.

Interviewer: You and Prince wrote "Love Song" together, which is a wonderful song. Did you and he work together or did he give you a track?

Madonna: No, he didn't give me a track. We sat down and just started fooling around. We had a lot of fun. What happened is that he played the drums and I played the synthesizer and we came up with the original melody line; I just, off the top of my head, started singing lyrics into the microphone. And then he overdubbed some guitar stuff and made a loop of it and sent it to me, and then I just started adding sections to it and singing parts to it. And then I sent it back to him, and he'd sing a part to it and add another instrument and send it back to me...it was like this sentence that turned into a paragraph that turned into a little miniseries. So it was great. It was a completely different way to work. And because of our schedules and everything, and he was in Minnesota and he likes to work there and I like to work here. So we kind of sent it back and forth. He's great. He's a real interesting...unique talent.

Interviewer: And it was an easy connection from the beginning for the two of you?

Madonna: Yeah, it was. We started out being real admirers of each other's work. And, you know, we're already successful so we didn't have to prove anything to each other. We were on the same level. And I don't think he's had that same opportunity with other people that he's worked with. Because generally he tends to dominate everything.

Interviewer: "Act of Contrition," the closing track of Like a Prayer, has backwards masking and other mysterious elements. Did he have anything to do with that one as well? The credits only say, "Produced by the powers that be."

Madonna: Yeah, he did. He played guitar on it. He also played guitar on "Keep it Together."

Interviewer: I noticed on "Act of Contrition" that you have the choir from "Like a Prayer" reversed on that.

Madonna: Yeah, we turned the tape and played everything backwards.

Interviewer: Your idea?

Madonna: Yeah. And then, of course, the whole thing, the saying of the prayer (on "Act of Contrition") and everything, that was totally conceived of in the studio, in the control room. Pat put out a microphone, and I just started fooling around; and that was free-form, too. Whatever was on my head. It's totally unedited.

Interviewer: You, Prince and Michael Jackson were all born in the same year, 1958--

Madonna: I know. Isn't that weird? And I think Michael's birthday is right near mine, in August...there are so many Leos in my life. I'm August 16.

Interviewer: The three of you have had such an enormous effect on popular music. Yet recently it seems that both Prince's and Michael Jackson's connection with the world has weakened while yours has strengthened and become more intimate and personal. Do you feel that?

Madonna: Yes. I think because I stay in touch with the world, and I think that Michael Jackson and Prince have really isolated themselves. And they live very isolated lives. There's so much fearfulness and so much inhibition that comes with when you become a celebrity and you're in the public eye all the time; I think you really have to fight that temptation to go into hiding and surround yourself with people who protect you and keep life out from you. I don't want to live that way. I don't want to crawl into a hole. I don't want to go around with six bodyguards, you know?

Interviewer: You don't wear disguises or anything?

Madonna: No, no. I go running everyday in my neighborhood. People bother me all the time, but it's important for me to stay in touch with--it sounds cliched--with the street. I go to movie theaters. I can't deal with separating myself that way. I didn't struggle my way out of Michigan so I could crawl into a hole.

Interviewer: Both you and Prince have concentrated in your work on the separation in our lives between sexuality and religion. Has this been a conscious attempt in your life, to connect these two forces?

Madonna: Yes, absolutely. And I think that's the problem in relationships. That's why everyone has affairs and they cheat on their wives or their husbands. People separate things. They have someone they idolize, and then they idolize them so much that they put them on a pedestal and see them as so virginal and holy that they can't have fun with them. And then they have to find people to have fun with and get low-down and dirty. They don't let the id in themselves come out, know what I mean? I think you have to put the two together with people. You have to let both of them surface. And it has so much to do with being honest with yourself and the people you're with. Say, "This is me and this is what I want."

Interviewer: Your song "Like a Prayer" deals with this subject. Do you recall how that one was born?

Madonna: I don't know! It just...came out of my head. Pat had the chord changes for the verse and the chorus. We hadn't written the bridge yet. I really wanted to do something really gospel oriented and a capella, with virtually no instrumentation, just my voice and an organ. So we started fooling around with the song, and we'd take away all the instrumentation so that my voice was naked. Then we came up with the bridge together, and we had the idea to have a choir. In almost everything I do with Pat, if it's uptempo, there's a Latin rhythm or feeling to it. It's really strange.

Interviewer: Does he bring that to it or do you?

Madonna: (Pause) We both do. It's like, we don't know, we're possessed. We both think that we were Latin in another life.

Interviewer: That's interesting, because you've done both "Spanish Eyes" on this album and "La Isla"--

Madonna: "La Isla Bonita." I know! I have no idea! It just happens.

Interviewer: You have the Italian in you this lifetime--

Madonna: Yeah, but Pat is about as white-bread as they come. I love Spanish music. I love that group Gipsy Kings. They're so great. And I love Spanish singing. I'm very influenced by Spanish music. When I lived in New York for so many years I was constantly listening to salsa and merengue. I mean, that stuff was constantly blaring out of everybody's radio on the street.

Interviewer: You were talking of having only your voice and organ on "Like a Prayer." I love the beginning of "Promise to Try," which is just you and an acoustic piano.

Madonna: Yeah, isn't it pretty.

Interviewer: Yeah. That song and "Oh Father" seem to be companion songs.

Madonna: They are. Yeah, they absolutely are.

Interviewer: Did you write them at the same time?

Madonna: No. We did "Promise to Try" first. Pat and I. Once again, he just sat down and started playing. And I started singing. And we built it from there. We'd start stuff and we'd come back to it. With "Oh Father" he wrote the tracks, and I was doing the play in New York (Speed the Plow). He came to New York and I was in a very, very dark state of mind. We got together in this really dingy, awful little studio in the garment district in New York. It was grotesquely dirty and cramped, and that's what came out of me.

Interviewer: The song "Cherish" is incredibly joyous. Were you in a happy mood when you wrote it?

Madonna: I was actually. It was before I went to New York. Absolutely. It was right before I left.

Interviewer: Was "Promise to Try" written for the little girl in you?

Madonna: (Softly) Yes. It was...yes, it was. I mean, it's not just one thing. It's my father talking to me, it's me talking to me...and "Oh Father" is not just me dealing with my father. It's me dealing with all authority figures in my life.

Interviewer: Does that include God as well? You say, "Oh Father, I have sinned."

Madonna: Absolutely.

Interviewer: In that song you also say, "I lay down next to your boots and I prayed..." Which kind of reminds of me of Tom Waits. Are you an admirer of Waits's work?

Madonna: Oh, I love Tom Waits. I've always loved him. He's great. He's a great performer. I love watching him.

Interviewer: What other songwriters do you enjoy listening to?

Madonna: Prince. He never ceases to amaze me. I've heard all the tracks off of his next album that he hasn't released yet and they're incredible. Stephen Sondheim, who I worked with for Dick Tracy. I never really appreciated his stuff because I didn't pay that much attention to them (his songs). And having to learn his songs, which are unbelievably complex. I just have the utmost respect and admiration for him. An incredible songwriter. Incredible.

Interviewer: Complex musically and lyrically?

Madonna: Oh, yes. There's not one thing that repeats itself. It's just unbelievable. When I first got them, I sat down next to him and he played them for me, and I was just dumbfounded. And then, forget about making them my own, just to learn to sing them--the rhythmic changes and the melodic changes--it was really tough. I had to go to my vocal coach and get an accompanist to slow everything down for me. I could hardly hear the notes, you know what I mean? So it was a real challenge. And they definitely grew on me.

Interviewer: So you eventually mastered them?

Madonna: I think so. When we ended up recording them, I think Stephen was very pleased.

Interviewer: You're an actress, a dancer, a singer and a songwriter. Can you say what the most powerful art form in your life is?

Madonna: God, it's tough. I like visual arts. I'd have to say music even though I love movies and dramatic arts. Music is the most accessible art form. And I think everybody relates to music. It is completely universal and therefore the most powerful for me, too.

Interviewer: Do you have a favorite song of your own?

Madonna: (Pause) No, I don't like to say that. It's like having ten children and saying I have a favorite child. It's not fair.

Interviewer: You wrote "Lucky Star" alone. Did you write it on guitar?

Madonna: No, I wrote in on synthesizer.

Interviewer: Yeah? You say you're not a musician and yet you play guitar and keyboards.

Madonna: I know, but I'm lazy and I don't practice because I've gotten involved with so many other things in my life, and I just had to make a sacrifice. Of course, Stephen Sondheim encourages me to start playing the piano again. Maybe I will.

Interviewer: Do you remember hearing "Like a Virgin" for the first time?

Madonna: I though it was sick. I thought it was sick and perverted and that's why I liked it.

Interviewer: And that appealed to you?

Madonna: Yeah! Sick and perverted always appeals to me.

Interviewer: And it sounded like a song you could pull off well?

Madonna: Yeah. Because there were so many innuendos in it. I thought, "This is great. This will really screw with people."

Interviewer: You like that, when people get upset?

Madonna: Yeah, controversy. I thrive on it.

Interviewer: You've certainly generated a lot of it. After "Like a Virgin" there was "Papa Don't Preach" and, of course all the controversy surrounding your video for "Like a Prayer."

Madonna: It's not really that I thrive on it. It's that I think it's necessary. I think art should be controversial. I think it should make people think. About what they do believe in and what they don't believe in, and if they don't believe in it, that's good too. I mean, everything is just kind of opium for the masses. It puts people in a trance. I think it's good to hit people over the head with this stuff and make them question their own beliefs.

Interviewer: Is is hard to get an album scented with patchouli?

Madonna: (laughs) Yes, it is. I had to work hard for that.
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I'm Breathless

 

1988:

December 11: The Dick Tracy project has been announced and de-announced several times. But the folks at the Disney Co.'s Touchstone Pictures affirm, swear and insist that this time it's a go. Budgeted at a reported $22 million to $25 million, it will begin filming in January with Warren Beatty super-starring, directing and producing. Beatty won't discuss plot, but we have learned that ladylove Tess Trueheart is on hand. Beatty's interest in playing Tracy-the project was then at Paramount-was first reported in June 1983. Then, in October, he took a hike. Reports in The Times said Beatty had exited because the studio wouldn't comply with his salary demands of $5 million plus 15% of the gross of the film (then budgeted at $25 million). (LA Times)

December 22: Barring a last-minute contractual snafu, Madonna will be Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy leading lady. The deal was just set this week for the picture Beatty will be making for Touchstone shortly after the holidays. (The Victoria Advocate)

1989:

February 15: Madonna begins filming Dick Tracy with actor and director Warren Beatty. She records several songs for the film with Stephen Sondheim.

February 19: In an interview around this time with Interview magazine (for their May 1989 issue):
 

Madonna: Stephen Sondheim is writing songs of the period for the film, so I've been working on them, and they're quite difficult.

Interview: Why's that?

Madonna: Because Stephen Sondheim writes in a kind of chromatic wildness. They're very difficult songs to learn. I mean, one song is written with five sharps. they're brilliant, but really complex.

Interview: Are they mostly torch songs?

Madonna: One is; there are three songs. One is a torch song and another one is more up-tempo. It's kind of like “Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend” or “Material Girl,” where she keeps singing about how she wants more and more. It's about gluttony. And it's funny, it's ironic. And then the third song is a kind of slow, sad song. I'm going to be singing it with Mandy Patinkin, who plays my accompanist at the nightclub where I work. It's the kind of song you sing at three in the morning, when the club is empty. It's very melancholy... just a piano and a voice. But they're all really different for me, and so I've been working very hard to get them right.


March 19: Mr. Patinkin has at least one other commitment. After ''The Winter's Tale'' closes next month, he will fly to Los Angeles for work on Warren Beatty's movie, Dick Tracy, in which he has been offered the small role of 88 Keyes, the pianist for Madonna's character, Breathless Mahoney. (NY Times)

July 23: From a NY Times article about Patinkin's role in an upcoming off-Broadway show: The Broadway engagement follows a brief sojourn in California where Patinkin played a small role in Dick Tracy, the Warren Beatty movie about the famous comic strip detective. In the film, he appears as 88 Keys, piano player for Breathless Mahoney, played by rock star Madonna. They get to sing several songs written for the movie by Sondheim. Dick Tracy is expected to be released next summer, and Patinkin has several other movie projects waiting. But for now he will concentrate on his Broadway show and possibly more concerts with orchestras around the country after that.

August 22: Janet Jackson’s “Miss You Much” single is released. It is accompanied by a house remix by Shep Pettibone. Later, Tony Shimkin will admit that elements of this remix were used as the foundation for “Vogue.” (MTribe Interview with Tony Shimkin)

October 13: Madonna has been doing a lot of solo midday dining at Columbia Bar and Grill, slinking into the trendy Hollywood eatery with her face hidden under a wide-brim hat and being led to an isolated table in the rear of the establishment. Then she takes off for the nearby recording studio. (LA Times)

November 27: From a NY Times interview with Stephen Sondheim:
 

As for his movie work, Mr. Sondheim says he wound up writing the songs for Madonna because Mr. Beatty asked him to. "I'd done a score for him for Reds, and I'd never quite finished it," he says. "Warren was very patient, but there was so much work to do at the time on Merrily We Roll Along, so I always felt I owed him one."

In Dick Tracy, which is set in the late 1930's and is scheduled for release next summer, Madonna plays a nightclub singer named Breathless Mahoney. Mr. Sondheim wrote two nightclub-type songs for her and a duet for her and her accompanist, who is played by Mandy Patinkin.

"They're 1930's-type songs," Mr. Sondheim says, "or at least the two nightclub songs are." One is sort of Cole Porterish, he says, and the second, called "I Always Get My Man," "is kind of a Harold Arlen blues." The duet, however, "has a faintly modern tinge to it."


December 15: Madonna, who changes her hair as often as some people change their minds, was seen the other night [Dec. 11] at the Los Angeles hang-out China Club, sporting her very closely cropped, short, dark brown 'do with bangs. "Madonna is a big fan of silent film actress Louise Brooks and was more than likely inspired by her look on the silver screen," says Liz Rosenberg, the Material Girl's press agent. With Madonna was Warren Beatty, soon to be starring as Dick Tracy in the new film of the same name; Madonna is writing songs for the sound track album, Listen hears. Between time, she's gearing up for a world tour next spring and has consulted with Jean Paul Gaultier, the Paris designer, about her stage wardrobe. (LA Times Gossip section)
 

LATER: In a Harper’s Bazaar interview (June 1990 issue), Madonna says she wrote seven songs with Pat Leonard in three weeks for this album and the film. She says she composed the songs to give psychological oomph to her role as Breathless Mahoney. The Gershwinesque ballad, “Something to Remember” is about Breathless’ heartbreak over Tracy’s brushoff, while “Hanky Panky” is a campy Big Band take on S&M.


mid-to-late-December: Madonna writes “Vogue” with Shep Pettibone in a one-off session. It is originally planned to be a B-side for her upcoming single, “Keep It Together.”
 

LATER: Pettibone tells the May 11, 1990 issue of Entertainment Weekly: “We were just after a fun club record, but when the record company bigwigs heard it, they said, ‘This is a No. 1 smash record. Let’s not put it on a B-side and lose it.’”

LATER: Shep Pettibone says, “She really liked what I did on “Express Yourself” and “Like A Prayer,” so we jelled very well together. I was asked to come up with some music for a song. She liked it a lot, and she came to New York on the red-eye, very tired, and wrote most of the lyrics on the plane coming in. Pettibone was surprised at the subject matter of the song. “Vogueing was in the underground clubs. It had been around for awhile and it was also semi-passé. People were saying, “What’s the next thing? That’s over.” She came in and said, “I hope you don’t mind, but I am going to call the song “Vogue.”


December 25: Madonna does costume fittings in Paris with Jean Paul Gaultier for her upcoming tour.

1990:

January 9-11: Madonna holds open auditions for her next world tour at Landmark Studios (Hollywood, California) for male dancers.

February 9-11: Madonna shoots the “Vogue” video with her brand new tour dancers (auditioned last month).

March 28: MTV launches the stylish premiere for “Vogue” - Madonna's latest video on Thursday [March 29] at 2, 4, 9 and 10 p.m. “Vogue” is the first single from Madonna's upcoming album I'm Breathless, music from and inspired by her role in the film Dick Tracy. A sneak preview of the video revealed Madonna in various looks, ranging from a risque black lace see-through outfit to a slinky white gown. Madonna is a Marilyn Monroe-like blonde now, hence the name of her new tour, "Blonde Ambition" scheduled for the spring. (LA Times)

April 13: The Blond Ambition Tour kicks off in Japan today.

May 22: I'm Breathless is released today.

June 15: Dick Tracy is released worldwide. It ends up grossing around $163 million worldwide.

September 13: Paris Is Burning debuts at the Toronto Film Festival.
 

Paris Is Burning, Jenne Livingston's stirring documentary on the Harlem drag balls, may have introduced vogueing to the masses, but it got a big push from Madonna's "Vogue" (directed by David Fincher). "I remember being in a drug store," says Livingston, "and there was a white woman with two children, and one of the kids said, 'Look Mommy, Johnny's vogueing!' I was shocked, and that was really all because of Madonna."

Although the black-and-white video perfectly showcases the dance, it's also a gorgeous tribute to '40s style glamour, complete with flawless close-ups borrowed from fashion photographer Horst P. Horst. "What impressed me was how many people from the ball loved it and embraced it," says Livingston.


September 15: Although it won’t be known until much later, “Now I’m Following You,” the odd duet with Warren Beatty, was to be the final single from I'm Breathless, in it's full two-part glory.
 

Sire went to the trouble of commissioning remixes for the release and a host of 7" Remixes were made to try and find a way of making the odd mix of styles that make up the album version(s) into a radio friendly mix. Five different ones were prepared, but in all honesty, they aren't particularly inspiring and all that different from each other.

A Dance Mix was also prepared and considered for inclusion on the set. None of them have ever been released commercially. A further mix was commissioned - the Tiny Little Circles Mix which did slip out commercially, via the Razormaid DJ mailorder service where upcoming mixes are sent out to influential DJs to test reaction in clubs. The Mix was included on the 15th issue on lovely swirled mustard vinyl and a much rarer CD.



1991:

March 25: Madonna performs “Sooner or Later” at the 63rd Annual Academy Awards at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California. The song wins composer Stephen Sondheim the Oscar for Best Original Song. Dick Tracy wins two other Academy Awards: Best Make-Up and Best Art Direction in a Film.



LATER: Madonna recorded several tracks for this project that will end up unreleased:

• “Dick Tracy” (Madonna/Pat Leonard): Copyrighted but not included on the LP.
• “To Love You” (Madonna/Andy Paley): Recorded but not included.
• “Dog House” & “Time After Time” (rumored but nothing is known)

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Erotica

1990:

Fall (probably late November): Judith Regan, an editor at Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books has an idea for a book of erotica and sexual fantasies which she felt would be ideal for Madonna. She sends an imaginative box of material to Freddy DeMann’s office in which includes erotic photos and the kind of text she thought would be appropriate. In a matter of weeks, Regan scores a meeting with Madonna and Freddy DeMann in his Los Angeles office. In the meeting, Madonna demands 100% control over the project and says she will not even think of doing it if it was already offered to another celebrity. She is quoted as saying, "It has to be unique to me." By the end of the meeting, Madonna agrees to do the book, “in principle” and they agree to call it: Madonna’s Book of Erotica and Sexual Fantasies. Six months later, Regan learns Madonna has used her very same pitch to secure a deal with Warner Books for the same concept. (paraphrased from Madonna: An Intimate Biography by J. Randy Taraborrelli who interviewed Judith Regan)
 

LATER: In an interview to promote Erotica with the UK's Jonathan Ross (in November 1992), she admits that soon after "Justify My Love" was released, she received several offers to write erotic prose for a book.


1991:

March: Somtime this month, Madonna does an interview with Carrie Fisher for the June 13, 1991 issue of Rolling Stone. In the interview, she mentions she is using the nickname 'Dita' which will later become her persona for the album. The name is drawn from a German actress, Dita Parlo, who gain fame starring in German and French films in the 1930's.
 

She also does a photoshoot with Steven Meisel which may serve as a dry-run of sorts for the SEX book. This is what was written about the photospread for RS:

The pictorial, "Flesh and Fantasy," casts Madonna as a seductive member of the Paris demimonde of the '30s. Inspired by the work of Brassai, the pictures show bordello scenes, cross-dressing, women lying together and kissing. These are, according to Brassai, "The Secret Paris" and his pictures of these subjects were not published until the '70s. Unfortunately, these scenes of a hidden alternative are not presented as a part of the history of sexual minorities, although most of us would identify them as such. Instead, according to Madonna, "It was a great chance to re-create an era that I feel I would have really flourished in, that nothing I would have done would have been censored." This statement is certainly mysterious. First, how could Madonna be more accepted than she already is? Second, this is certainly a romanticized view of the culture of Paris in the '30s, which marginalized rather than accepted the behaviors of the underworld members portrayed by Brassai. However problematic the motivations, the pictures are charming and I still give Madonna points for yet another great performance.


March 20: (20) USA TODAY: Madonna and Michael Team Up
 

Call it Blond Ambition meets the Man in the Mirror.

Madonna and Michael Jackson have decided to mix their professional magnetism. “They're working on a musical project,” say Madonna's spokeswoman Liz Rosenberg.

Record? Video? Concert?

“I can't elaborate,'' Rosenberg says. They don't even know if they'll work for her label, or his.

They have been friends for a long time, Rosenberg says, but the decision to mesh musicalities was “fairly recent.”

Saturday night, the duo was spotted having dinner together at Los Angeles' Ivy restaurant.

Jackson is ``just finishing'' his long-overdue album, says his manager Bob Jones, who expects it in stores by June. Could Madonna be in there? ``If (he) comes up with something great, it could be,'' Jones says.


April 21: From an interview with The Advocate to promote Truth or Dare:
 

MADONNA: I keep telling Michael Jackson, "I'd love to turn Jose and Luis on you for a week (her lead dancers Jose Gutierez and Luis Camacho)." They pull you out of the shoe box you're in. Anybody who's in a shoe box in the closet cannot be in one after hanging around with Luis and Jose. Or me, for that matter.

I have this whole vision about Michael. We're considering working on a song together. I would like to completely redo his whole image, give him a Caesar - you know, that really short haircut - and I want to get him out of those buckled boots and all that stuff. What I want him to do is go to New York and hang out for a week with the House of Xtravaganza {a group of drag queen performers and their coterie}. They could give him a new style. I've already asked Jose and Luis if they would do it. They're thrilled and ready.

Don Shewey: Is he up for it?

MADONNA: I don't know. He's up for a couple of things that surprise me. The thing is, I'm not going to get together and do some stupid ballad or love duet - no one's going to buy it, first of all. I said, "Look, Michael, if you want to do something with me, you have to be willing to go all the way or I'm not going to do it." He keeps saying yes . . .


May 15: Any musical collaboration between Madonna and Michael Jackson reportedly is off. "He ran away from me," the Material Girl told reporters Monday at the Cannes Film Festival. "When I was 8 or so, I wanted to be Michael Jackson. Not the Michael Jackson that we know now."

May 25: He [Shep Pettibone] is mulling over offers to write and produce songs for several platinum artists, as he is slated to work on forth-coming albums by Madonna and Liza Minelli. The future looks bright. (Billboard)

July 8: Shep Pettibone began putting tracks together with his assistant Tony Shimkin. Today, he gives Madonna a cassette of three songs (instrumental demos) when he visits her in Chicago (where she is filming A League of Their Own). Madonna listens to the material and calls him a few days later to say she likes all three songs – so he decides to work on more. (The Erotica Diaries, Shep Pettibone)

LATER: These 3 songs were probably "Erotica," "Deeper and Deeper" and/or "Rain" or "Thief of Hearts." At least judging by Shep's later comments that those were the first songs they did together.

October 31: Madonna attends Sandra Bernhard's Halloween show in NYC. She has just returned from filming in Indiana today.
 

Madonna returns to NYC and she begins working on demos with Shep in his apartment/penthouse studio. Their initial work is sporadic as Madonna would work with Pettibone for a week and then go off with Steven Meisel to work on her SEX book. Occasionally, she meets with André Betts, her co-producer on “Justify My Love.” (The Erotica Diaries, Shep Pettibone) - Shep indicates they started working in October, but all the press reports I dug up indicate Madonna was in Evansville, Indiana for the entire month - except for a few days around October 12 when she attended a wedding of her accountant, Allen Grubman, in NYC.

 

LATER: Madonna does a unreleased demo called “You Thrill Me” with Shep Pettibone that winds up being an alternate version of “Erotica.” An a cappella version of the demo vocals will surface on the Internet later on.

Madonna also did a demo called “Love Hurts” with Junior Vasquez (a protégé of Shep Pettibone) which contains similar lyrical content as “Erotica” and is an early version of that recording. Madonna reportedly intended to work with Vasquez as a producer on this album but changed her mind to Shep Pettibone for unknown reasons.


November 3: While shooting her MTV:10 spot in Los Angeles with Alek Keshishian, Madonna does a brief interview with Australian Molly Meldrum. In the interview, Madonna says of starting a new album:
 

“Well, I’m gonna go to New York next week and start writing again. Thank God. I’ve missed it.”


November 13: Madonna records the final demo for “Deeper & Deeper” and new vocals for the first demo of “Rain” today with Shep Pettibone. (The Rain Tapes)

November 15: Madonna went out tonight to the men-only Gaiety Theatre in midtown Manhattan. She goes with Steven Meisel, designer Marc Jacobs, Alek Keshishian and some other guys. (this could be when she decides to use the space for her upcoming book or maybe she was scouting locations).

(sometime in November): Shep says the first batch of songs they work on includes:

• “Deeper & Deeper”
• “Erotica”
• “Rain”
• “Thief of Hearts”

He says they sampled horns from Kool & the Gang for “Erotica” and snake charms for "Words."

Shep says Madonna always had a problem with “Deeper & Deeper.” They tried different bridges and changes but nothing worked. In the end, Madonna wanted a flamenco guitar in the middle of the song – a decision Shep did not like as he felt the tune should stay “a Philly house song.” (The Erotica Diaries, Shep Pettibone)

December 6: Today, Madonna records final demo vocals and new harmonies for “Rain.” (The Rain Tapes)

mid-December: Madonna ends up disliking the first bunch of songs recorded. Shep says he liked them because some tracks had a NY house sound and others had an L.A. vibe. Madonna didn’t want the L.A. vibe – she wanted a raw sound. She wanted it to sound like it was recorded in an alley at 123rd St. in Harlem. She didn’t want any glossy production. Shep went back to his usual style of mixing – bass-oriented, analog, hit-you-over-the-head stuff.
 

He says that Madonna was coming over to his apartment by 1PM and they would work until 8 or 9PM. During the sequencing (putting the song together) Madonna would get very impatient and yell at Shep. He recalls that this was about the time the music he was writing became more melancholy and written in minor keys – songs like “Bad Girl” and “In This Life.” He also says Madonna was driving the creative direction into personal and intense territory. (The Erotica Diaries, Shep Pettibone)


December 23: What Madonna did for vogueing, she may soon do for stripping.
 

Early next month, the superstar films her next music video - in Times Square's Gaiety Male Burlesk Theater, with the X-rated guys doing PG versions of their stage acts.

“Three weeks ago on a Friday night, Madonna went to the Gaiety and was entranced - she stayed and watched for three hours,'' says Ken Graziano, one- half of the gay performance duo, Bone Boyz.

“Strippers are very in vogue right now,” he says.

The Bone Boyz, based in Miami, were hired to coordinate last week's stripper auditions at the Gaiety. “We had to have 25 guys there at 10 a.m. for (fashion photog) Stephen Meisel and (Madonna's Truth or Dare director) Alek Keshishian,'' adds Scott Drnaerz, the other Boyz.

“They were looking for guys who had the best act in terms of costume, dancing ability and specific burlesque routine, not necessarily the best bodies,'' Graziano says. “Most of them were Latin go-go boys. It was easily the most exciting thing that's ever happened to them.'' (USA Today)


December 25: Shep spends Christmas vacation in Jamaica. (The Erotica Diaries, Shep Pettibone)

1992:

January 2: Pettibone returns from vacation in Jamaica with a reggae sound in his head. He put it down on tape and Madonna took to it – this song became “Why’s It So Hard?”
 

When the song was completed they had the idea of bringing in a Jamaican rapper to do some stuff on the record. They found a guy named Jamaiki who ran a Jamaican record store uptown. He was this big guy with real deep-ass voice. When we they trying to explain the song to him, he just looked at them and said, "Do you have any rum, man?" By the time Jamaiki was laying down the tracks in my studio, he was dancing around swigging rum and spilling it everywhere. They ended up not using the track beacause it sounded too rough for the song. (The Erotica Diaries, Shep Pettibone)


January 11: Madonna is involved in another project with her photographer that reportedly seeks to reveal more of her inner secrets -- Entertainment Weekly says the collaboration is rumored to be an illustration of Madonna's sexual fantasies. (Miami Herald)

January 15-16: Madonna records the final demo vocals for “Erotica.” (the Rain Tapes)
 

Shooting Madonna: Is Madonna playing truth or dare again? We hear her next stab at attention-grabbing headlines will be with a book of pornography that she's collaborating on with photographer Steven Meisel. "It's definitely hard-core," one source said. Meisel and Madonna have been working on the book for the past couple of months. (Last week, they reportedly took over the male theater, The Gaiety, for a shoot.) "There was one image," we're told, "that was shot with a knife at Madonna's vagina." "Was she wearing the nun's habit?" spokeswoman Liz Rosenberg asked. Then she said: "Madonna and Steven are working together on a series of portraits of personalities from the past. What form it's going to take has not been determined. It may be a book, it may be a magazine layout." Yes, and about the pornography? "I just don't know," Rosenberg said. "I haven't been at the shoots." In the meantime, Madonna was on her way to a recording studio - or was it a photo shoot? - the other day when fans, two boys and a girl who were stationed outside her apartment, followed her limo in a cab. (Inside New York, Jan. 15 edition)


January 17: Madonna, who trades in nothing if not shock, is involved in a photo project designed to "turn on the Sapphic and sadomasochistic sets," reports the New York Post. In one scene, Madonna supposedly is tied to a chair while two confederates cut off her duds and do unmentionable things with a knife. The paper says the pop star is having secret sessions with fashion photog Steven Meisel that feature whips and chains and all those things. (Liz Smith)

February 11: Shep Pettibone registered a number of songs with the U.S. copyright office today. The 2 tapes he submitted was titled ‘The Rain Album’ and featured “Rain,” “Words” and “Thief of Hearts.” The song “Words” was originally called “Actions Speak…” and had several different mixes and incarnations. One mix did not feature the Indian-sounding instrument on the released version, and instead used guitar. Also, synth keys (used at the end of the song) were repeated in the chorus. The lyrics also included: “Your love is for fools” and “You’re so cruel.” The vocal is different than the one on the album release, so they must have been re-recorded at some point.

The songs were all created in late 1991.
 

Tape# 1

1) Rain (final demo w/new harms) 12/6/91 5:14
2) Rain (new vocal) 11/13/91 5:27
3) Deeper And Deeper (final demo) 11/13/91 5:29
4) Bye Bye Baby (first day ruff) 5:44
5) Bye Bye Baby (second day ruff)
6) You Are The One (final edit demo) 4:15
7) Shame (final demo) 4:30
8) Shame (straight pass) 6:02
9) In This Life (edit) 6:29
10) Cheat(Drunk Girl) edit 6:15--------------------------------this became “Bad Girl” most likely
11) Goodbye To Innocence (final edit) 5:25
12) Goodbye To Innocence (straight pass) 6:00
13) Goodbye To Innocence (madedit/Sheps neck(choice)5:22
14) Actions Speak Louder Than Words (final edit)
15) Erotica (final demo) 1/16/92 5:05

Tape# 2

1) Actions Speak Louder Than Words (1st day)
2) Actions Speak Louder Than Words (final edit)
3) Erotica (rough mix) 1/15/92
4) Erotica (final demo) 1/16/92
5) Thief Of Hearts 1/17/92
6) Jitterbug 1/17/92
7) Thief Of Hearts (new music) 1/20/92
8) Thief Of Hearts (old music again) 1/22/92


S.Pettibone/M. Ciccone/T.Shimkin - Madonna is credited for all the lyrics on the tapes, while Shimkin/Pettibone are credited with the music.

“SHAME” - The totally unreleased song is from the "Erotica" sessions with Shep Pettibone. It's actually very good. It's similar in dance style to that of "Deeper And Deeper", and "Vogue", Perhaps a little slower.

This demo is high enough quality that it could have been sent to another artist to use (like "Love Wont Wait"). If it had been included on the album, it would have been too similar in sound to have enough variety on the album with the other tracks. I guess this made room for the Andre Betts collaborations.

In the song Madonna talks down to the object character of the song (or perhaps the listener). This is part of the developing Dita persona that we did not get to see. The song opens with a spoken intro:

"Look what you have done with your life, it's such a shame".

Later she says "anyone can learn to fly" as if she is asking why haven't you
learned yet ?

She also says "you're the one to blame".

The chorus starts with "It's a Shaaaaaame" which sounds an awful a lot like the song of the same title by Monie Love. This is probably the source of the old rumour that they were going to do something together. The similarity
ends there, and then it breaks off into it's own unique melody.

GOODBYE TO INNOCENCE is completely different than the version released later as the B-side to “Rain.” This original version is considered better. It’s pure pop-funk-dance and the vocal is stronger and the melody different. The theme is the same and many of the lyrics remain intact.

EROTICA in its original version, contained the verse lyrics found in the “Erotic” song included with SEX. The choruses were also different using the “you thrill me, fill me deep inside” instead of “erotic, erotic put your hands all over my body.” The mix is more generic and the released version is definitely more exotic and unique.

THIEF OF HEARTS did not change too much from beginning to end of creation. The “sit your ass down” line at the end of the song was originally used in the beginning and was a sample of a Southern black woman. There were also subtle modifications to the bridge.

DEEPER & DEEPER: This track also did not change much from its original demo. The Spanish guitar bridge (which Madonna insisted upon) is not present and the song follows its typical house pattern. The demo version is a little longer with the ending lines slightly different.

YOU ARE THE ONE: This demo is reportedly not that good and was abandoned for good reason. The music is very house/dance and remotely similar to the released version of GOODBYE TO INNOCENCE. The lyrics are forgettable – “You are the one for me” and “I have chosen you.”

JITTERBUG: It's typical generic Shep dance music with Madonna finishing up with "Jitterbug, Jitterbug". Perhaps it's a cover? There is not enough to
tell...

She stops but the music continues. She says "Ya that one has some good ideas to it". The music continues, and she says "How long is this one going to go on"?. The music continues and she say "Isn't anyone going to turns this damn thing off"? It abruptly ends.

It seems to just silly studio fun, and not really "Erotica" album material but there was more before Shep recorded over it.
 (Bruce Baron article)


February 14-16: Madonna is reportedly in Miami this weekend - with Vanilla Ice no less. Madonna was also reportedly shooting on Golden Beach and staying at The Alexander. She is seen at restaurant Barocco Beach, every imaginable club and theme evening, as well as renting furniture from Carlos Betancourt's studio for some stylized posing. On Saturday night, she attends the opening of The Marlin.

February 19: Miami as the new Ibiza, a hothouse for international jet set types. It's Madonna in town - no, really in town this time - shooting her new book with photographer Steven Meisel and living out the Don Johnson/Star Island scenario for the Nineties.
 

The really quite juicy story about Madonna's girls-night-out-evening, relayed by New York Post columnist George Rush: Material Girl backstage at Jackie 60 in New York, inserting the handle of a switchblade in her not-so-private regions, as part of some no-doubt artistically provocative lesbo-land scenario. (Miami New Times)


March: Pettibone knew by now that they were doing an album. They had 15 songs demoed and Madonna liked them all. The last song they did was “This Used to Be My Playground” for her movie A League of Their Own. Madonna just started by singing a melody over and over into the mic while piano, strings and organ. (The Erotica Diaries, Shep Pettibone)
 

The song was completed the day before Madonna flew to Portland, Oregon to film Body of Evidence which began shooting April 6, 1992.


April 20: Time-Warner announces a new $60-70 million deal with Madonna. The first two projects will be a book of erotic fantasies and a new album due in the fall. (NY Times)
 

Madonna tells the NY Times (reporting on her $60 million deal with Time Warner) that she has already written the songs for her next album. Madonna described the album, whose songs she has already written, as "soulful, with a jazzy undertone and lot of beatnik-style poetry in it."<---- I am assuming she is talking about the André Betts stuff


April 25: There are rumors in the dance community that Madonna has penned a song called “Deeper & Deeper.” Sources close to the singer have no knowledge of such a song but admit she has been writing new material with producer Shep Pettibone and will enter the studio this summer to record her next album. There are also rumors of a song called “Eating Out/Out to Lunch” – a paean to lesbian sex. Other works in progress: “No Entry,” “Freak,” “Show & Tell” and “Smoked Too Many Cigarettes.” (Billboard, Dance Trax section)

May 4-5: Madonna shot her scenes at the State Court House in Olympia, Washington today (for Body of Evidence) causing an uproar that state facilities were used for a *reportedly* NC-17 film.

(mid-May): Pettibone met Madonna at Oceanway Studios in Los Angeles to complete the orchestra parts of “This Used to Be My Playground.” Madonna had Jeremy Lubbock do the string arrangement because he had done such a good job with her I’m Breathless material. When the orchestra began to play their parts, Madonna and Pettibone did not like what they heard, so they changed the entire arrangement right there by singing the notes to Lubbock who has perfect pitch. The orchestra cost $15,000 for the first 3 hours and $3,000 for each half hour after that – the strings were done in 2 hours and 58 minutes. (The Erotica Diaries, Shep Pettibone)

May 25: Madonna wanted to re-record the vocals for “This Used to Be My Playground” because she knew they could sound better. Today was the last day of recording for the song, and Pettibone finished some edits before going to a party at Madonna’s Hollywood mansion. (The Erotica Diaries, Shep Pettibone)

June: US Magazine says Madonna's new album is "reportedly rave and techno influenced."

June 8: Madonna & Pettibone recorded “Erotica” at Soundworks in NYC. (The Erotica Diaries, Shep Pettibone)

June 9: Madonna & Pettibone recorded “Words” & “Why’s It So Hard” at Soundworks in NYC. (The Erotica Diaries, Shep Pettibone)

June 10: Madonna & Pettibone recorded “Why’s It So Hard” & “Thief of Hearts” at Soundworks in NYC. (The Erotica Diaries, Shep Pettibone)

June 11: Madonna & Pettibone recorded “Thief of Hearts” & “Goodbye to Innocence” at Soundworks in NYC. (The Erotica Diaries, Shep Pettibone)

June 15: Shep does 8-track dumps with no time-code. (The Erotica Diaries, Shep Pettibone)

June 16: Madonna & Pettibone recorded “Deeper & Deeper” at Soundworks in NYC. (The Erotica Diaries, Shep Pettibone)

June 18: “This Used to Be My Playground” retail single is released.

June 30: The video for "This Used to be My Playground" debuts on MTV. Directed by Alek K.

July 7: Madonna & Pettibone did the mixing for “Erotic” the ode to S&M that Madonna wanted included in her Sex book. Madonna wanted it to sound just like “Erotica” but just a bassline, her voice and some sensuous Middle Eastern sounds. Shep gave her the idea to use the ideas and stories in the book in the song and this is when Madonna started using “My name is Dita, I’ll be your mistress tonight.” The chorus and bridge of the original changed completely. (The Erotica Diaries, Shep Pettibone)

July 10: Today was Pettibone’s 30-something birthday and he spent it working in the studio with Madonna, Tony Shimkin and an animal-balloon-twisting clown.

July 29: Liz Smith reports that Madonna’s new album will be titled Erotica.

August 14: Madonna attends a Peggy Lee cabaret show at Club 53 in the NY Hilton tonight (Liz Smith).

August 15: Pettibone says that “Goodbye to Innocence” wasn’t working. He worked overnight on a new bassline that he brought into Soundworks (NYC) today and it seemed to fix the problem. However, when Madonna started putting down the vocal track, she started toying with the lyrics and started singing the words to “Fever.” He says it sounded so good they decided to actually cover the tune. Madonna called Seymour Stein and in less than an hour, they had the lyrics to the Peggy Lee original. This was the last track they did for Erotica. (The Erotica Diaries, Shep Pettibone)


September: This will be the first release on Madonna's new MAVERICK label.

September 12: Pettibone leaves Soundworks (NYC) with the completed master for Erotica. He said they spend three and a half months in the same recording studio to complete it. Everything had gone smoothly at the end except for “Why’s It So Hard” and “Words,” both of which were recalled for changes. (The Erotica Diaries, Shep Pettibone)

1.8 million copies of the album are already advanced ordered in the U.S. (Billboard)

Madonna says Shep Pettibone is more commercial and dance-oriented while Andre Betts has a more street vibe, jazzy, hiphop feel. Shep’s production is more heavily synthesized while Betts features more live drums, acoustic piano and saxophone. (Vanity Fair, October 1992)

October 2: At midnight on MTV, the video for “Erotica” premieres. It is shown 3 times before the network pulls it completely. It is helmed by French art director/designer Fabien Baron and features footage shot with an 8mm camera during the making of her book, SEX. It features Udo Kier, Isabella Rossellini, Tatian Von Furstenberg, Naomi Campbell, and Big Daddy Kane. Bobby Woods from Heart Times Coffee Cup Equals Lightning Productions produced the clip.
 

LATER: In an interview with MTV in Milan, she talks about the “Erotica” video and how it was shot with Super 8 video for a “scratchy and antique-looking” feel. She also says all the people in the video were either friends of hers or Steven Meisel’s.


In an interview with MTV, Madonna says that most of the album’s tracks are in their raw 8-track demo form for a “rougher sound.”

Madonna says SEX was partly inspired by the 1920’s French photographer George Brassaï’s Paris de Nuit (Paris by Night). The book also features notorious gay (and HIV positive) porn star Joey Stefano in several shots. He is seen on the page after the dog photo and has a tattoo on his right arm. In 1994, he will die of a heroin overdose. (source not listed)

The ballad “In This Life” was written in memory of two of Madonna’s closest gay friends – her childhood dance teacher, Christopher Flynn and her best friend in NYC Martin Burgoyne. Both passed away from AIDS-related illnesses.

It shipped 4 million units worldwide prior to its release. (Entertainment Weekly, October 1992)



October 20: The album is released. One day later, SEX is released.

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Ray of Light

 

1996:

August 3, 1996: Madonna has approached DJ Robert Miles – a trance/progressive house composer from Switzerland who lives in Italy - about working on her next LP (due next year) after she heard his worldwide No. 1 hit, “Children.” She is apparently eager to experiment with “dream” and “trance” music on her new album. (MLVC Mailing List rumor)

Also of note in 1996 - Christine Leach records "Sepheryn" to backing music made by William Orbit one night while they were working together. That recording is among the first he sends to Madonna in the Spring of 1997. - from Q Magazine (August 2002) The Making of Ray of Light


1997:

January 1997: In a radio interview with WKTU in NYC, Madonna says she and Babyface start writing next month for her next album.

February 26, 1997: Rick Nowels meets Madonna in a random encounter at Barney’s in NYC today. Later, they will have a meeting and end up writing 9 songs together – 3 of which will make the album.

March 1997: "Guy [Oseary] rang and suggested I send some tapes to her [Madonna]. I didn't take it very seriously, so I didn't send anything. Then he rang again, so I sent a DAT with 13 tracks on it. (William Orbit from Q Magazine - August 2002 - The Making of Ray of Light)

In an interview that will be published in November 1997, Italian dreamhouse DJ, Robert Miles talks about his new album, 23a.m. and how it started to take shape this month (March 1997) with a song he wrote for Madonna called, “Enjoy.” Scheduling problems prevented them from recording it together so he hired another singer to do it for his album.

March 17, 1997: Madonna is currently working with Pat Leonard and Babyface on her new album, which she will record in the spring. (ICON Newsletter)

March 20, 1997: Madonna is working on a new album, collaborating once again with the heavily-booked producer Babyface. However, whether or not she's reaching out to Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor to produce a track for her, a hot Internet rumor at the moment, remains to be seen. (MTV News)

April 11, 1997: Madonna has just arrived in London for a two-week stay. The UK papers say she will be recording her new album there with Nellee Hooper.

April 18, 1997: MTV News’ Kurt Loder says: Madonna is in London laying down tracks with producer Nellee Hooper (from the Bedtime Stories album) and will soon return to L.A. to record with Babyface.

April 1997: In a March 1998 interview with MuchMusic, Madonna said she did approach Tricky to work with her but his management said he was busy finishing his own album. She also said she contacted Goldie and he initially agreed so she sent some demos and he “fell in love” with “To Have and Not to Hold” but never called her back after that.

 

“I tried to get him to work on one of the tracks from Ray of Light. Nellee Hooper played a bunch of early demos for him and he fell in love with 'To Have And Not To Hold'. We sent him the master tapes and he said he wanted to work on it by himself, and then we never heard from him. Oh well, I guess he was busy."


May 1997 (early): "Five days later, sitting in my garden, I got a call from Madonna. She said she was working on my tracks and would I like to come out and meet up with her. They sent me a plane ticket and off I went." (William Orbit from Q Magazine - August 2002 - The Making of Ray of Light)

May 23, 1997: From Liz Smith's column: WHAT'S NEW on the Madonna front? The once-outrageous star is busy communing with the muse. In other words, songwriting for her next album. She will collaborate on a few tunes with Kenneth (Babyface) Edmonds. The last time Madonna and "Face" pooled their resources, it resulted in the zillion-seller, "Take a Bow."

Early June 1997: "It was a day of sun and showers, and I remember I got drenched just as I arrived at her apartment block. Her living-room hi-fi wasn't working, so we adjourned to her gymnasium with another hi-fi. She played me the stuff she'd written with Babyface and Pat Leonard, and I'm sitting thinking, "These tracks sound very slick. What can I contribute?"

 

We spent the next week at the Hit Factory getting my backing tracks up in stereo, and she sang what she'd worked out, and it was clear that something was happening. At the end of that week, she said, "Would you work on my record?" and I said. I'd love to." (William Orbit from Q Magazine - August 2002 - The Making of Ray of Light)

June 15-22, 1997: Per a rumored letter between Madonna and Pat Leonard, Madonna is in Michigan around this time visiting her father. In the letter (if it is true), Madonna informs Pat that she wants William Orbit to be the primary producer of the album.

(mid-to-late June): Work begins at Larrabee North Studio, Universal City, LA.
 

William Orbit: "The first day, I was in paralysis because I was used to going off and being left to get on with it, but she said, "I'm not the kind of girl that leaves the guy to get on with it. Get used to it." It took me a while to get used to someone looking over my shoulder.

Larrabee was a real state-of-the-art studio. I'd never even worked on an automated desk before. It wasn't so much a learning curve as a learning cliff. I realised right away that my equipment was really superannuated, like my old Atari 1040, held together with gaffer tape. It caught fire twice on the sessions.

One minor hazard was that Lola (Lourdes) would come in every day and, like any toddler, she'd make a beeline for the knobs and buttons. We'd look away and the whole sound had changed. We had to keep an eye on her.

There weren't a lot cf musicians around. Mostly it was just me, Madonna, Pat McCarthy, who was a briliant engineer, and a tape-op called Matt. On Ray Of Light every guitar you hear is me. On a lot of tracks I did everything.

Most of the tracks pre-existed, so Madonna would work on vocals and lyrics at home, or driving around in her car. It's Important to point out that I wasn't the only producer working on the LP. Patrick Leonard did some great work...

Madonna: As a classically trained musician, Patrick brought a whole other element to the mix, particularly his string arrangements...

William Orbit: About a third of the way through, I thought I was going to get fired. Madonna was used to working with super-slick producers, whereas I'm very lateral which she saw as being disorganised.

I went to her house to playback “Power Of Goodbye”. We'd taken the wrong DAT with us and she was not amused. I ended up saying "Gimme a week and I'll turn this one round".

I virtually lived in the studio for that week, and from then on, it was great. She became confident that I knew what I was doing. - From Q Magazine (August 2002) The Making of Ray of Light


July 8, 1997: Freddy DeMann told WEA Italian executives that Madonna is recording her new album right now from songs she wrote this past spring. The recording will be finished in September but he said she wants to have plenty of time to promote it, so it is unlikely it will be released until early 1998. (MLVC Mailing List)

July 15, 1997: Madonna recorded the vocals for “Swim” today. Orbit later claims the vocals have “emotional resonance” to them because of how the death of Gianni Versace (murdered today) affected her - as she got the call about the designer just before she started recording the vocal in the studio. From Q Magazine (August 2002) The Making of Ray of Light

July 31, 1997: Madonna reportedly asked Liam Howlett of The Prodigy to produce the album with her but he declined saying to do so would be like “selling my soul to the Devil.” (MTV News, I think)

August 15, 1997: Madonna spent the spring and most of June writing material. On June 30 she went into the studio to record material with William Ørbit. On July 7 she was supposed to start recording with Nellee Hooper but the two had a falling out. Hooper is reportedly very upset. (I have no idea where I got this info - possibly a rumor ffrom the MLVC board)

August 25, 1997: A representative at Chrysalis Records reports that Susannah Melvoin (former Prince flame and half of the Paisley Park duo Wendy & Lisa) says that Susannah just completed a song ["Candy Perfume Girl"] with William Ørbit for Madonna’s next album. Susannah also just got married and will be taking a few weeks off now before re-entering the studio with Lisa again. (MLVC Mailing List)

August 26, 1997: Red-hot British producer Nellee Hooper, who has produced records for Soul II Soul, Massive Attack, U2, and Bjork, has refused to work with Madonna. Madonna and Hooper had originally agreed to record in London, so Hooper booked studio time along with some of London's top musicians. But when Madonna met with him in Los Angeles to discuss plans, one of the details was a switch of locale from London to L.A. Nellee agreed, on the condition that Madonna pay for the cost of canceling the London sessions. She refused. So he refused to do her album, or ever work with her again. Of the Hooper situation, Madonna's manager Caresse Norman says, "The stars weren't properly aligned."

[
NOTE: I know somewhere there is a print interview with Madonna where she says that she took her demos to Nellee Hooper in London and he "wanted to change the music" and get a writing credit, and that angered her so she took him off the project. However, considering she allowed William Orbit to write and change music from the demos - most notably, "Drowned World" which was her and Leonard's "Substitute for Love" - I am not sure who to believe.

Mid-September 1997: In an interview for the 30th anniversary issue of Rolling Stone (which hits stands next month with M, Tina Turner and Courtney Love on the cover) she says Lourdes is always in the recording studio with her now. She also says she has a month to go on the recording process and that it is likely she will tour next summer (1998) to support the album. (Rolling Stone 11/13/1997)
 

During the photoshoot for the Rolling Stone cover, she is (reportedly) constantly playing a remix of Tricky's "Makes Me Wanna Die" (remixed by the Stereo MC's) - this will lead her to having them [Stereo MC's] remix her lead track, "Frozen."


October 2, 1997: A Turkish magazine leaks 3 song titles: "Substitute for Love," "Sky Fits Heaven" and "Candy Perfume Girl." (as reported by the MLVC Mailing List)

October 3, 1997: Today, MTV films the ULTRASOUND episode of Madonna in the recording studio.

October 9, 1997: Donatella Versace unveiled the new Versace spring-summer collection in Milan, Italy. Madonna was unable to attend so instead she contributed the catwalk music. The song she supplied is from her forth-coming album. It was called “Candy Perfume Girl” and is described as “very Prodigy” – quite hard edged. (MLVC Mailing List)

October 12, 1997: BET reports Babyface has done a few tracks for the album but didn’t know if they would all be included. One is funky, one is a full-on jam (like TLC’s “Creep”) and one will be a smooth, beautiful ballad. They also mentioned that last time the two worked together, one cut didn’t make the Bedtime Stories album.

October 18, 1997: The lyrics to "Little Star" leak online. Two more track names are also leaked: "Ray of Light" and "Skin." Also, Marius de Vries is mentioned as a producer. (MLVC Mailing List)

October 29, 1997: According to her website, Madonna has decided on a name for the album and she has renamed the song “Substitute for Love” – “Drowned World.” The first single is due in February. As of today, she is still in the studio doing mastering for the album.

November 18, 1997: Madonna has brought on some new management. Cliff Burnstein and Peter Mensch (of Q Prime Management) will co-manage Madonna along with current manager Caresse Norman. Their first priority will be the new album in March of 1998. Burnstein says the new album is “groundbreaking” and “It’s unlike anything else heard on the radio.”

November 20, 1997: This week Madonna invited top WB execs to a listening party for her new album. The party was held in a London recording studio she had decked out in Moroccan décor. WB president Phil Quartararo and the heads of the international labels were pleased with what they heard. The album is a dance disc that gets back to her original audience while mining the latest trip-hop and drum-and-bass grooves…courtesy William Orbit. One insider said: “It’s very ‘druggie’ sounding.”

November 21, 1997: Madonna christens the album RAY OF LIGHT. Madonna changed the title five times before deciding on this name. Previous names included: Mantra, Drowned World, Heartbreaking, and Electronica.

November 26, 1997: Madonna previews 5 tracks from the record at LIQUID (club) in Miami. While in Miami this weekend, she shoots the album cover with Mario Testino.

December 2, 1997: Marius de Vries tells an informant he worked on 3 cuts on the album, including Madonna’s drum-and-bass lullabye to Lourdes, “Little Star.” (MLVC Mailing List)

 

According to reports from Warner Europe, the first single will be called “Frozen” (produced by Madonna and William Orbit). It will be released to European radio January 23, 1998.


December 15, 1997: Chris Cunningham will direct the video for “Frozen,” a slow and spacey song according to an insider. Black Dog is the production company and the video will be shot January 5-12 in a location outside L.A. The casting calls for two body doubles and reports that one may “hang from a rig” while being scantily clad.

December 25, 1997: Madonna calls Victor Calderone today to inform him his up-tempo tribal remix of “Frozen” will be chosen for the maxi-single. (from an interview with Victor Calderone)

 

1998:

January 1: “Frozen” was played on New Year’s Eve at Twilo, the new NYC dance club opened by Junior Vasquez.

January 2: Lyrics to “Drowned World,” “Ray of Light,” “Frozen” and “Nothing Really Matters” hit the Internet.

January 4: A press release says there are two new song titles: “Swim” and “Mer Girl”

January 6: At the 2nd anniversary of Liquid (in Miami, November 1997), Madonna met Victor Calderone. Victor was DJ-ing that night and he hit it off so well with Madonna that he’s remixing 3 songs for her.

January 7-10: “Frozen” – Madonna shoots the video for this mystical clip in the Cuddeback Dry Lake Bed in the Indian Wells Valley region of Ridgecrest, CA in the Mojave Desert with Chris Cunningham. She chose him based on his disturbing video for “Come to Daddy” by the Aphex Twin. Black Dog Films produced. The production put $120,000 into the local economy. Jean Paul Gaultier designed the costumes.

January 8: Madonna plans to work with Jonas Akerlund (director of Prodigy’s notorious “Smack My Bitch Up” video) on a video from the upcoming album. She is also planning a large-scale tour for summer 1998.


January 9: OFFICIAL Tracklisting: RAY OF LIGHT
13 tracks:

• Drowned World (Substitute for Love)
• Swim
• Ray of Light
• Candy Perfume Girl
• Skin
• Nothing Really Matters
• Sky Fits Heaven
• Shanti/Ashtangi
• Frozen
• Power of Goodbye
• Has To Be
• Little Star
• Mer Girl

WB is planning a massive long-term promotional campaign for the album. Madonna will provide heavy participation. Music and fashion magazine spreads, talkshows, and performances of the album material are planned.

January 10: The song, “Shanti,” is taken from Sanskrit vocabulary. The word means “peace” and is frequently used in yoga. It’s repeated at the end of a meditation…like ‘amen.’ It is often used in conjunction with ‘Om’ which means “God.” It is most closely tied with Tantra, a branch of Hinduism that considers sexual ecstasy a sacrament. Such words are also used in Hindu ‘mantras’ which can act as spells for good or evil.

January 12: A rumor says Madonna was recently in the Mojave Desert filming her new video in a black gown and wig. She reportedly had “henna” (Islamic hand tattoos) painted on her hands.

January 13: The video for “Frozen” will reportedly feature a number of “trippy special effects.” Chris Cunningham, who has worked with Aphex Twin, is directing it outside of Palmdale, CA.

“Frozen” remixers: Victor Calderone, Junior Vasquez, and Stereo MC’s.

January 18: At the 55th Annual Golden Globes, Madonna presents the Best Actor Award to Jack Nicholson and debuts her new self-proclaimed “Renaissance pre-Rafaelite” look with ratted, stawberry-blond hair and gothic dress.

January 19: SPIN magazine has a listening party for the album. Most of the listeners trash the new material.

January 20: The album cover debuts online with Madonna in her pre-Rafaelite hair, a blue dress and a logo for the album: ]|[

MTV announces it will air a special on the album with its new weekly series MTV Ultrasound, which will show the recording process of future hit albums. The Madonna episode (which will reportedly feature Lourdes) airs March 1.

January 21: A maxi-single for “Frozen,” with remixes by Victor Calderone will be released on March 17.

A revised album track listing is released which has “To Have and Not To Hold” instead of “Has To Be.”

January 23: The cover of the “Frozen” single is released. The B-side will be “Shanti/Ashtangi”:

January 24: The Japanese release of the LP will have a bonus track – “Has to Be”

WB reps say there will be a special edition of the album released that will have special artwork and retail for $30.00.

Madonna is talking about releasing a remix album of this LP’s material.

Madonna will perform several songs from the album on Valentine’s Day (2-14-98) at the Roxy in NYC.

January 25: “Frozen” is released to European radio stations this week.

January 26: The second single will be the title track which they are hoping will be the dance song of the summer.

Insiders say Madonna had originally planned to work on 2 cuts of the album with William Orbit, but their pairing worked so well, he ended up producing and writing a majority of the record. They recorded over the summer at Larrabe Studios in Universal City, California and Pat McCarthy engineered the sound.

Suzanne Melvoin (sister of Johnathan Melvoin – the Smashing Pumpkins keyboardist who OD’ed and died on tour) co-wrote “Candy Perfume Girl” while “Shanti/Ashtangi” had lyrics taken from ancient Sanskrit texts.

January 27: Madonna gives a press conference in Beverly Hills, CA to promote the upcoming album.

January 30: In an interview, Madonna says a remix album, Veronica Electronica, will be released later this year. She also reveals that the song “Mer Girl” is about death, was one of the first tracks recorded for the album and was done in one vocal take. She also knew that it would be the last song on the album. Her favorite track is “Drowned World.”

January 31: WB Records has joined forces with the RIAA to combat illegal leaking of the album and the single “Frozen” via the Internet. A number of fan sites have been streaming audio of the new song, pre-empting radio ad dates all over the world.

She also plans a “club date” tour soon.

February 3: In an interview with an Australian radio station to promote the album, Madonna says she’s been listening to a lot of Tricky – the Stereo MC’s remix of “She Makes Me Wanna Die” – and Aphex Twin. She also currently likes Portishead and Massive Attack.

Madonna will launch a promotional tour for the album.

Timeline:
• 2/17/98-3/3/98 Promo-tour in Europe
• 2/19/98: “Frozen” goes to radio.
• 3/3/98 Ray of Light and “Frozen” released for sale (U.S.)
• 3/6/98 Madonna visits Canada to promote the album.
• 3/13/98 Madonna will perform “Frozen” on Rosie O’Donnell
• 3/17/98 “Frozen” maxisingle released. (U.S.)

On “Shanti/Ashtangi” Madonna sings in Sanskrit. The first line translates as: “I worship the guru’s lotus feet.”

Madonna is still taking singing lessons.

Tommy Mottola (CEO of Sony Music) predicts “Frozen” will be “nothing less than a smash hit!”

Madonna and William Orbit only wrote 5 of the songs together. Among them, “Swim,” a guitar-driven electrofunk odyssey; and “Ray of Light” which originally ended up being 10 minutes long! The full version may surface on her upcoming remix album: Veronica Electronica.

The album is generating RAVE reviews.

U.S.A. Today gave “Frozen” 4 out of 4 stars in a review.

February 16: The video for “Frozen” premieres on MTV.

LATER: After receiving the initial phone call from Madonna and when meeting her in person, Ørbit gives her a tape of five instrumental tracks. One becomes “Swim” – which was among the first of their collaberations. Orbit says once they completed this track, they both knew they were “onto something special” as it gave him shivers. “Frozen” was originally over 10 minutes long, and Madonna says it was “heart-breaking” cutting down to a manageable length.

From a Dotmusic Interview with W. Orbit:

“Power Of Goodbye” - Another of the songs for Madonna fans (this time one of Nowels'), it is all keyboard and drums and circus-like swirls and stands out for its all-knowing lyrics.

 

WO: "This track took a long time. I really did struggle. This was the midnight of the tracks. There was a
point on the album when I thought I was going to give it up. But like Robert the Bruce and the spider in the cave, I kept cracking away on it and then we were flying."


“To Have And Not To Hold” - A delicate chant-like track in which Madonna's voice weaves through the melody.
 

WO: "It was pretty straightforward, the sound just fell into place. Rico Conning put bells on and a great
descending bell-line and I totally neglected him in the credits."


“Little Star” - A lullaby-like track not least for its lyrics, which show Madonna's daughter Lourdes as being the most important thing in her life. The most ambient track which has restrained beats and complex effects held
back by sweeping strings.

 

WO: "I had nothing to do with this track, apart from being around when it was done. Marius came in and went down the
corridor to come up with that. I walked by, loved it and gave them the thumbs up."


“Mer Girl” - From its landscape and the emotional resonances, this is a powerful ending to the album.
 

WO: "I'm very proud of this one. I set out to do something complex and I felt like I'd pulled it off. It has a lot
more structure than it would first appear. She sang it so incredibly beautifully - in one take - early in the project. It's just a moment in time I'll cherish. Most people don't get that far on an album."



Q Magazine (August 2002) The Making of Ray of Light:
 

William Orbit: The final track, “Mer Girl” was another crucial point for me. I was very proud of it, but there was outside pressure to change it, and she just said, "No, It's a piece of art. Don't touch it." I thought "I'm in good hards here." I knew I wouldn't have to worry about the music being trampled on by A&R interventions.

Madonna: It's a song about dealing with death. There's the obvious thing about my mother's death but also Princess Diana's and Versace's death. There seemed to be so much death actually around the time that I had written it.

 

 

KEYBOARD magazine (July 1998) Interview with W. Orbit:

"The funniest memory was Madonna, who doesn't do a lot of keyboard
playing, messing around on a keyboard marked up with grease pencils. I
mean, picture Madonna, the biggest pop star in the world, playing with
this retro gear that you could buy for $50 in the Recycler."

"Skin was a track that the three of us worked together on [Orbit,
DeVries, and Madonna]. We had fun with that one, and that flute was
something Marius recorded at a market while on holiday in Morocco. In
fact, at the very end of that I faded early because everyone starts
clapping at the end of the sequence. It didn't sound right to hear
applause near the end. It gave the wrong impression of the track, so I
faded it early."

"Another thing about Madonna. I've never met anybody who has more
ability to make things happen like she does. Stuff happens, and she
makes it happen just by the sheer force of her will."

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Music

1998:

November 18, 1998: In a Swedish press conference, Madonna says that the Veronica Electronica remix album is no longer happening because she & William Ørbit have other projects to focus on right now and she doesn’t want to go back into the studio and re-record this album. She does say that she will be "releasing a new album in a year or so."

1999:

June: Fatboy Slim recently spoke with Madonna's team about doing a record together in the future. Meanwhile, progressive-house DJ Sasha is doing some original tracks too after remixing for Madonna last year. (MLVC Mailing List)

July: Madonna is planning to record material with William Ørbit for a Fall 2000 album. (MLVC Mailing List)

August: According to William Ørbit's spokesperson, he and Madonna will begin work on a new album for 2000 shortly. (William Orbit's website)

August 12: Madonna is currently working on songwriting for the soundtrack to The Next Best Thing. (Liz Smith's column)

September: According to William Ørbit’s manager Andy Kipness, Madonna has summoned Ørbit into the studio once again to co-produce her new album. Originally, Madonna had booked him for January 2000 to start the new album but she changed her mind. Ørbit is now rushing to finish the All Saints material he was working on, and he only has afew days left until he's due to start work with M.
 

Later on, Orbit will say they started with the cover of "American Pie" which was really just an attempt to appease Rupert Everett's request that it be included in he and Madonna's film. After that, Ørbit said what they came up with was mostly ballads which got scrapped.

On November 17, 2000, Madonna is interviewed by a Norweigan TV show that asks her how MUSIC started:

"Well, I knew that I didn't want to repeat myself and I wasn't actually sure of the direction I wanted to go in, so I started working with William Orbit again - cuz we had, I thought, a really great collaboration. And after I wrote about 9 songs, I decided that there was too much of a sameness or similarity of sound as the last record. So I kind of threw out everything and started all over again. And at that point I met Mirwais and we started working together and that's really when I found the sound that I wanted the record to be. And then I went back to William after that and sort of re-worked the stuff that we were doing."

She also says that her engineer working on the album was raving about Da Ali G Show so she got some tapes of it and thought Sacha Baron Cohen was hilarious. She later decided to put him in the "Music" video.


End of Sept/Beginning of October: Mirwaïs Ahmadzai (via a friend) sends his demo to Maverick which comes across the path of Guy Oseary. A mere two weeks after sending them his demo, he is in a London studio laying down tracks with Madonna.
 

In an interview much later on, Mirwaïs says in the fall of 1999, he was finishing his album Production and Stephane Sednaoui sent the record and video for "Disco Science" to Maverick Records. Guy Oseary called a few days later and asked for some additional material, so Mirwaïs obliged with several tracks from Production. Then, he got a phone call from Madonna and she loved them both. Madonna sent Sednaoui to ask Mirwaïs if he wanted to work on "one or two" tracks for her album.


October 5: Madonna will reunite with William Ørbit when she flies to London in two weeks' time to finish her new album. William Ørbit has a number of songs ready for the record which is due out next year. Madonna and Ørbit have also been collaberating on the soundtrack to The Next Best Thing.
 

The two are rumored to have recently completed a song for the soundtrack called "The Best Thing" [they probably mean "Time Stood Still" because it has the title in its chorus] at a NYC sound studio, the rest of her studio album will be done in London.


October 17, 1999: Madonna and Lola arrive in London today. She's in London to complete her new album. (MLVC Mailing List)

October 20, 1999: Madonna begins recording at SARM Studios in London. Mark "Spike" Stent also gets involved with the album production this month. (MLVC Mailing List)

October 21, 1999: Contrary to reports that MADONNA is doing the soundtrack for The Next Big Thing, her press office indicates she will actually only be doing one or two songs for that project. In the meantime, she is working on the follow-up to her hugely successful foray into the electronica mainstream, Ray of Light. British DJ SASHA, who did remix work on the material girl's last effort, is said to be working on ideas for her to listen to ...(Rolling Stone, 10/21/1999)

November 6, 1999: William Ørbit is currently working on a second album with the Material Girl - and despite the gruelling work schedule he's up for another. He explained: "I know the ropes now. I wouldn't rule out a third one, but let's see how this one does." But he's not lacking in confidence: "When I first heard Madonna singing some of the things she's singing on this album I got shivers because I can hear these songs being covered and being played everywhere for decades." (Yahoo News)

November 8, 1999: BT is travelling to the UK on Wednesday or Thursday of this week to meet up with Sasha. Sasha is working on a new track for the upcoming Madonna CD and BT is going to give him a hand. No word on whether he'll be credited. (MLVC List)

November 19, 1999: Madonna was back in New York City this week to finish mixing her new album and some lyrical content. She was seen momentarily at her brother’s eatery ORIONT on Wednesday, November 17, chatting with friends. (Liz Smith's column, I think)
 

NOTE: Madonna will later mention in an interview to promote MUSIC, that she wrote the verse "Music makes the bourgeoisie and the rebel" after seeing Sting in concert (and from a balcony she could see the rich and less rich in the audience all brought together by music). Sting was performing at the Beacon Theatre in NYC on Nov. 16-21 this week so she could've seen him there. He also did one show on Nov. 11 at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in NYC. However, this is purely speculative on my part. She could've seen him long ago and written about it in a journal too.


November 23, 1999: The reason Ørbit is in town, away from his home in L.A.'s leafy Brentwood, is because he's working with Madonna on her new album in west London's SARM Studios. Nine tracks have been recorded in four weeks so far ("we've definitely got another Ray Of Light on there") with Ørbit at the controls, though Madonna is also working with trip-hoppers Alpha and "a French guy called Mirwaïs". It's all going so well, in fact, that Ørbit has cancelled a holiday in Majorca and condensed his press duty into a four-day burst just so the pair can further explore their "inspirational reciprocity" and finish the album. It's pencilled in for a springtime release next year. Chances are, it'll be quite a big record.
 

Alpha is on Massive Attack’s label, Melankolic, information cannot be found on Mirwaïs, other than he was introduced to Madonna by French photographer Stephane Sednaoui. (MLVC Mailing List)



December: Madonna is finalizing the soundtrack to The Next Best Thing around this time and she includes a cut by Brit triphop group Mandalay called “This Life” which is co-produced by one Guy Sigsworth...

December 23: DJ SASHA WORKING WITH MADONNA: Madonna is currently in London working with British house DJ Sasha and producer William Ørbit on the follow up to her hugely successful Ray Of Light album. A source close to Sasha confirmed that he is writing material for the album, though it is not known how many tracks he will collaborate with Madonna on.
 

"It's mad," said the insider. "Madonna's next album is definitely going to have a progressive house feel to it."

Sasha, who has in the past completed remixes for Madonna, is a highly respected DJ on the global progressive house scene and has a residency at New York's famous Twilo nightclub. Fellow Brit Ørbit produced Ray Of Light which was Madonna's most commercially successful album since the 20 million selling Like A Virgin.

Ørbit, who is also in the studio with Madonna, said: "She is much more expeditious than anyone I've worked with. She drives things at a very fast pace. We've been slamming tracks down - we might even ace the last LP. I'm inspired." (MLVC List)


December 25, 1999: In an interview published later on, Joe Henry says that today - Christmas 1999 - Madonna emails him and says she has recorded his song "Stop" for her album. The track was sent to Madonna originally by her sister who is married to Joe.




2000:

February 2, 2000: Madonna tells Entertainment Weekly that she will "probably not" be at this month's Grammy Awards (on Feb. 23) - she is up for two trophies for "Beautiful Stranger." Instead, she'll be in London finishing up her album.
 

She says the new album is "three-fourths complete" and admits she doesn't know quite how to describe it:

"People always ask me, and I don't have a clue," she says. "But if you held a gun to my head and said describe it, it's electronic. It's very soulful, very melodic, and very minimalist. Does that help?"

"It's quite a little edgier than Ray of Light. It's almost like we started off with a lot of slow ballad songs and she's started to kind of chuck 'em out in favor of more edgy tracks. The album is getting more kind of fast, very European sounding, very English and French sounding, naturally, 'cause everybody working on it apart from her is English or French. Pretty exciting, actually. It's like a follow-up for Ray of Light without stopping still. It's perfect."


February 9: The ICON website says the new album will be out in the SUMMER of 2000!

(mid to late February): This is pure speculation, but I suspect Madonna wrote and recorded "What It Feels Like For a Girl" around this time. One reason is because she mentioned she was pregnant and hadn't informed the media yet (see below) and another is because she was back in London around this time to finish her album and I am pretty sure she recorded with Guy Sigsworth while in London.
 

Madonna will say in the March 2001 Interview magazine (about “What It Feels Like For A Girl”):

I wrote it kind of halfway through the album, when I was pregnant and hiding it from the world. It was a really tumultuous period in my life. I was not in a terribly stable relationship at that point, and part of the reason was because we both lived in different countries. So, it was a combination of that, and also just feeling incredibly vulnerable that inspired that song.


February 29: In an interview with Britian’s Mixmag, Madonna reveals her current musical muses:
 

I really like the soundtrack to The Beach - Orbital are on that, of course. Around the house we're always dancing to Moby or Leftfield or Daft Punk, stuff like that. And Mr Scruff I love, that weird little album ['Keep It Unreal'] that's got so much personality. European or British dance music is by far the best in that area just now and I play it all the time. Trancey stuff, stuff with soul, anything with an idea and some spirit. One of the guys I'm working with just now, Mirwais, we're always playing his record. He's the future, Mirwais. I loved his demo and so naturally I immediately felt I had to have him on my record before anyone else heard him.

ON HER CURRENT FAVORITE DJ’s:

I love, love Sasha [she pronounces his name the American way: Sar-sha]. I like the way he approaches sound, as something you can move and change any way you want. Victor Calderone is great too. Have you ever heard Moby DJ at a party? He is damn good. I did a little work with Sasha here while I was working with William. We all got together but what we did never actually turned into a song, which is the danger of this way of working. So it's in the vaults and who knows what's going to happen to it? He is very talented, though.

LATER ON: An instrumental from Sasha's sessions with Madonna in 1999 would later become the track "Wavy Gravy" for his 2002 album Airdrawndagger.


In an interview with Britian’s Dotmusic, Ørbit says there are 16-17 tracks total and that some will be going into the vault, including Sasha’s work. He thinks about 10 tracks will make the cut as Madonna wants a "tighter, more cohesive album." He says it is being mixed right now and that the tracks represent a number of styles.

March 12, 2000: Madonna and Mirwaïs have co-written and co-produced a song called "Paradise (Not for Me)." The track will appear on Mirwaïs' new album, Production (Naïve), due in late April, it may (or may not) also appear on Madonna’s new album. On the track, Madonna sings some of the lyrics in French. (MLVC List)
 

Later, this information will reveal itself in interviews that I do not have sources for: Madonna says this is the first song they probably did together, and the second is "Music." She says "Music" set the tone for the rest of the album.

Mirwaïs says the first song they did was "Impressive Instant" because it was the most "complete" demo he had originally sent to Madonna in the first batch of songs. He says the track was an instrumental that was never intended to be included on Production but Madonna had ideas for it lyrically, so he had her sing them to him soon after they met in London (at SARM Studios) for the first time in October 1999. "Paradise" was also a fully formed track when Mirwaïs sent it to Madonna. "Those are live strings, arranged by Cyril Morin," he says. "This track was originally for my own album, Production. When she listened to my tracks, she absolutely wanted to sing this one. My only problem was that I wanted to include it on my own album. So it's on both my album and hers! The only difference is I did a two-bar edit on my version."

"I Deserve It" was recorded with an old German microphone from the 1930's - which was Mark "Spike" Stent’s idea.


March 16, 2000: From French VSD Magazine Interview with Madonna: "Wait till you hear the new album I'm preparing with Mirwaïs. He's a producer and a composer. The music will be very different from everything I've done before. Without flourishes, more direct, reduced to its plain expression. Emotion is on the surface, naked."

March 27, 2000: Jonas Åkerlund tells a Swedish newspaper that he has been tapped to direct Madonna's next music video. He says they will do it "very soon" since she is pregnant. The song will be the first single from her new album - it is also the title track: MUSIC. He says the video will have a "retro-modern theme" and adds, "It's a great song."

March 30, 2000 Madonna and William Orbit recently composed the opening theme music to the ABC series Wonderland. The series is written and directed by one of Madonna's ex-boyfriends, Peter Berg.

March 31, 2000: (31) WORLD EXCLUSIVE: MADONNA GOES UNDERGROUND (MUZAK Magazine)
 

Madonna's new album has been described as "underground" and "gothic" by a source close to everyone's favorite material girl. Acclaimed French producer Mirwaïs Ahmadzai has worked on three tracks so far and former producer William Ørbit has produced a fourth. The album--untitled as yet--is pencilled in for a September release on Maverick.

"Mirwais produced three tracks so far," our source told us. "The fourth is an acoustic track with a signature William Ørbit production. They're both working on additional songs."

Muzik's source was played the tracks by Madonna's manager in L.A. late Last month. "The tracks with Mirwais have a distinct French feel," he revealed.

"They have looped, processed vocals and a stuttered signature kick. It seems a return to a darker, more underground feel, a little like the sound she explored on 'Erotica'. "Is it pop? Only by virtue of being Madonna!" he continued. "It really tests the current state of pop. It's more sexually charged and underground. She's the master of reinvention so it's no wonder that she's doing it again. I got a real gothic vibe out of the tracks."

Reports in the press suggest that Madonna had planned to make a
Progressive house album. This no longer appears to be the case. "I know that she did a track with Sasha but I think that he's going to hold onto it now,"

Muzik's source said. "I don't want to put Sasha into a box but maybe she wanted to move away from that uplifting sound."

"The good thing about Madonna is that she's very much a producer
herself," he explained. "She brings out the best in those around her and prompts them to elevate her game. 'American Pie' won't be on the album, neither will “Time Stood Still' which is William and Madonna at their best." Both tracks are taken from the soundtrack to The Next Best Thing which is out now on Maverick.

Rae & Christian, Tom Middleton, Zero 7, Eric Kupper, and Wamdue Kid Chris Brann are among the names who have been approached to remix future singles. "I think Rae & Christian are ready for this," said Muzik's source. "I love their British twist on Hip Hop."


April 3, 2000: The OMFC (Official Madonna Fan Club) website now says the album will be released in September.

April 9, 2000: L.A. Times Article: Madonna's New French Accent
 

The singer hires Paris-based Mirwaïs to produce her next album and signs him to her Maverick label too.

Meet Madonna's new man. Not Guy Ritchie, the English film director with whom she's having her second child, but Mirwaïs, a Paris-based musician with whom she's producing much of the music for her next album.

Richie was introduced to the singer by Sting and his wife, Trudie Styler. Mirwaïs, who goes by just the one name, was more of a blind date.

The 39-year-old, formerly of the French group Taxi Girl, contacted Madonna's Maverick Records late last year looking to get signed as an artist, not to produce the star.

"He sent a demo tape to Maverick with four tracks," says Caresse Norman, Madonna's manager. "Madonna heard it and went insane. Two weeks later they were in the studio together."

"This is not a repudiation of William Ørbit, who co-produced most of 1998's electronica-infused Ray of Light and last year's "Austin Powers' single "Beautiful Stranger." Orbit returned to do three songs on the new album but has also been focusing on several other projects, including his own recent "Pieces in a Modern Style" album of electronic interpretations of classical pieces. And Madonna, Norman notes, has never been one to sit still stylistically.

"This is taking Ray of Light to the next level," Norman says. 'It's not as electronic. It's funky, with a pop edge to it. I have heard most of it a lot, and it's something I never get sick of. And there's one song that brings me to tears."

How much does Madonna like Mirwaïs? In addition to hiring him to produce, she signed him as an artist to Maverick and will also share a song with him. [this data is not correct, Mirwais was signed to a Sony label and was never on Maverick] It will be on both Madonna's album and his debut, which will be released April 18 outside North America and then here, after the expected late September release of the Madonna set.

When not finding partners for herself, Madonna seems to have a knack for matchmaking. Her latest move was to hook up k.d. lang with Damian LeGassick, introducing the two at a party last year. A protege of Orbit, LeGassick has co-produced Invincible Summer, k.d. lang's first album since 1997's Drag, due June 21.

NOTE: Damian LeGassick co-wrote Madonna's "Gone" track for this album.


April 10-13, 2000: Madonna and Jean Baptiste Mondino shoot the album cover for MUSIC in Los Angeles.
 

LATER: JEAN-BAPTISTE MONDINO ON MUSIC'S THEME (August 15, 2000)
Jean-Baptiste Mondino, the world-renowned photographer who was called upon to capture Madonna's Music portfolio in April, was interviewed on CNN Style, where he said that it was his idea to have the cowboy theme to Madonna's new album. "(Madonna) wasn't sure at first," he said. "But I told her that if she didn't like it I won't charge her. But she loved the final result!" When asked if he's helmed to direct any videos for the MUSIC album, he replied, "I'm honoured to photograph a Madonna album, I've done few of her videos before so that is already accomplished.”


April 14-16, 2000: “Music” – Madonna and Jonas Akerlund filmed the video in L.A. with Ali G., Niki Haris and Debbi Mazar. The video is currently scheduled to debut at the MTV VMA pre-show in September (the month the new album is due to drop). Madonna goes "gangsta" in the video and wears a fur coat and rapper medallion around her neck - Madonna herself describes it as "70's ghetto-fabulous." Album promotion will begin in August.

April 15, 2000: Sasha was quoted in the UK dance mags earlier this year saying that his work with Madonna (classed as progressive trance) doesn't fit in with the other producers' work and will not be on the album. He said there were no plans to release it, although he hoped that it would be released sometime. Sasha said in Mixmag that they didn't even get to record vocals for the track.

April 29, 2000: From a Dotmusic interview with Mirwais: French house producer Mirwaïs revealed details of two of the tracks on Madonna's forthcoming follow-up to 'Ray Of Light' and hinted at the simple title, 'Music'.
 

"I was free to work but within her limits," he says. "When you work with someone - it doesn't matter if it's Madonna or people I've worked with in the past - you have to respect them. When she didn't agree with me I'd try
to find a compromise."

The sound of the Mirwaïs -produced tracks on the album will clearly be driven by the 39-year-old's sparse electronic funk, a sound that will become familiar when his solo release 'Disco Science' hits the charts in a couple of weeks. "I worked on six tracks," he explains. "My favourites are the last two tracks we did. One is called "I Deserve It" and it's the most simple track on there and the one I prefer. The biggest surprise will be the simplicity."

Speculation about the title of the album has been rife with many sources suggesting that it will simply be called "Music." Mirwaïs is caught off guard: "I don't know, it could change. A lot of people have said that because of one track we did called "Music." You'll have to ask Madonna."


May 1, 2000: Spoof rapper Ali G has won himself a starring role in Madonna's latest pop
video, it is reported. He was flown to Hollywood to film the video to “Music,” the title track from the pop queen's new album, according to the Observer newspaper.
 

Madonna is said to have become a fan after a friend sent her a copy of his Christmas special, Ali G, Innit.

"She watched the tape and thought he was brilliant - the Peter Sellers of our generation," her manager, Caresse Norman, told the Observer.

"We came up with the video idea, and she thought he would be great in it."

Ali G - Cambridge graduate Sacha Baron Cohen in real life - is said to appear in the video wearing his trademark yellow track suit and wraparound sunglasses.

The details are not being revealed, but Ali G is said to feature at the centre of a "strong storyline".

He is said not to contribute musically to the video.


May 3, 2000: Victor Calderone claims he has heard the album and it is “incredible.” He says it is mostly done with Mirwaïs, and William Ørbit’s contribution is limited. Calderone says that he sent “4 or 5” tracks to her for vocals for this project but they do not appear on the album. He doesn’t know what she will do with them.

May 28, 2000: “Music” shows up on Napster. Lyrics are reprinted immediately all over the Web.

June 8, 2000: Liz R. confirms that Groove Armada have done a remix of “Music.”

June 9, 2000: The Official Madonna Fan Club web page says the second single will be called “What It Feels Like (For a Girl)” after the lead single: “Music.” The album is due sometime in September 2000. Madonna reveals her ghetto-cowboy look and says the video for the lead single is due in August.

LATER: Madonna tells an interviewer more about this song:

“What It Feels Like (For A Girl)”:
I wrote it kind of halfway through the album, when I was pregnant and hiding it from the world. It was a really tumultuous period in my life. I was not in a terribly stable relationship at that point, and part of the reason was because we both lived in different countries. I just lived in limbo from every angle you could imagine, and I think that is also part of where that song came from, a big part of it. Then the other thing was - - it's probably the more obvious thing - that you go through life, I mean our generation certainly has been encouraged to grab life by the balls, be super-independent, get a great education, follow our dreams, kick ass, all that stuff, and I feel like I woke up one day holding the golden ring and realized that smart, sassy girls who accomplish a lot and have their own cash and are independent are really frightening to men. I felt like, "Why didn't somebody tell me? Why didn't somebody warn me?" And that's also what that song is about - swallowing that bitter pill. So, it was a combination of that, and also just feeling incredibly vulnerable that inspired that song.

June 14, 2000: The final mixing and mastering of MUSIC (the album) was completed today and delivered to WB this afternoon. (MLVC Mailing List)

June 15, 2000: The Official Madonna Fan Club webpage (OMFC) confirms the album MUSIC will have a release date of September 22. The “Music” single release is due to hit radio in July – being significantly moved up to accommodate the Internet leak.

June 22, 2000: Moby told MTV this weekend that Madonna had expressed interest in working with him on new album material but his tour and own recording obligations prevented him from doing this. He also says he’d rather focus on his own work than do a remix for her right now. (MTV News)

June 27: The release date of “Music” the single has been pushed back but remixers are now known:
 

• Hex Hector
• Victor Calderone
• Deep Dish
• Groove Armada
• Tracy Young


July 7, 2000: Warner Japan posts several track names on their website: "Music," "Don't Tell Me" and "Runaway Lover."

July 11, 2000: Caresse Norman says Madonna’s 8th studio effort, entitled MUSIC, is set to be released on Sept. 19. The album features Madonna’s production work with Mirwaïs, a French-Afghani club artist, and William Ørbit. Other last minute additions include songs co-produced by Mark “Spike” Stent and Guy Sigsworth.

July 21, 2000: Warner announces the Euro/Japanese release track listings:
 

1. Music (Mirwaïs) 3:44
2. Impressive Instant (Mirwaïs) 3:37
3. Runaway Lover (W. Ørbit) 4:47
4. I Deserve It (Mirwaïs) 4:23
5. Amazing (W. Ørbit) 3:43
6. Nobody's Perfect (Mirwaïs) 4:58
7. Don't Tell Me (Mirwaïs) 4:40
8. What It Feels Like For A Girl (Guy Sigsworth) 4:43
9. Paradise (Not For Me) (Mirwaïs) 6:29
10. Gone (W. Ørbit) 3:29
11. American Pie (W. Ørbit) – bonus track (Europe)
12. Cyberraga (Talvin Singh) bonus track (Asia/Australia)


July 26, 2000: The album cover art leaks online.

August 2, 2000: Today at 4:00PM (ET/PT) the video for “Music” debuts on MTV. Madonna goes ghetto-fabulous in the flick directed by Jonas Akerlund. Madonna wears £250,000 of chunky gold jewelry on loan from Van Cleef & Arpels.

A London paper says Madonna may do a small concert at a London venue before the end of the year a prelude to her first tour in 7 years to launch in 2001. Madonna’s rep denies this. (this would end up being the Brixton Academy performance)

A London paper gives a track-by-track synopsis of the new album:
 

“Music” is an electro-funk track.
“Impressive Instant” has the remarkable refrain “I like to singy singy singy like a bird on a wingy wingy wingy.”
“Runaway Lover” is a disco-rave song.
“I Deserve It” is hiphop-tinged
“Amazing” recalls Martha and the Vandellas’ Motown classic “Dancing in the Street”
“Nobody’s Perfect” is electro-funk
“Don’t Tell Me’ is souful
“What It Feels Like For A Girl” is the second single
“Paradise” is melodramatic
“Gone” was co-written with Damian LeGlassik and Nicola Young and features electronic and acoustic elements.


August 7, 2000: Madonna tells Vh-1 in an interview, that she intends to do a few club dates a month after the album’s release – this will be preparation for a full tour next year.

August 9, 2000: Liz R. says the second single will probably be “What It Feels Like For A Girl.”

August 10, 2000: There will be four different limited edition album versions of MUSIC. The limited edition includes a 24-page color booklet and embossed with a burnished copper buckle with linen cloth covers in rose, olive, beige and black.

August 21, 2000: The lyrics to "Cyberrage" leak online.

September 19, 2000: Warner Brothers hosts a release party for MUSIC at Catch One, 4067 W. Pico Blvd @ Norton (L.A.)

PRESS RELEASE:

Madonna's recently released track "Music" is a worldwide phenomenon. In
the USA, it tops Billboard's Top 100, Dance and Club Play charts. It #1
in fourteen other countries including Italy, Canada, France, Spain, Australia, Mexico, Greece and Latvia. The album of the same title debuts in stores Tuesday, September 19 with advance orders of over 5 million copies throughout the world. Music is Madonna's fourteenth album; all thirteen of its predecessors have achieved multi-platinum sales status.

Madonna comments on Music: "Some of the songs reflect my melancholic and thoughtful side, while others just take the plunge right into reckless abandon. I didn't put limits on myself, other than to make sure there was plenty of club-oriented, dance-friendly material, because I enjoy that myself."

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2001:

October 15: In a U.K. interview, Richard D. James (aka Aphex Twin) says Madonna contacted him earlier this year to do a track for a new album (or a single). He declined, but counter-offered to have her guest on a track for his new album Drukqs (Sire/London/Rhino) which comes out on October 23, 2001. He reportedly wanted her to make pig sounds and grunts. She declined the offer at the last minute. He takes a swipe at her in the interview by saying she “works with trendy producers to stay young.”

November 23: In a U.K. BBC Radio 1 interview to promote GHV2, Madonna says she will begin working on her new album in January 2002 with Mirwaïs. She also says she might work with Stuart Price from Les Rythmes Digitales who helped her remix and rework some songs on the Drowned World Tour. He is currently working on some music for her so she may try that collaberation too. She doesn’t have plans to work with anyone else on the album currently, but she does know that she’ll be recording it in London. Part of the interview concerning this:
 

But it could have been a greatest hit?
M: Well I'm gonna save that for my next record which I'm gonna start
recording in January.

So you are about to do some new stuff?
M: Yeah.

But all the papers were saying that's it, you've stopped now?
M: Oh, since when did you believe all the papers?

Have you got ideas who you're working with on the next album?
M: Yes, I'm working with Mirwaïs again ...

That was a genius stroke.
M: Yeah, he's so great. So I'm gonna work with him again. I might work
with this guy that I met when I was looking for some musicians to play
with. His name is Stuart Price, he's in a group called Les Rythmes
Digitales. We fooled around with remixes and re-doing a lot of the
tracks for the actual live show. Then we talked about working on stuff
for my next album, and he's already working on music for me. So I'm going
to try that collaboration as well.

Anyone else?
M: Not yet.

And where are you recording that, in this country?
M: Yeah, here.

How do you tend to work, do you lock yourself in the studio and work
intensively and give yourself fixed time limits?

M: Yeah, I hit a stopwatch.

And do you enjoy doing that?
M: Well I like to do a lot of preparation work so when I go into the
studio, which is generally very expensive, I'm prepared. Both Mirwaïs and
Stuart have their own home studios, what I do is go and work on the
writing with them and than we get all of the pieces and we go into the
big studio and record everything.


December 12: In an MSN chat interview to promote GHV2, Madonna says the following about her new album:
 

[about the next album’s direction]: It’s too hard to say. I have very rough ideas about my album right now. I don’t ever know what I am going to do until I am in the studio so I can’t predict that.

[currently listening to] Kid Loco, Nick Drake, Dean Martin and Goldfrapp.


December 18: Madonna does an interview on the Today show with Matt Lauer. In it, she says she is unhappy with recently released “unauthorized” biographies because they people who write them do not “truly know the person” they are writing about. This could end up being the source material for “Nobody Knows Me.” - my own conjecture

END OF 2001: Towards the end of 2001, Madonna by herself, wrote a song called “Mind Trap.” Mirwaïs had then worked on the track in his studio without Madonna. It got various names, one being “Mind Trapper.” Later they have worked on the song together and it has been fully recorded. This track is considered as an early track. At a later stage, the song “Nobody Knows Me” has been co-written with Mirwaïs and recorded. Both of these songs consist of similar lyrical content and “Nobody Knows Me” can be described as the evolved version of “Mind Trap.” (DrownedMadonna.com, reported in 2004)

2002:

January 19: RUMOR: Madonna has recorded a song for the soundtrack to the upcoming Austin Powers movie Goldmember. She reportedly recorded the song and submitted to the film’s producers a few weeks back and pending its approval, it could be the theme song. It’s rumored to be called “When I Look Back.” (Source: madonnarama.com)
 

Later: Madonna’s spokesperson denies such a track was ever recorded or even written. Insider sources say she was asked to submit a song though before Christmas.


January 20: Two songs have been recorded so far at SARM West Studios in London with Mirwaïs and another (as-yet unnamed) producer. There are also rumors that Madonna will record the theme song to the 20th James Bond film due at the end of the year. Negotiations are still going on. (from Madonnarama.com)

February 25: Liz R. confirms that Madonna has recorded a few new songs with Mirwaïs. She also says the song for the new Bond movie will be a single as well as the theme song.

March 1: Madonnarama reports that there is no album scheduled for this year. Tracks are near completeion but the album is now for next year and also expect no new tracks until later this year.

March 14: Sources say Madonna just signed an agreement today to record the new Bond theme. Liz R. says, “She goes into the recording studio on Monday.” Madonna drove a hard bargain according to MGM - she only agreed to do the song if she gets a cameo in the film. There are conflicting reports she will not be able to film the cameo due to her doing a London play at the same time.

March 15: Press release: Madonna to Compose, Perform Next Bond Theme

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - After scoring a Grammy-winning hit with her
theme song to the last "Austin Powers" movie, pop diva Madonna (news -
web sites) is ready to sing for a real spy.

The Material Girl has been tapped to compose and perform the title song
for the next James Bond film, "Die Another Day," becoming the latest in
a string of music stars who have recorded 007 themes over the years,
producers announced on Friday.

"Die Another Day," the 20th Bond film, will star Pierce Brosnan in his
fourth incarnation as the suave British super spy and actress Halle
Berry as the agent's latest squeeze.

Metro-Goldwyn Mayer Inc. is due to release the film in November in
conjunction with the 40th anniversary of the venerable film franchise
spawned by the novels of Ian Fleming.

Madonna, set to star this spring in a new London stage play, "Up for
Grabs," follows in the footsteps of numerous recording stars who have
lent their talents to James Bond soundtracks over the years.

Notable hit Bond themes have included "We Have All the Time in the
World" (from "On Her Majesty's Secret Service") sung by Louis Armstrong,
"Live and Let Die," performed by Paul McCartney and Wings," "Nobody Does
It Better" ("The Spy Who Loved Me") sung by Carly Simon, and "For Your
Eyes Only," sung by Sheena Easton.

Madonna, 43, has written and recorded a number of movie songs during her
career, including the hit "Beautiful Stranger" from espionage spoof
"Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me," which won a Grammy Award for
best song written for a motion picture, and a Golden Globe nomination.

The Bond film is due to be released on Nov 22nd.


March 18: Madonna begins recording the James Bond tune with Mirwaïs today.
 

REVEALED LATER: Madonna records two songs for MGM. One is “Die Another Day” which is used and the other, a ballad, “Can’t You See My Mind?” which was widely reported in the media but not used. The unused track is registered in the ASCAP database.


March 19: Madonna will reportedly not being doing matinee performances of Up For Grabs, her upcoming West End play, due to her recording commitments which cannot be rescheduled.

March 20: George Michael reportedly visits Madonna in the recording studio where he is doing some new material.

April: REVEALED LATER ON: Jemma Griffiths (the singer Jem) and Guy Sigsworth properly recorded their demo for “Silly Thing” (after writing it together in 2001 - I think it was even post 9/11) this month [April 2002] and sent it off to Madonna. She loved it and re-wrote part of the lyrics and changed the name to “Nothing Fails.” Jem and Guy say that the musical arrangement changed considerably and that the choir inclusion was Madonna’s idea. Sigsworth also say he’s happy with what Mirwais did with the production as it’s not a copy of Guy’s style at all. (KCRW Interview, April 2003)
 

Previous reports stating “Nothing Fails” has many versions are in fact, not correct. It was very clear to Madonna and her producers how this song is going to sound in terms of melody. Even the choir was already planned. “Silly Thing” was the working title. Jem wrote the song with Guy Sigsworth in 2001 and it was later sent to Madonna. Madonna added additional lyrics and re-produced, re-arranged and recorded the track. (DrownedMadonna.com, 2004)


May 8: Rumors report that Mirwaïs’ part of the album recording is finished and that he put the finishing touches on it last week before returning to Paris. A Madonna spokesperson tells MTV that the album recording is “on hold” until August, when Madonna completes her run on the London stage in Up For Grabs.

May 22: (rumor) About two weeks ago, Madonna took the Eurostar to Paris and worked with Mirwaïs in his studio on 6 tracks for her album. (MadonnaPlanet.com)

May 23: Madonna is collaborating with French composer Michel Colombier (Serge Gainsbourg, Zero 7) on "Can't You See My Mind," the title song to the upcoming James Bond movie, Die Another Day. Colombier, who first worked with Mrs. Ritchie on "Don't Tell Me," is also scoring Madonna's upcoming film, Swept Away, and working with the singer on her next album.
 


[Glenn from the Madonna Mailing List says: Rumor has it that the song is "jazz/strings and reminiscent of Sinatra's 'I've Got You Under My Skin'.]

From Michel Colombier’s official website today:

"Michel has just finished recording the score for 'Swept Away', written and directed by Guy Ritchie, starring Madonna. This film is scheduled for release in the U.S. in September 2002. - Select songs from Madonna's new album, including 'Can't You See My Mind?', title song of the soon-to-be-released James Bond movie, have had string arrangements written by Michel."


June 11: The Bond theme song will now be “Die Another Day” instead of “Can’t You See My Mind?” (madonnarama.com)

July 2: Madonna is reportedly going to be collaborating with Versailles, France duo Air on her next album. According to MTV's French website, they will meet in September to discuss the development of a demo track liked by both parties. There is no new Madonna album planned until 2003. The demo has no title and no lyrics at the moment.
 

REVEALED LATER: In an interview to promote their new 2004 album Talkie Walkie, AIR told a French magazine about their offering of a song to Madonna for American Life which she refused:

“We had been requested to send a song to her,” tells Nicolas Godin. “We chose a 'light' song which is called “Alpha Beta Gaga.” The song was not very erudite, so for me it didn't deserved to be on a AIR disc. It was also a way of being sure that Madonna would refuse, because we were afraid of the stake that represented working with her. Finally, the song is not that bad and was put on the disc. But, while listening, it misses a voice, hers.” (January 2004)


July 4: Madonna has personally called rap producer/artist Dr. Dre to help out with some tracks on her new CD. We have been told that Madonna first called Dr. Dre a few months back and asked him to do a track on the new
Austin Powers soundtrack which is released on Maverick Records next week. Dre agreed to do it and has remixed the Rolling Stones' classic "Miss You" for the forthcoming Goldmember soundtrack. Insiders say that Madonna was so blown away by the track that she has asked him for some help on her new album. No decisions have been made, but Dr. Dre 's management are said to be against the idea, saying it's "too pop" for him.
 

Madonna has also asked remixer Paul Oakenfold, (who has remixed "What It Feels Like For A Girl") to help out on the album. Oakenfold has just released a successful CD called "Bunkka" in the U.S. on Madonna's Maverick Records.(MLVC Mailing List rumor)


July 9: Also, today, Liz R. confirms that the Bond theme-song, “Die Another Day” will be released in October 2002 to precede the film which arrives in November.

July 21: The real lyrics to “Die Another Day” leak on the Internet.

July 28: Paul Oakenfold has completed some remixes of “Die Another Day” and Thunderpuss have been asked to submit one as well, but they haven’t started work on it yet.

July 31: Madonna writes a letter for ICON magazine in which she says she is back in the U.S. relaxing and enjoying the sunshine and:
 

I am strumming my guitar and cooking up ideas for my next album.

 

PERSONAL CONJECTURE: I think she may have written "Easy Ride" around this time in Los Angeles. Just a guess. Here is what DrownedMadonna said in 2004:

In 2002, Madonna worked with Monte Pittman on the song “Easy Ride,” then titled “Round and Round.” It did not involve Mirwaïs or Michel Colombier at that point. “Round and Round” was recorded as an acoustic version with guitars only and was planned as the final version. By the time Colombier finished working on “Nothing Fails” a decision was made up to add the strings. The track was finally reworked on with Mirwaïs.


August 7: Jamie King, the Drowned World Tour choreographer, is set to choreograph Madonna’s new Bond-themed video at the end of the month.

August 15: Niki Haris did a webchat today in which she says she is not doing backing vocals on Madonna’s new album, or the new Bond tune. She did say Madonna would be continuing the recording of the record at the end of September.

August 16: Deep Dish will be doing remixes of “Die Another Day.”

August 22: The video for “Die Another Day” starts filming today and continues on August 23, 26 and 27.

August 23: Madonna injures her hand on the set of her “Die Another Day” video today. It features a fencing duel between a “good” Madonna and an “evil” Madonna, lots of Bond parapheneila and a Chinese prison scene. The video for “Die Another Day” was shot at Hollywood Center Studios by the Swedish directing duo Traktor. The whole family was present. (Madonnarama)

August 29: A snippet of “Die Another Day” (the opening, dramatic strings) is leaked online.

September 3: Ole Sanders, from Sandvika in Norway, was approached in May. He got a handwritten letter from Madonna, and a demo of the song to his hotel room in Prague, where he was shooting a clip for The Prodigy. Later he went to Pinewood Studios in London with the Traktor team, to watch a clip from the new Bond movie. Then he was invited to Madonna's home in London with his collegues, to discuss the project. Through out the summer he worked with the video with Madonna.
 

Daily, he received e-mails with feedback from her. Sanders says she worked hard on ideas and details, and it came clear to him why she's been on top for 20 years. He also sais things about the video, which we allready know, such as it has no content from the new Bond movie - but still is very Bond-ish. He says the video will premiere in October on MTV, who for the first time in history will air a video simultanously around the globe. It will also be released on DVD.


September 7: French duo Air, have spoken about their planned collaboration with Madonna. They told MTV Spain "We are gentlemen. We never refuse the proposal of a lady - in this case, the greatest artist in the world!" As of press time, however, the collaboration has yet to happen.

September 14: Madonna’s new Bond song “Die Another Day” will reportedly be on Madonna’s new album which is slated for release in the spring of 2003. The song, which is scheduled to go to radio on Oct. 15, features remixes by Thunderpuss, DeepSky, Brother Brown, Dirty Vegas, Felix the Housecat and Humpty Vission.

From Madonnarama: Far-out fashion designer Jeremy Scott is on fire, reports sister/business manager Barbara Scott. "He's got some very exciting things going on," she says. "He did the clothes for the new Madonna music video. He designed her clothing for it. It's in correlation to the new James Bond movie that she has a song in." The music video is slated to debut on MTV in October, Barbara says. "He spent five days with her during the shoot to make sure everything held together. Because she's pretty active in the video and does a lot of dancing." The look Scott chose for Madonna: "He told me it was very fencing-inspired," Barbara says. "Her publicist said it has a pretty out-of-this-world look. And she also represents Cher and wants him to dress Cher."

September 21: “Die Another Day” goes to U.S. radio on October 7, MTV on October 10, and the Bond soundtrack (on WB not Maverick) on November 12. The title is definitely “Die Another Day” and will sound similar to “Music” with heavily-autotuned vocals.

September 26: VH-1: Madonna Escapes Electric Chair, Engages In Deadly Duel
 

Madonna is moving into the field of covert operations.

In her new video for "Die Another Day," the pop diva, lusty temptress and maternal nurturer becomes involved in a world of intrigue and espionage.

The song is the title track for the next James Bond movie, which opens in theaters November 22. The upbeat dance cut is filled with electronic flourishes and the stealthy, suspenseful vibe essential to all Bond themes. It will be released to radio October 7.

In the clip, which was shot in Los Angeles earlier this month by directing team Traktor, Madonna plays a secret agent placed in death-defying situations reminiscent of scenes from past 007 films. In once clip, she's strapped into an electric chair; in another, she has her head held underwater by double agents; and a third features the nephew of Harold Sakata - the Oddjob character from "Goldfinger" - flinging deadly bowler hats at Madonna as his uncle did to Sean Connery back in 1964.

In one highlight, a "good" Madonna dressed in white engages in a duel with her evil alter ego, who wears black. The scene makes reference to Madonna's cameo role in the movie as a fencing instructor.

The soundtrack for "Die Another Day," which features Paul Oakenfold and others, will be released November 12.


September 27: “Die Another Day” is leaked for the first time on NYC’s Z-100. WB gives the go-ahead for other stations to play it.

September 30: The Felix Da Housecat mix of “Die Another Day” is played at the Echo club in Echo Park. The sound is very “electroclash/new wave.”

October 3: BILLBOARD: Although it wasn't intended to debut on U.S. radio until next week, a leaked copy of Madonna's "Die Another Day," the theme song to the forthcoming James Bond movie of the same name, is already getting heavy airplay on stations around the country. An accompanying video clip will premiere Oct. 10 on MTV's "Making the Video" series; a commercial CD single, featuring remixes by such acts as Thunderpuss and Felix Da Housecat, is due Oct. 22.
 

The new track is all over the airwaves in major markets, having been spun more than 100 times in less than a week by two Miami stations alone. It is expected to debut next week on the Billboard Hot 100 on the strength of airplay. Madonna has a cameo as a fencing instructor in Die Another Day, a soundtrack for which is due Nov. 12 via Warner Bros.

Meanwhile, Madonna told Today host Matt Lauer that she has almost finished up her next Maverick album, which is expected some time next year. The artist is promoting her upcoming film Swept Away, which she described as "an angry love story."


Madonna tells Larry King she has been entertaining Hebrew words for the title of her next album (due in early 2003). Tentatively, she is calling the collection, Ein Sof, which is the Hebrew word for ‘endlessness.’ She says she will finish the album in the coming months.

October 5: In an interview to promote Swept Away on Entertainment Tonight:
 

MARK: Your album ... in 2003? What should I expect?

MADONNA: Just pure crystalline brilliance! I'm about
three quarters of the way done and it will come out
next year, in the beginning of next year. It's good.


October 19: Madonna is seen parking in Soho (London). She drove into the West End in her new Mini Cooper S, and stopped at a studio to record new album tracks.

October 29: Madonna is currently in London recording with Stuart Price. (Madonnarama)
 

REVEALED LATER: Their composition will consist of a single track (“X-Static Process”) which began as a demo called “The Process” and became a full-on dance/techno number before being stripped down into an acoustic vignette for the album. “The Process” is registered as a separate song in the ASCAP database.

Madonna will tell Attitude magazine in 2005: “We wrote X-Static Process together on my last album and that was kind of testing out the water. We tried out other things, but that was the only thing I thought had substance.”


November 1: Madonna drove her new Mini Cooper S to the recording studio today where she is still working on tracks. (Madonnarama)
 

REVEALED LATER: When interviewed on the Jonathan Ross Show on May 1, 2003, Madonna says she was working on the song “American Life” “back in November” when she started coming up with the war-theme ideas for its video.


November 4: In an interview with KIIS FM to promote “Die Another Day,” Madonna says the Bond tune will be included on her forth coming album. She also says no title has been chosen yet for the album, which will include about 10 songs. The sound will be “stiff” as she says “stiff is the new hard.” She says there will be a “hardcore rap” on the album which was inspired by Eminem who she thinks is very talented.

November 5: Madonnarama.com says the album is officially complete. It will have 10 tracks and they will sound very “stiff.” Some of the production is very unexpected for the Mirwaïs style as there is lots of guitar. He produced AT LEAST 6 of the tracks.

November 14: Madonna's new album is now slated for an March/April release. There are details of 2 of the songs which have working titles of "Hollywood" and "American Life" (these refrains are repeated in the lyrics). They're described as being similar in style to "Die Another Day" (stop/start electronica in the same vein as Mirwais' "Music" work). One of the tracks again features a heavy use of the auto-tuned vocal, though is described as being more like "Impressive Instant" than "Die Another Day". (Madonnarama)

December 18: “Die Another Day” is nominated for Best Original Song from a Film at the Golden Satellite Awards. It is also nominated for a Golden Globe.

December 23: April is the earliest we will see the new album. A definitive release date is expected after the holidays. (Madonnarama.com)

2003:

January 2: Madonna’s still-yet-to-be-titled album is due in April. She currently plans to film the lead single’s video in February with Jonas Akerlund in L.A.
 

The album cover photo shoot will take place next week with Craig McDean (who shot the October 2002 Vanity Fair cover with her). McDean is one of leading fashion photographers of today. Reports say that the album combines electronic disco with guitar.


January 7: Madonna does the cover shoot this week with Craig McDean and hairstylist Luigi. First single is called, “American Life.” (Madonnarama)

January 11: The album may include a composition done with Madonna’s Drown World Tour guitarist/instructor Monty Pitman.

January 15: Warner Brothers is denying rumors that they have asked Madonna to re-record some of the material on the album. The speculation came after French producer Mirwaïs flew to L.A. this week to assist Madonna with the final mixing of the album. Inside sources say the “electro-pop” album is too over the top and “avant garde” to be a commercial success. They claims she has used too many electronic synthesizers on her voice and morphed the vocals into sounding like a robot.
 

Some confirmed song titles:

• “American Life”
• “Die Another Day”
• “Easy Ride”
• “Hollywood”
• “Nothing Fails”


January 20: It’s reported that the video for the first single will be shot in New York with Jonas Akerlund Feb. 2-8, 2003. There is also speculation that the theme for the album artwork will also be present in the video.

“American Life” (the single) is scheduled for commercial release in the U.K. on March 31, 2003.

January 23: There is confirmation that the shoot will take place in L.A. with Jonas Akerlund.
 

Other rumors include:
• Choreography being done by Jaime King.
• The video will have lots of extras (including children, soldiers and dancers) and revolve around a war theme.
• Budget is nearly $2 million with a “very different” concept.
• Luigi Moreno will again do hair.


January 26: The album’s working title right now is Hollywood and this will also be the name of the second single. (Madonnarama)

January 27: TRACKLIST for Hollywood (from Madonnarama)
 

1. American Life
2. Hollywood
3. I’m So Stupid
4. Easy Ride
5. Nobody Knows Me
6. Ecstatic Process
7. Love Profusion
8. Nothing Fails
9. Die Another Day
10. (unknown)
11. (unknown)


January 28: The album art direction and design is now reportedly being done by Michael Amzalag of M/M Paris (Michael Amzalag & Mathias Augustyniak - design duo). The firm is responsible for packaging of Björk’s VOLUMEN, Vespertine, Greatest Hits and FAMILY TREE releases. They also redesigned Vogue Paris.

February 3-4: The video for “American Life” is shot in L.A.

February 9: WARNER PRESS RELEASE:
 

Madonna’s new album is called American Life and will feature 11 tracks. The album is set for release on April 22.

The 11-song American Life (April 22) was co-produced by Madonna and Mirwais Ahmadzaï, who also co-produced her Music (2000) and the recent James Bond tune "Die Another Day." The album's title track will be the first single, with a video by controversial director Jonas Akerlund (Smashing Pumpkins, the Prodigy); the video was completed in Los Angeles this week, the singer's spokesperson said. Madonna co-wrote the songs on American Life with Guy Sigsworth, Jem Griffiths and Les Rhythmes Digitales' Jacques Lu Cont, who was the musical director and keyboardist on her Drowned World Tour. Among the tracks slated for inclusion are "Hollywood," "Nothing Fails" and "Love Profusion."


February 15: Reps for the singer deny talk that she clashed with Warner Bros. Records chief Tom Whalley, after sending the label an astronomical bill for a photo session Craig McDean did for her new CD.
 

"Whalley sent word back to Madonna that he wasn't paying the bill," says the source, since his boss, Warner Music Group CEO Roger Ames, recently told all his label heads to trim expenses.

"So she called Ames, reminding him of how many records she sold. Ames called Whalley to ask him to make an exception for Madonna. But Whalley wouldn't budge. Things have gotten very tense."

Madonna's rep, Liz Rosenberg denies Whalley and Ames spoke about the bill.

"Tom Whalley doesn't get involved in that area of the company," said Rosenberg, who did confirm that McDean's bill for the photo session ran over $100,000.



February 23: Jean Baptiste Mondino will directed the video to the second single, “Hollywood.” There are rumors that David Fincher may direct another video for Madonna (from this album).

February 24: The video for “American Life” features fashions from Stella McCartney, Jean-Paul Gaultier and combat couture runway show of Jeremy Scott’s work.

February 28: “American Life” will have a remix by none other than Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliot (The Gold Mind/Elektra). Additional remixes to be provided by Layo & Bushwacka, Paul Oakenfold, Timo Maas, DJ Tiesto, Felix Da Housecat and Peter Rauhofer.

March 6: Warner executives in London were given an exclusive preview of the album this week. It is reportedly similar in style to the Music album: fusing electronic, guitar and pop genres. Several of the tracks are reportedly humorous and feature Madonna poking fun at herself. There is an 80’s disco-style tune and one down-tempo track that features the London Community Gospel Choir (conflicting reports say it is “Nobody Knows Me” and other say it is the third single, “Nothing Fails”). (Madonnarama)

March 21: In light of recent events (i.e. the U.S. invasion of Iraq on March 20), Madonna has decided to “tone down” her “American Life” video, which was reportedly supposed to feature vivid images of violence and war such as bloody, limbless people and a dying baby. There were reports that television stations in Germany were planning to ban the video based on its content. It is still planned for release the first week of April.

March 24: The digital single for download of "American Life" was a smashing success for Warner Brothers. It tracked 4,177 downloads in the first week, enough to put it at No. 90 on the Hot 100 and No. 4 on the Billboard Single Sales chart. (It ends up selling 4,177 as a download single and becomes the second single EVER to debut on the Hot 100 that was only available as an internet download, the first being Fleetwood Mac one week earlier with “Peacemaker”).

March 31: After debuting internationally today, Madonna and Warner Brothers have pulled the controversial video for "American Life" out of rotation and have nixed plans to premiere it in the U.S. this weekend. They also have postponed Madonna’s interview, MADONNA SPEAKS, with Megan Mullaly of “Will & Grace” scheduled for this Friday on VH-1. According to Liz Rosenberg, the DVD single is also being put on permanent vacation.

April 3: Some radio stations have stopped airing “American Life” completely or limited its number of spins due to bad response from listeners. In its second week on Billboard’s Hot 100, the song only managed to climb to a disappointing No. 74, despite a whole week of debut airplay.

April 4: BILLBOARD REVIEW OF "American Life" single:
 

Billboard delivers a scathing review of the single, “American Life:”
Madonna rapping? She really shouldn't have. Really. But that's just one of the missteps sabotaging new single "American Life," a blurry snarl of style and composition that sounds more like a disjointed medley than a song. Enough already with substituting electronic blips for melody; it may have worked well on "Music" and sufficed on "Die Another Day," but the novelty effect is well-worn and just plain grating on this effort. To further the sting, the space-age noises are followed by a jarringly disparate fanning of acoustic guitars, and then what appears to be two choruses. Huh? But watch out, next is the rap - soulless and in your face, it is positively atrocious. Our beloved Madonna is certainly the industry's most-accomplished musical chameleon, and previous evolutionary inquisitions have changed the face of pop music to great effect. Not this time. This "American Life" should be hastily deported. -CT


AOL will stream album tracks for listeners this month, starting with “Love Profusion” on April 14.

April 9: Z-100 in NYC has put the Oakenfold remix of “American Life” into rotation and is no longer playing the single version serviced to radio by Warner.

April 12: There are rumors that Warner Bros. is refusing to pony up the money it cost to shoot the video for “American Life” since Madonna has opted not to release it. There may be some truth to it since Warner Bros. initially did not want the video to focus on the war in Iraq, and there is word that Madonna may edit the video yet again for a TV-friendly release next week.

April 13: The VH-1 special, MADONNA SPEAKS, is now scheduled to air Wednesday, April 16 at 10PM. The interview (hosted by Megan Mullaly of “Will & Grace”) was slated to air two weeks ago before Madonna pulled the video for “American Life.” It is believed that the newly re-edited video will debut during or after the special.

April 14: Three new tracks from the album make their online debut today:

“Love Profusion” on AOL
“X-Static Process” on Yahoo
“Mother and Father” on MSN

April 19: In response to Madonna’s aggressive anti-piracy campaign, anonymous hackers broke into Madonna.com, removed the web pages and posted links to free, high-quality downloads of her new album. The site was restored after four hours.

April 21: MTV’s Carson Daly says that the “American Life” album preview on MTV.com’s The Leak has generated 700,000 hits on the website in 5 days, a record for MTV Online.

The album shipped GOLD in the U.K. (100,000 copies) prior to its release.

April 22: RELEASED.

June 6: From either Madonnarama or DrownedMadonna (not sure):

Many of the rumors circulating before the album’s release have been cleared up:
 

• The rumored 12-minute track was actually “Nobody Knows Me” although it was only afew minutes longer than the album version.

• “Love Profusion” was originally titled “I Got You Under My Skin.”

• “Intervention” was originally recorded for the MUSIC album and was about Guy and not Rocco. It was reportedly much different in style and lyrical content. It was originally called “Love Will Change Us Forever.”

• The collaberation with Air never happened for an unknown reason.

• “Can’t You See My Mind?” was recorded for the Bond film and sounds more like the traditional ballads used for the series, however “Die Another Day” was chosen because it’s name fit the film’s title. DrownedMadonna said this though this year (2009):

There has been so much talk about “Can't You See My Mind,” the track that Madonna and Mirwais wrote and produced for the "Die Another Day" movie. At the end "Die Another Day", the track, made the soundtrack. Finally we have some details to share about this so-much-talked unreleased song. “Can't You See My Mind” is not a ballad at all as rumoured, but it's upbeat. Each line on the verses is a question. The song has a mysterious feel to it. Michael Colombier's arrangement on it has a much more natural sound than in Die Another Day. Once again Madonna sings, more like talks, in French.

• “X-Static Process” originally sounded much more like “Impressive Instant” but was re-recorded with an acoustic style for the album.

• “Mr. Ejector” (or My Ejector, or Ejector) was a track that was recorded but not put on the record. It may surface as a B-side. It is said to sound like the final version of “American Life.”

• “Adverse Youth” is a ballad. Madonna’s spokesperson said many of the tracks NOT included were dance-oriented and Madonna wanted a quieter, “more acoustic feel,” however, why this ballad was left off is not known.

• “Hollywood” was actually a song Madonna wrote some time ago but never recorded until now. She apparently changed the melody for this record more than once. Mirwais will tell Remix Magazine (June 2003 issue):

“‘Hollywood’ was a very old song,” Mirwais says. “We weren't satisfied with the original version, so Madonna found an alternative melody."

• "I Can't Place It" - or at least its demo version - is rumoured to be quite a guitar-driven track with a strange rhythm that kept stopping and starting, kind of like what happens to the start of the music of "Don't Tell Me". It is thought to be an early demo for "I'm So Stupid."

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Confessions on a Dancefloor

 

2003:

February: At some point this month, Madonna does a sit-down interview with W Magazine (for the April 2003 cover story). In it, she comments on the musical project she is rumored to be working on:
 

"Yes, I'm working on a musical project. It's already been written and it's totally original. The director and I have put together a creative team, and we're working on getting financing right now."


March 13: Insiders have suggested that Madonna’s next big project is a movie musical called “Hello Suckers” an original screenplay extravaganza to be directed by Scott Elliot (“A Map of the World”) and produced by Barbara de Fina (“You Can Count On Me”).

May 13: Scott Elliot is directing Madonna in the Texas Guinan bio movie musical that was once a go with Courtney Love ("It just didn't work out," said Elliott).

May 21: Madonna states in an interview that she is currently working on a movie musical script about a real-life actress who worked in Hollywood in the 1920’s.

September 24: Madonna’s brother-in-law Joe Henry, told an Italian magazine that he has been working on a couple of songs with her for a musical that she will star in next year.
 

Later: These songs will include "The Devil Wouldn't Recognize You" which will show up on Hard Candy and "Jump" which will show up on COADF.



October 28: Madonna and Luc Besson shoot the video for her song "Love Profusion."
 

LATER: Madonna will tell interviewers for the COADF promotion that she began work with Luc Besson for another musical project in the fall of 2004. It is possible this video collaboration led to that musical film idea.


November 30: Mirwaïs is said to be working with Madonna on 3 songs for a new musical. They’ve scheduled recording time in Los Angeles in December.

December 2: Madonna has been working on a musical with Patrick Leonard called Hello Suckers!. The two of them have already been working on music and lyrics over the past year and have completed a large body of material. Madonna plays a 1920's vaudeville-like tap-dancing star. (Madonnalicious)
 

LATER: Madonna will record a number of tracks for this musical which will leak (or are rumored to exist) much later in various forms. Among them are "Is this Love (Bon D'Accord)" - which will later reincarnate as "Voices" on Hard Candy, "If You Go Away," "Curtain" (which has not leaked yet), and "How High" which will have its lyrics used with a demo submitted by Bloodshy & Avant in early 2005. A song called "Miss You" has lyrics which were later used in "Like It or Not" but it is unclear if this song was from the American Life sessions or indeed written for the musical.






2004:

January 27: From an interview in the Belgian magazine, HUMO, with Joe Henry:
 

HUMO: Did she ask you for more songs, afterwards?

Henry: Well, right now we're writing some songs for a musical. It's about the era of the 'silent movie'. I learned not to harbour any expectations and just seize every interesting opportunity. You know, I've noticed that many journalists think I resent “Don’t Tell Me,” but what can be more beautiful for a songwriter than having one of your songs covered? And when they still ring true in a completely different version... . I can't think of a bigger compliment.


February 19: The first preliminary setlist of Madonna's upcoming Re-Invention Tour is leaked and it includes a track called "The Devil Wouldn't Recognize You," a track from the musical she has been working on the past year.
 

Later: Mike McKnight (sound engineer for Madonna) tells Drownedmadonna.com in a 2005 interview that "The Devil Wouldn't Recognize You" was on the Reinvention setlist to be performed but was pulled and never done in the actual show. He says that Madonna did the track with Mirwais and does not mention Joe Henry, which suggests Madonna may have taken the track she wrote with Henry to Mirwais who would do his own music and production for it. The song is replaced by a ballad version of "Deeper and Deeper" in the live show.


April 8: Madonna will release a studio album during 2005, and she has already begun to work on it. She is reportedly collaborating with Joe Henry and Pat Leonard – although some reports suggest their involvement was only with a soundtrack she was developing, and that project was shelved 6 months ago. One thing is certain, however - Mirwaïs' role on this new album will be very limited. Also, she might bring in two other producers that also worked on the American Life album – possibly Guy Sigsworth and Stuart Price.

April 11: She has reportedly done one song with Mirwaïs but it isn’t known yet if that song will appear on an upcoming compilation of remixes for American Life or if she’ll save it for her new album in 2005. The song was recorded last week. She continues to field new collaberators for the new album.

May 11: Headcleanr (a.k.a. Ray Carroll) from the Sire electronic-duo The Waterlillies is one of the new producers she may be collaberating with and also Thomas Bangalter (Daft Punk) is rumored to be helping out. Very little has been done so far as Madonna is still writing and plans to do so through out her upcoming tour. The new studio album won’t likely be released until late 2005.

May 27: Guy Chambers, one of the U.K.'s most prolific & talented writer and producers, is most famous for working with artists such as Robbie Williams, Mel C and Kylie Minogue. In an interview on UK TV show London Tonight at the Ivor Novello Awards, he was asked who he wanted to work with next. He replied "Madonna" with a smile on his face - he then quietly said "In fact, I am going to meet with her management in the US in August."

May 30: DJ and remixer Peter Rauhofer says in an interview that Madonna’s next album will likely be a soundtrack to a movie she’s starring in – Hello Suckers! He said the material was done with Patrick Leonard and the style reminds him of a “broadway musical.”

June 8: Madonna has landed a new film role - playing a gunslinging 1920’s cowgirl for whom she’s a dead ringer. The singer will play silent movie star Texas Guinan in MARTIN SCORSESE’s big-screen musical Hello Suckers! The tale is based on the life of legendary bareback horserider Guinan - who appeared in Hollywood Westerns. Texas-born blonde Guinan also became a rebel nightclub host who openly flouted anti-booze Prohibition laws and kick-started her stage shows with the hellraising catchphrase “Hello Sucker!” The film is Madge’s chance to get even with critics who slated her parts in Eighties films Shanghai Surprise and Desperately Seeking Susan then 2002’s Swept Away, directed by hubby GUY RITCHIE. Madge will co-produce it with Goodfellas director Scorsese and also write the music. It will be shot next year and the soundtrack will be the Material Girl’s next album, with the first single a cover of 1920s hit “There’ll Be Some Changes Made.” The movie will be directed by Jonas Akerlund who masterminded Madge’s anti-war video for her hit “American Life.” Madonna idolises feisty Guinan - star of The Hellcat, The She Wolf, The Gun Woman and Little Miss Deputy - and will love stepping into her stirrups. An industry insider said: "This project is really personal for Madonna as she worships Guinan. Critical acclaim in movies is also the one thing that has eluded her but this is a special film with big names involved. "Madonna has already recorded an album’s worth of songs for it and is determined to make it work." The film arm of her production company Maverick bought the rights to the film in 2001 and planned a stage show but later hit on the movie idea. Madge has been laying down tracks for it since last year. COURTNEY LOVE was cast as Guinan and even wrote some songs but has been axed over her recent drug troubles.

June 9: According to an industry insider, Madonna will work on her new album in 2005 but it is currently too early to consider who will produce with her. If Madonna leaves WB due to her current legal battle over Maverick Records, there is expected to be a number of remix albums and compilations flooding the market before she even gets a new album out on another label. Reportedly, Madonna has already stated that she is done with WB however, they are still hoping to get more out of her. Madonna has met with Quentin Tarantino recently regarding “a musical” but so far, their talks have just been discussion about the project. Madonna apparently has no plans to start any major projects until her contract dispute with WB is resolved.

June 16-24: LATER: Madonna writes a song called “I Love New York” while doing sound checks for her Re-Invention tour at Madison Square Garden in NYC after receiving a police escort to MSG. She just started playing a riff at sound check and that is how it came about.
 

LATER: Price says in an interview with British magazine The Word (June 2008): We were at Madison Square Garden in the middle of the 2004 Re-Invention tour, and it had got to that point where everyone was just completely bored. Touring with Madonna is like taking everything you've learned from the age of 14 about playing small pubs and clubs in bands and chucking it all out of the window. It's more like Cirque Du Soleil than the Pheasant & Firkin, put it that way. Essentially, the show has so many moving parts that if you go out on a limb you might end up losing a limb.

Madonna can be quite spontaneous, but she's not spontaneous when it comes to doing a show in front of 20,000 people! Similarly, the soundcheck is often quite a choreographed affair, but this time she just started messing around. She started playing this very basic, two-chord riff on the guitar and making up these lyrics about how she loved New York. It was just a real fun, mess-around song. Later I went into her dressing room with a guitar and a portable multi-track and said, "We're just going to stick something down for a reference", so we had a rough sketch of the song.


July 23: Hello Suckers! is reportedly Madonna’s next project once she completes the Re-Invention tour and the soundtrack to this musical is reportedly her next album affair.

August 4: Inside sources say Madonna has contacted U.K. electronic band Goldfrapp for a possible collaboration. She has attempted to work with them before in 2002 when Guy Ritchie and Madonna asked the British duo to score their film Swept Away - Goldfrapp rejected that offer but did give permission to use track (“Lovely Head”) for the 2002 film’s opening credits.

August 29: Iggy Pop & the Stooges open for Madonna at Slane Castle in Ireland. Madonna watches the performance with Stuart Price and makes a suggestion:
 

LATER: Price says in an interview with British magazine The Word (June 2008): Later on in the tour we were playing Slane Castle with Iggy Pop, and while we were watching him Madonna said, "Let's make the song a bit like The Stooges." She was making a documentary on that tour, I'm Going To Tell You A Secret, and there was a scene in it that featured New York, and she decided she wanted a kind of Stooges version of I Love New York to play over it. So I took the riff and the guide vocal away to a friend's house in Reading. We went into his bedroom and propped the bed up against the wall to make room for the drum-kit. His brother played guitar, I played bass and we tracked this Madonna song in the bedroom of a house on the Wokingham Road! And that's the version that appears on the documentary.


September (early): There is a report that Depeche Mode songwriter, Martin Gore, recently met with Madonna and Stuart Price while on her tour. He may be working on some demos for her.

September 27: Pat Leonard recently finished writing a “period musical” with Madonna.

September 29: Joe Henry tells the press that he and Madonna collaborated on 3 songs last year (and recorded them together) for a movie that is set in the silent film era.

September 30: Last week in London, Madonna checked in with Martin Gore and claims to have “loved” one of the demos he was given to work on.

October 11: According to well-informed sources, an all-new Madonna album (currently in the planning stages) is due in November 2005 with a lead single planned for Summer 2005.

October 25: Stuart Price is at the helm of the album, his role is as producer; Stuart has a lot of input with the type of music, sound and over all direction of the album. The sound we are being told is more electric than the work she did with Ørbit. Also, Monte Pittman is involved, Madonna is working with him, but what they are working on is unknown at the moment. Mirwaïs doesn't seem to be too heavily involved with this album at this time and his role is yet unknown.
 

LATER: In an interview with John Norris on MTV Overdrive (broadband channel), Madonna says the album didn’t start out as an all-dance record. She did some songs with Mirwaïs and some with Stuart Price. She says she tried several different things, and then Stuart brought her the music to “Hung Up” and she wrote the lyrics very quickly – in about 10 minutes driving around in her car – “it was like instant, divine inspiration” – and she knew she wanted to make a dance record.

She sent an emissary to Stockholm with a letter she’d written to Bjorn & Benny begging them to allow her to use the sample. She says they did not say YES right away, but rather took some time to think about it. They have rarely allowed their music to be sampled. The sample was reportedly quite expensive, and they got a writing credit on the song.

UK TELEGRAPH: The pair agreed to let Madonna use their most famous disco hit after striking a lucrative copyright agreement that observers say will give them a significant share of royalties from airplay.
"Gimme, Gimme, Gimme” is the essence of the new song and we have agreed to split the copyright with Madonna and her co-writer," Andersson said. He declined to go into details and insisted that financial concerns were not the primary motive for the decision to give Madonna permission to use the track. The ABBA track went to No. 3 in the U.K. in 1979.


A lot of the songs were written very quickly, but they did take a lot stuff they worked with on tour and morphed into songs from things Stuart Price and Madonna collaberated on during the tour – inbetween sound checks, back stage and in “hotel rooms in boring cities.”

She says she wanted to make something “buoyant” and “fun.”

“Hung Up” was written for the disco section of a musical she was working on. It was one of the first songs she and Price wrote (out of 20 songs total for the musical done over a couple years). Then she decided not to do the movie and they started listening to old disco records: Georgio Moroder, Cerrone, ABBA ABBA ABBA. There is a bit of tribute to Donna Summer (I Feel Love) and the Bee Gees.

Stuart Price tells Mojo magazine of the album: “It came out of the ashes of a film script she was working on – a musical, it had a ‘futuristic club section.’ Initially, we were just doing songs for that. “Hung Up” was the first one. For months I had wanted to use that loop from “Gimme Gimme Gimme,” and she said ‘I want the future disco section to sound somewhere inbetween Danceteria, Studio 54 and Abba on drugs.’ I said, ‘Errrr, ok, let me play you something.’ Three days later, she’d written a song with it. Within a month we had the bulk of an album. They did all their work in Price’s studio flat in Maida Vale, in the loft.

LATER: Based on Price's comments, I am led to believe that "Hung Up" was written for the Besson musical as I cannot see Hello Suckers! having a futuristic disco section being that it was a 20's-style period piece.

U.K. Observer: Madonna says she intended to do the bulk of the album with Mirwais and a few songs with Stuart Price. But the first song she did with Price - “Hung Up” - resonated so monstrously that she decided to go the other way – and it decided the direction of the album.

Madonna: And that song made up my mind in which musical direction to go in. Until then I had done an entire soundtrack to a musical called Hello Suckers!, and that didn't pan out because I decided I didn't want to do it. Then I decided to write a musical with Luc Besson, with him doing the screenplay. So I started a whole new chunk of songs, and then I read the script and I hated it, and I thought, 'That's crap, let's scrap that'. And then I was exhausted. We finished the tour, and my record company was like, 'You owe us an album', and I was, 'I don't have any more ideas, I'm tapped out'. So I came over here to work experimentally, and because that song turned out so great, I said, 'OK, that's it, I'm making all dance music'.

The entire time I was recording the album I was also editing a documentary film that I've just finished, and that was a very painful... It's called I'm Going to Tell You a Secret and it's not a conventional documentary. It's cinematic, it's like a journal. I was flying to Stockholm every other week to work on the edit, then coming back here, and it was very difficult, taking 350 hours of film and putting it into two hours. I was so wiped out by it.


November 9: Madonna is currently writing and recording in London for a 2005 album, although its release may not come until next November. It might be an extension to her Warner deal with the same royalties for one album. If the album does well, she could reportedly get an even better deal if she proves American Life was a fluke and not the beginning of the end of her recording career.

November 11: Tonight, Madonna is inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame and afterward she says to reporters of her new album: I’m getting ready to record another album and I begin writing, in fact, next week. Well, I’m working with Mirwais again and probably Stuart Price who was on tour with me – I wrote a track with him on my last album…and… who knows? I kind of figure it out as I go along and things always change by the time I get finished recording my album…so, I don’t know…stay tuned.

November 24: In People Magazine, Madonna says: “I’m writing for this musical I’m working on based on the life story of Texas Guinan, a woman who was a silent movie star and hell-raiser during Prohibition. It’s a good story but I don’t know if its acceptable or not. I have to record a new album, but I don’t really like the idea of just making another record. So I’m throwing a lot of balls in the air and will see what happens.”

November 30: Madonna.com confirms that she is in the studio today recording new material but it does not say what it will be for. A London tabloid says it is “trip hop” music.

December 3: Madonna was in the studio with Stuart Price this week.
 

LATER: In an interview with Attitude in October 2005, Madonna says she did not intend for Price to be the primary contributor but that she only intended to do a few songs with him. Also, after she did three songs between Price and Mirwais: “Hung Up,” “Sorry” and “Future Lovers” she said she did some other songs that were slower, but then she decided she wasn’t in the mood for ballads this time around.


December 10: Madonna & Guy are seen leaving the London Kabbalah Centre tonight.
 

LATER: In an interview with Israel's biggest newspaper Yediot Aharonot, Yitzhak Sinwani says it was around this time that he moved to London (working for the Kabbalah Centre) and performed some songs he had learned from home (Israel) at the Centre’s traditional Shabbat dinner one Friday night. She later tapped him to do vocals for her album (for “Isaac”) and on her 2006 Confessions World Tour. (12/11/06)


December 24: According to his friends, Stuart Price is busy producing Madonna’s next album. BBC DJ Pete Tong has stated that Price is “the most important and prolific young producer in Britian today.”

December 28: Madonna is currently working on music for a new studio album for WB, however, she is also recording material for a possible release with her new documentary due in the spring. The Hello Suckers! musical is currently in a lull because Madonna owes WB a new studio album next year so that is currently her primary focus. Madonna is also up for a supporting role in the film The Streets of Paris (FineLine) and if she wins that role, it is likely that the production for Hello Suckers! will be postponed until late 2005.

 

2005:

January 5: Madonna has finished several new songs with Stuart Price. Last year, she also did a barter collaberation with Missy Elliot (in exchange for Missy appearing on Madonna’s tour in video form) - that song may appear on the rapper’s next album, which features guest stars Tweet, Ciara, 50 Cent, and Ludacris.

January 7: The track she did with Missy Elliot is called “Cali Dreams” and is about the cost of fame. Madonna only provides backing vocals and was rumored to be called “Liquid Dreams.” It has not yet been determined if it will be used but it isn’t a “Me Against the Music” type of project. Madonna has also tapped an American producer, Emilio Estefan, Jr. to crank out a demo for her. She is a big fan of Estefan’s work and wants a Latin track on her next album.

January 8: During the sound checks of the tour this year, Madonna was playing a new song with the working title, “I Love New York.” The song was co-written with Monte Pitman.

January 9: Madonna has completed two new songs and is working on two more (in progress). A new song title has also been revealed: “Goddess”

February 3: Madonna has been taking karate lessons at the Budokwai club in south London – she plans to showcase the discipline in an upcoming video.

February 6: Stuart Price aka Jacques Lu Cont, winner of Best Remixed Recording at Sunday's 47th Grammy Awards. The Jacques Lu Cont's Thin White Duke Mix of the No Doubt cover of "It's My Life" won over the Full Intention Club Mix of George Michael's "Amazing", the Felix Da Housecat's High Octane Mix of "Motor Inn" by Iggy Pop with Freedom, featuring Peaches, the Basement Jaxx Mix of N.E.R.D.'s "She Wants to Move" and Sasha 's Remix of "Watching Cars Go By" by Felix Da Housecat.

February 13: Stuart Price, aka Jacques Lu Cont, plays the Good Vibrations Festival in Melbourne, Australia today.
 

LATER: Price plays a dub version of “Hung Up” with the ABBA sample (no Madonna vocals) to great crowd reaction. From an IntheMix review:

Jacques Lu Cont started his set with a remix of Gwen Stefani’s ‘What You Waiting For?’ before mixing it into a remix of a classic ABBA tune. I didn’t get to witness much of Jacques Lu Cont’s set however from I did hear he seemed to have played a lot arm raising, crowd favourite tracks, making is set a lot of fun, but in comparison to other acts he didn’t really stand out.

LATER: Price says in an interview with British magazine The Word (June 2008), that he was working on the track “I Love New York” while he was in Sydney, Australia (Feb. 19 – was the day he played the Sydney Good Vibrations Festival).


February 14: Swedish duo Bloodshy & Avant revealed today in an interview to Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that they are currently working on a new song for Madonna. Christian "Bloodshy" Karlsson, 29, and Pontus "Avant" Winnberg, 29 are the guys behing Britney Spears' "Toxic", the winner of the 2005 Grammy Award for Best Dance Recording. They had already worked with Britney and Madonna producing a remix for their "Me Against The Music" single. They have just started working on the track, but the idea is to come up with a huge dancefloor-hit, they say. Madonna herself called Christian on his mobile and caught him when he was on a beach in Thailand to ask them to collaborate with her.
 

LATER: In an interview with a Swedish correspondent in NYC (in Oct. 2005) Madonna says she wanted to work with them after she heard her daughter listening to Rachel Stevens’ solo debut Funky Dory (released March 9, 2004) which had a song produced by Murlyn Music hotshot Bloodshy, “Sweet Dreams My LA Ex.” She said that plus their work on Britney Spears’ “Toxic” convinced her that she wanted to work with them.


Swedes Produce New Song for Madonna
They were given a Grammy for their Britney Spears song. Now the Swedish top producers are working on a new hit - for Madonna. "This is really something big," says Christian "Bloodshy" Karlsson. Swedish producers Bloodshy & Avant wrote and produced Britney Spears' hit "Toxic". This Sunday they won an American Grammy for their work. "It's absolutely amazing. An American Grammy is probably the biggest award you can win in my business. Now I'm beginning to understand how it would feel like to win gold in the Olympics," Christian "Bloodshy" Karlsson tells Aftonbladet.

The Swedes beat big acts like Chemical Brothers and Basement Jaxx in the category "Best dance recording". "This is really unbelievable. Those are really heavy names and we beat them just like that," says Christian Karlsson.
Bloodshy & Avant were not in the US to accept the award in person. The reason: they're working on a new hit - for Madonna.

"Madonna herself called me. I was at the beach in Thailand when my cell phone rang, and it was her. I can't even explain how unreal it felt to stand there with Madonna on the line," says Christian Karlsson.
The Queen of Pop discovered the Swedish duo after their work with Britney Spears and asked them to write her a song. "We've hardly begun working on it yet, so we've got no idea when the song will be released or what will become of it. Our goal is to give her a real dancefloor filler (disco stomper)," says Pontus Winnberg.
 

LATER: Early versions of “How High” and “Like It or Not” produced by Bloodshy alone are also in the vaults, assumably without the additional mixing of Avant and Stuart Price. The instrumentals to both songs were written before the lyrics were. These appeared on Bloodshy's MySpace in 2006 as "Snookercrunk" which is an almost identical version of "Like It or Not" without vocals, and "Lester" (4:01), which is an early version of "How High" (3:26).


February 15: A London paper says Madonna will reinvent herself next as the Queen of Rock and her new album, which is nearly completed, will have a “heavy guitar sound.” Madonna is reportedly drawing her latest musical inspiration from acts like Franz Ferdinand. She apparently wants to go in the direction of “real sounds – like those of a real band.” Other contributers on board include the album’s main producer Stuart Price, Mirwaïs, Bloodshy & Avant, and Monte Pittman. The collection may also include her recent cover of John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
 

LATER: This is just a personal observation, but around this time a lot of the rumors seemed to indicate a ROCK direction, and I often wonder where that came from. I suspect that Price - having done a very Stooges-rock-inspired version of "I Love NY" with friends in Reading could have led to gossip about the record that this was its true direction. Especially if those who helped him started talking to people about what they worked on together.


February 22: Madonna met with Nellee Hooper today in NYC regarding a song she wrote in the past with Marius DeVries – Marius had the idea to give it to Nellee. Madonna is currently in NYC to work on some new music and meet with some different music people. Update (3/3/05): The song that Marius wrote with Madonna, has a working title of "Stare" or "The Stare." She has asked Nellee Hooper to make it a dance song with heavy guitars. She is looking for a heavy guitar sound with dance contamination – this led her to Nellee.

February 25: Madonna has used the London Community Gospel Choir on a new track for her album. The choir, who previously worked on Nothing Fails, are supposed to have already secretly recorded their part in a London studio recently. The gospel style choir have already laid down their vocals at a secret session in a London studio and will have a starring role on the new album. A source said: "Madonna loved their sound and professionalism on American Life. They have an impressive track record in their own right and she felt they were perfect for a Rolling Stones-style song like “You Can't Always Get What You Want.” The choir has also previously worked with Stevie Wonder, Sting, Sir Paul McCartney, Tina Turner, George Michael, Elton John and Sean 'P Diddy' Combs.

Madonna is also reworking a track from the William Orbit-sessions for Ray of Light called “Liquid Love” – a heavy guitar track with HIT written all over it. Madonna will play the axe on it herself.

 

March 8: According to an insider, Madonna has completed recording on 6 songs and the sound is very rock and dance inspired. This is apparently a “whole new direction” for Madonna and the tracks are reportedly quite impressive “sure fire hits.” The album is due later this year or early in 2006. She has previewed three of the tracks she did with Stuart Price for people at Warner Bros. who described them as “full-on dance” tracks that are “very catchy sounding.”

March 9: A new inside source says the songs are “dance-able rock” that are much like Chumbawamba or The Darkness.

March 10: The album may be about half done although it isn’t on Warner’s release schedule for 2005. The label very much wants to release it before the holidays, but Madonna is thinking about spring 2006. She is still very unhappy with them due to the Maverick Records debacle.

March 14: Madonna may also record a theme song for Guy Ritchie’s Revolver film depending on timing as she is currently writing for her new album. Her label rep has confirmed that she is working with Mirwaïs and Stuart Price. The only song title confirmed so far is “I Love New York.”

April 6: According to Warner France, the album is completed and the marketing plans have begun. Currently, the first single and its release date are being decided – there is still debate about whether or not to release it pre-summer or post-summer. They also have said that the album has little to do with “rock.”

Today, (Apr. 6) Madonna is seen leaving a recording studio in North London.

April 11: According to insiders, WB is always presenting ideas for compilation albums to Madonna, most of which she rejects. The most recent idea was a 2-disc set – one disc her greatest ballads and the other remixes. She rejected the idea and said that if such a project were to happen, those would be separately released. WB has now stated that a new album will be released before any kind of compilation.

April 14, 15, 18: Madonna entered a London recording studio on these dates around noon and stayed until 8PM.

April 16: More rumors: the album will be released in early 2006. Mirwaïs wrote several new titles but it is not known if they will be included. The only track that is certain to appear is “I Love New York” which may be previewed early as part of a promotional push for the documentary.

April 22: Insiders reveal that Madonna is definitely working with Mirwaïs. He is currently at work on new tracks in a London studio and they are both “very pleased” with the progress to date.

April 26: Madonna played WB five tracks that she did with Stuart Price, who will be the main producer of the new album. However, like Music, the project may have several collaberators. Two of these five songs were done with Mirwaïs and are dance tracks. Madonna still holds a lot of demos that she didn’t show to Warner because she still wants to rework them. She plans to record through the summer, and this is why a number of songs aren’t done yet and she is planning on recording some of them in NYC. She still wants an early 2006 release.
 

• “Hung Up”
• “Sorry”
• “Future Lovers”
• “Let It Will Be”
• “I Love New York”


May 1: In an interview Stuart Price tells the press that for the new album (which he has written new songs with Madonna) he “isn’t do anything I wouldn’t normally do.” Price is well-known for his 80’s-style dance pop.

May 17: Madonna has SLOWLY been submitting tracks to Warner and the group that she’s submitted so far have been given under the album name: Defying Gravity.

May 25: According to ContactMusic, a Warner rep says the new album has “a rockier edge and the usual electronica influence.” The label is very excited about the 8 tracks completed so far and sources say it is “full of hit singles.” There is a track called “Defying Gravity” which could end up being the title of the record too. The label expects the album in January 2006.

May 26: Madonna.com says that she is currently collaberating with producers she has never before worked with. (I suspect they could either mean Bloodshy & Avant or perhaps Anders Bagge and Peer Astrom who submitted "Get Together" late in the project)

 

June 3: The new album, Defying Gravity, will be released in November 2005 to coincide with the launch of her new perfume. <--- Obviously this info turns out to be FALSE.

June 5: Madonna has reportedly contacted two very well-known video directors for her next video. She’s going to review the ideas they submit for the track and she will pick the better of the two. The director’s names are not yet known, but neither has shot a video for her before.

June 7: In an interview with MTV at the Lotsa de Casha party at Bergdorf Goodman, Madonna says she did a lot of the album with Stuart Price but that she also worked with Mirwaïs and Bloodshy & Avant. She says the album is “all dance – no ballads.”

June 8: In a TV interview on The View, Madonna herself says that the album is due in “late October/early November” of this year and will features “all dance” music. She plans to tour in 2006 to support it.

June 9: Madonna says she hasn’t written anything lately as far as books since she has been recording for her new album. She claims she is finishing up that process now. She skips rabbi Philip Berg’s birthday party tonight in favor a music listening meeting (for her new album) with Warner Music’s head honchos Edgar Bronfman, Tom Whalley and Lyor Cohen.

June 14: There is much speculation at Warner that a new Madonna single will see release in July or August. According to the label, Madonna is still finishing up in the studio with her collaberators. An insider at WB says a single could see radio release as soon as July 4. Those have listened to the album so far are saying it’s “sooooo good!” There is also speculation that it could become a classic Madonna album. The sound is described as “very fresh and very clean.” Mirwaïs has a very limited role on this album and there is only one heavily-influenced Mirwaïs track. The album is “beautiful, upbeat and filled with happy songs.”

June 15: Madonna reportedly “belts” on this album and “(I Love) New York” is quite “anthemic” and is one of the strongest tracks on the album. The record is dance with a rock influence.

June 17: Madonna.com confirms a late November 2005 album release with a tour to “hopefully” follow in the summer of 2006.

June 26: Madonna has sampled an ABBA track for her next album due in November.

July 2: Madonna tells MTV in an interview at Live 8 that her new album is being mixed this week and she’s calling it: Confessions on a Dancefloor, and she thinks people will love “(I Love) New York.”

July 6: Madonna is in talks with a major international fashion firm to design her costumes for an upcoming promotional tour for her new album. The new album’s promo-tour schedule could include an appearance on the MTV Europe Music Awards in Lisbon, Portugal on November 3.

July 8: RUMOR (RAUHOFER BOARD): Madonna's team has contacted:
 

• Basement Jaxx
• Jacknife (remixed U2’s “Vertigo”)
• Superchumbo (Tom Stephan) – Kylie Minogue, Darude
• Peter Rauhofer
• Jan Driver
• Fierce & Coppola

…about re-mixing Madonna's new single. They send a copy of the first single to all of them. They are not confirmed yet. Again Madonna hand picks each remix.


July 9: BBC Radio 1 announces the first date for the album’s release: November 28, 2005. Within 10 days, Stuart Price will fly to Los Angeles to mix the new album. Madonna will join him there after her family vacation at the end of July.

July 12: Madonna plans to meet with WB’s marketing team at the end of July, and there is a big photo shoot planned for the second week in August. She has picked Steven Klein to do the photos again. The first single will be a massive techno/disco stomper reminiscent of “old Madonna” and will be released to radio soon. WB is working around the clock to prepare as this is considered to be the biggest release of the year. A heavy promotional tour is also planned with lots of dancing. The first single will go to radio in September, and have a commercial release in October. The B-side will be the unreleased Laylo & Bushwacka mix of “Hollywood.”

July 13: HMV lists the album release date in the U.K. as November 14. WB & Madonna officially chose a lead single today. Remixers are not yet decided.

July 18: Website Madonna-Electronica.com previews a heavily-techno sample of a reported song from the album.

July 21: Madonna is currently in Los Angeles mixing the album with Stuart Price. One of the songs to possibly be chosen for the first single is “Hung Up.” The album artwork will be shot by Steven Klein in mid-August in the U.K. – he may also direct her new video there too. Giovanni Bianco, who designed the tour program for Re-Invention may also come on board (if his schedule permits). Klein’s shoot has a tentative title of Regression, which could also be the album’s new title. (DrownedMadonna & Madonnatribe).

July 25: Madonna is seen leaving a recording studio in L.A. with Stuart Price. Christina Aguilera is also seen leaving the same studio around the same time. This leads the press to speculate if they have recorded something together. A source says she is working with Aguilera on one track and with Gwen Stefani on another.

July 26: Madonna.com confirms the album is called Confessions on a Dancefloor and the first single is “Hung Up” which Madonna co-produced with Stuart Price.

July 27: Madonna.nu reports that the album is now scheduled for November 15 release. Steven Klein’s photoshoot for the cover will take place in L.A. on August 11. She is not planning to work with Aguilera for this record but she is finishing up her record this week in the same recording studio.
 

Liz Rosenberg debunks the Aguilera rumors and says Madonna is also not planning on teaming up with Gwen Stefani for this album either:

“It’s all Madonna, all the time – a total dance record called Confessions on a Dancefloor. No ballads, no messages – it’s back to Madonna Queen of the Dancefloor!”


July 29: Madonna will hold meetings next week to begin planning the publicity for the album. Arianne Philips is currently putting a look together for the the album theme. A listening party for WB executives is also scheduled for next week. - Madonna.nu
 

The first single could see a radio release before the end of August but the retail release of “Hung Up” isn’t scheduled until November 7.



August 2: “Hung Up” is scheduled to hit radio the first week of October according to radio websites and WB. The release will feature some heavy promotion by the label and Madonna, however the nature of this promotion is unknown right now. Liz Rosenberg denies the rumors that the song samples ABBA’s “Ring Ring.”

August 3: The video shoot for “Hung Up” has been pushed back to the end of September (Sept. 19 to be exact). The album photoshoot will still take place August 11.

August 4: Giovanni Bianco, designer of the tour program for Re-Invention, confirms he will be doing the art direction for the album.

Liz Smith reports that the big guys at WB (including Tom Whalley) are the happiest music executives in town and are “blown away” by Madonna’s new album - which they describe as a “dance-driven pop record.”

Madonna.com officially announces release dates:

“Hung Up” will debut on U.S. radio October 17.
Confessions on a Dancefloor will come out November 15.

August 7: Italian fashion duo Dolce & Gabbana are just one of the designers who sent Madonna some clothing and accessories for her upcoming shoot with Steven Klein on August 11.
 

LATER: (Oct. 6, 2005) Stefano Gabbana says the pink outfit Madonna wears on the album cover is a D&G creation.


August 11: The album photshoot takes place. She is photographed leaving the Los Angeles Kabbalah Centre a few days later with ginger-colored haired. The following news comes on August 28, 2005: Klein photographed Madonna for her upcoming album on 12 elaborate sets.
 

LATER (Oct. 3): Details of the shoot:

(a) Wearing baby blue short pants with heels and a blue
top - on a lighted dance floor in a checked pattern
like in Sat Night Fever - but all white floor.

b)Black background with her in a red dress - very Liza
Minelli of the 70's type dress - this look to be used
for cardboard standees and related promo materials.

c)Pics of her posing with a chair in white dress.
Multiple poses with multicoloured lights on her.

d)In an orange jumpsuit thing - posing in front of a wall
of mirrors - the only yoga pose her with her on her
back = legs bent over her to her arms holding a disco ball.


August 12: RollingStone: Madonna is returning to her roots with the club-friendly Confessions on a Dancefloor, due November 15th. For her tenth studio album, the follow-up to 2003's American Life, the pop legend worked closely with British producer Stuart Price (a.k.a. DJ Jacques Lu Cont) at his London apartment.
 

Price met Madonna later in her career, playing keyboards on her last two tours -- "I was a bit too young to be a fan in the Eighties," he says, laughing. She approached him after last year's Re-Invention Tour, when she began work on a music-driven screenplay, bringing him onboard to create a sound she called "future disco." The idea for Confessions on a Dancefloor came from those sessions.

"We live real near each other in London, and we could just send ideas back and forth and get together and work on stuff," Price says. "The creative process was very short. There were a couple of weeks in London at my studio where we were doing a song every day."

At night, the producer would test out the tracks during his club gigs. "Whenever I was DJ'ing, I'd take dub or instrumental versions out with me," Price says. "I had my camera with me, and the next day I'd tell Madonna, 'This is what a thousand people in Liverpool looked like last night dancing to our song.' You can work on a song for twelve hours, but I guarantee you'll know within the first ten seconds of putting it on at a club whether it works or not. So these songs were tested on unwitting subjects throughout Europe."

But Price insists that he and Madonna did not blindly trust the club scene, wanting to create something more lasting. "There's a bit of a danger with dance music that you can create something that's cool but doesn't have much substance to it," he admits. "Every few months, a club record comes along that hits a nerve with people, and they connect to it. They don't know why, but there is something magical in it. That's what we were trying to make."

The first single is the uptempo synth-disco jam “Hung Up” which Price calls "a big feel-good song. You put it on and you want to get in your car, turn it up and drive around smiling."


August 15: The film Hello Suckers! is no longer happening at this point. Madonna did begin working on a musical driven screenplay after her Re-Invention tour was over, but the album Confessions on a Dancefloor came from those sessions. Insiders are promising a “new sound” from Madonna on her new album.

August 16: Due to a horse-riding accident today, Madonna broke her collarbone and her hand, as well as cracking three ribs. Liz R. says it’s too soon to tell if this will affect plans for a 2006 tour, but the promotion for her upcoming album in November, “will definitely be affected.”

August 17: Rumor: A song co-produced by Stuart Price entitled “Get Together” will appear on the album according to someone in the Rauhofer forum.

August 18: Stuart Price DJ’ed tonight at the club Space (on Ibiza) and played some of Madonna’s new songs. He sent pics from his cell phone to her showing her that 1000’s of people were dancing to her songs.

August 21: NEWSWEEK says the disc is a “tribute to ‘80’s house, modern French techno, and anything else with a beat with no ballads.”

August 22: Roger Sanchez, the chart-topping producer and superstar DJ, says that what he’s heard of the album is going to be “massive.” He hopes to work with Madonna soon.

August 26: Madonna has sent a water-marked CD around of her first single, “Hung Up.” She is apparently trying to decide which one of two version of the song will be the official release.

August 28: Warner France may debut a 30-second clip of “Hung Up” on September 15 as an exclusive, downloadable ringtone.

August 29: Madonna.com PRESS Release:
 

"I want people to jump out of their seats!"

Never one to understate, those were the exact words Madonna used to describe the songs on her upcoming album, - Confessions On a Dancefloor. The 12 delicious tunes of pure 'unapologetic dance music' including the single "Hung Up" (out Oct.17th) is scheduled to be released on November 15th on Warner Bros. Records. This time out, the original Queen of Dance Music returns to where she began and kicks it up a few extra notches.

"It's in her blood" says Madonna's co-producer/partner in crime, DJ and Madonna musical director, Stuart Price. "She has a dance halo over her head. We made this record without any preconceived notions. It was straight from the gut - unencumbered -not over edited - very spontaneous, concluded Price.

If Confessions were equated to a new dance step, it would a stunning blend of musical styles with one foot in the roots of early disco (à la Giorgio Moroder/Abba on ecstacy) and the other foot gloriously ensconced in the future of music - a dance step that could only be accomplished by one artist.

Confessions On a Dancefloor is all about having a good time straight through and non stop." says America's ultimate Dancing Queen.


August 30: Madonna has been filming a Mottorola commercial on a UK TV set which will feature an instrumental version of “Hung Up” over the end of the segment.

August 31: Madonna's new single “Hung Up” was played to a selected group of important UK programmers yesterday (the people who choose the radio playlists etc.). Plans are also being made for a 30 second downloadable clip from the single to be made available from October 12th for your mobile phone. The single does contain a sample from an Abba song “Gimme Gimme Gimme”. Previous reports had suggested an Abba sample from "Ring, Ring" was used on the single but that was denied by Liz Rosenberg. The song was a hit for Abba (moreso in Europe) in 1979.

September 4: Various heads at Warner (and from local markets) have heard the album now and there are very positive comments circulating. The album reportedly has a “strong Eighties feel, with sounds a lyrics that take us back to her joyful first album.” “Hung Up” is said to be “a powerful hit” and the other songs on the record are “as good as the first single and even better.” WB has already purchased ad space in major magazines and plans huge campaigns in every market.

September 5: The official lyrics to “Hung Up” are leaked online.
 

Drowned Madonna.com: The video for "Hung Up" is currently set to be directed by photographer/director David LaChapelle. "Principal photography" is TENTATIVELY scheduled for thursday September 15th. Madonna of course will be there. Two options are still under discussion for the plot, with the definitive to be chosen today in a meeting. The team is leaning for the one that features a club scene.

LATER: Mark Romanek was also in the running to direct this video which he mentions during the release of his Best Of… video compilation this month.


As for the photoshoot for Confessions on a Dancefloor by Steven Klein, it has more than a retro-ultra modern theme. It's actually difficult to describe. Very bright and "Happy". This is the most accurate description.

Madonna is definitely in the mood to dance, when you hear the first single you will be as well. When you will hear Confessions on a Dancefloor album, you will realize that 2005-2006 will be the year for Madonna. It will take quite an LP to surpass this. The buzz around Warner it is, without a doubt, her best work yet. If you think you know dance, Madonna has redifined it. Madonna has changed the face of dance music. This LP is very special. There isn't a bad track to be found. Every song is a potential single. That is the amazing thing about this one. Usually, fans found her other albums predictable in the sense that it was somewhat simpe to pick what songs would be potential singles. But on this one, no one will easily be able to tell which songs will be released after “Hung Up.”

“Hung Up” will be offered as an instrumental ringtone for purchase 3 weeks before its release.

LEAK: Today, “Hung Up” is leaked in a 13-second snippet online.

September 6: “Hung Up” will be released one week ahead of its retail debut on iTunes and the album will be released on iTunes one day early – AND will feature a bonus track not on the album.

September 7: “Hung Up” (with vocal) is posted in a high-quality snippet on Motorola.com as the official theme song of their new iTunes -ready cell phone, the ROKR. Also, today, all of Madonna’s back album songs are made available for purchase on iTunes.
 

In 48 hours, the commercial Madonna filmed for the ROKR phone and iTunes will air worldwide – and will feature her new song. The commercial was directed by Jesse Dylan.


Today, a Swedish newspaper does a report on Madonna’s new fascination with Swedish pop – nodding to her homage to ABBA in “Hung Up” and her current work with Bloodshy & Avant. The production duo says they did two songs for the album.
 

For the first time she has invited two Swedish songwriters and producers to the recording studio. Confessions on a Dancefloor is about feeling good, non-stop, all the time, says Madonna on her webpage, and titulizes herself "America´s Ultimate Dancing Queen"

The record is supposed to sound futuristic. And this is where Swedish Bloodshy & Avant come into the picture. The secrecy around the record is big, and the producers will not reveal any songtitles, but it´s a fact that they will contribute with two songs for Confessions on a Dancefloor

"A big challenge"

It´s among the biggest things we have done, says Christian "Bloodshy" Karlsson. On one hand it was a big challenge to work with such a big star as Madonna, and who works as hard as she does. On the other hand I´ve always been a great fan of what she does. It felt awesome to take part of this project. It was in the beginning of this year that Madonna called Christian "Bloodshy" Karlsson and Pontus "Avant" Winnberg for a co-operation. She was the reason they didn´t go to U.S.A. to accept the Grammy-award they got for the work with Britney Spears’ "Toxic".

She [Madonna] has carefully selected the people she wanted to include in her team, tells Christian Karlsson. Both Stuart Price and Mark "Spike" Stent have worked with her for a very long time. It was awesome to be a part of that team.

"Has incredible knowledge"

Madonna has by now two decades of a very successful career behind her. For Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg it meant a different working situation compared to many other artists. It wasn´t until you sat in the studio with her that you understood what an incredible knowledge she has, says Cristian Karlsson. When we work with some artists we just give them finished tracks, or we work with the record company to develope new artists. But it was a co-operation with the artist, where the artist has a lot of knowledge. We have produced with her, that´s a totally different thing.

Christian Karlsson describes Madonna as tough in a good way. Straight communication, and since she´s her own boss the options of decisions were minimal. When the songs were recorded in London there was only three people involved: Christian Karlsson, Pontus Winnerberg and Madonna.

It felt very simple, even though we worked very hard.


Also today, word from France is that the new album will feature its tracks mixed into one another, with no pause in between – like a continuous dance CD.

Madonna is seen leaving a pilates class in London. In her hand, she carries a photo of the possible album cover in a binder which is snapped by paparazzi. (it later turns out to be the actual album cover - well, the pose anyway, the coloring is different - the photo she held that day had the purple/blue/pink strobe lights all over her and was not the clean, colorful picture that ended up being the album cover)

September 9: The ringtone for “Hung Up” will be released September 19. The official download single on October 17. The retail single on November 7.

September 11: David LaChapelle’s treatment for the “Hung Up” video is no longer being used and Steven Klein is rumored to be in the director’s seat.

There are new rumors that the 12-track dance disc will have its release date bumped up a week to November 7.

September 13: David LaChapelle is back in the director’s chair for the video – this from Madonna.com. Rumors say the video will be a dance celebration in the streets of London with real spectators, as well as acrobats, being part of the video. Jamie King is working on the choreography. The shoot may feature Madonna riding a bike as well as dancing on a double-decker bus in downtown London.

September 15: Another song title is revealed: “Sorry.”
 

The current confirmed song titles are:
• “I Love New York”
• “Hung Up”
• “Get Together”
• “Sorry”


September 16: “Hung Up” goes to French radio on October 19, 2005.

“Hung Up” is the first song ABBA has given permission to use a sample of their music since The Fugees in 1996.

Another new song title is revealed: “Future Lovers”

Warner Japan lists “Hung Up” debuting on Japanese radio on September 21.

September 17: “Forbidden Love” is another track name, the same name as a cut from the Bedtime Stories album. The name of the track "Jump" is also revealed. The album cover debuts on Madonna.com today.

The video for “Hung Up” is set to debut worldwide on October 24. Madonna wants it to be premiered simultaneously on MTV, VH-1 and the new gay network, Logo. It will be shot in London next week. The single will definitely have a maxi-single release in the U.S. according to WB.

Today, the ringtone debuts early on MTV.com as a paid-downloadable MTV Ringtone (more specifically, a digitone – an actual song) – these are only available and work for Virgin Mobile phones. They cost $2.50 a piece.

September 19: New Zealand cell phone company Vodaphone is the first to offer the “Hung Up” ringtone to customers today for $3.50. Later today, Vh-1 launches its ringtone of the song for subscribers of T-Mobile, Cingular and AT&T Wireless.

RUMOR: Madonna & David LaChapelle are having MAJOR creative differences over the direction of her new video “Hung Up.”
 

Madonna reportedly wanted a very sexy look and LaChapelle balked at the idea commenting on her age. She reportedly slapped him in the face.

The problems are so intense that Madonna is considering getting a new director immediately and getting rid of LaChapelle. Swedish director Johan Renck is being considered as an alternative. (DrownedMadonna.com)


Madonna was to attend a party tonight thrown by Donatella Versace at the London Versace store, but did not show. Donatella has reportedly designed a very special outfit for Madonna to wear in her “Hung Up” video.

September 20: Madonna.com reveals the entire tracklisting for Confessions on a Dancefloor:
 

1) Hung Up
2) Get Together
3) Sorry
4) Future Lovers
5) I Love New York
6) Let It Will Be
7) Forbidden Love
8) Jump
9) How High
10) Isaac
11) Push
12) Like It Or Not

 

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2006:

April 1: Cyndi Lauper tells Neil Sean of Sky News she's hoping to team up with Madonna on a project soon:
 

“I've been given the chance in the past to write with her but, as yet, it's never come off,” she said. “We're both admirers of each other's work and she wants to get together so this is going to be the year.”


July 9: In an interview with OK! Magazine, Madonna talks about her next project/adventure:
 

"I just want to do more of what I do and be better at it. There's nothing specific I want to achieve. I could do another dance album, but I don't like to repeat myself. Maybe I could do a ballad album, or maybe I'll write a musical, or I might direct a film and do all the music in the film, you know what I mean? Anything's possible."


July 20: There is a possibility of a new album towards the end of the year, after she finishes promoting The English Roses 2. (MTRIBE)

August 21: RUMOR: A rep from Warner Germany said that Madonna will be recording a new lush, synth ballad for the film Arthur & the Invisibles called “Find Me Nowhere.” It is believed that the song was a previously unrecorded demo that Madonna did with David Foster for the Something to Remember project in 1995. It is believed the song will also be the first single from an all-new album by Madonna – however it isn’t know if it will also be on the movie’s soundtrack or not. (poster on MadonnaNation)

August 31: Neil Sean of Sky News reports from an interview with Madonna:
 

"I have more club music in mind. It's where I started and funnily enough, it's now huge again. I'm writing the new album now, while we're on tour."


September 5: Madonna is planning a studio collaboration with Lenny Kravitz after he joined her on-stage in Paris for a guitar solo to “I Love New York.” (UK’s The Sun)

September 7: Sources say that the “real plans” are to release new music (a new album) in 2007. (Drownedmadonna)

September 19-21: Madonna runs into Pharrell in Tokyo while on her Confessions Tour. He offers to write a song for her. (from an interview with Der Spiegel – a weekly German magazine, April 29, 2008):
 

“On my last tour I ran into Pharrell in Tokyo and he frankly proposed to write a song for me.”


October 5: There is final confirmation that Madonna will be going into the studio soon. (DrownedMadonna)

November 11: The U.K. paper The Sun reports that Madonna may collaberate with with ABBA legends Agnetha Faltskog and Frida Lyngstad on tracks for her new album. Madonna has been in contact with the two legends for a few months. They will reportedly write and record together as soon as Madonna & Stuart Price have cleared their schedules. She is also working on fresh material with Lenny Kravitz.

2007:

January 8: There was a brief comment from Stuart Price on the U.S. television station E! in their weekly news segment. He stated that he is working with Madonna on a new record for the new year and that it is going to be quite a work of art, that they are building the sound on dance, R&B, and a some rock n roll, a totally new sound from their previous collaborations and that they were very excited to finish. He also said she has collaborated with some top producers that are in fashion right now.

LATER: On 03/07/09, the Pet Shop Boys give a Q&A session with the media to promote their new album Yes. During the interviewing, Neil Tennant said:
 

After remixing "Sorry" in 2006, they were contacted again by Warner, in 2007, and asked to write & produce some tracks for an album Madonna was planning at the time (which later became "Hard Candy")

Sadly, the same week Warner's changed mind and according to Neil’s own words "we got told to forget it as they decided to shove her down the r&b route" Neil stated Parlophone asked them to write for Kylie's "X" as well, before deciding to send Minogue out to other producers instead (one of the tracks featured on "Yes" (titled "Pandemonium") was actually written & demoed for her, along with other 5 cuts).


January 11: MadonnaTribe has heard some exclusive and exciting new info about a new Madonna album that will be soon in the making and we are happy to premiere this info for the first time online.
 

A few months ago we were told that "cartoon and new children books" were the main things to look forward in 2007, but what will the Lady herself be up to in the meanwhile? Sources have confirmed to us that at the same time Madonna is going to work a new album soon.

We were exclusively informed that Madonna will be recording materials to include on a new album in the USA with Pharrell Williams, while rumored producer Timbaland is not in the picture. From what we have been told Stuart Price will not be on board as a main producer for this album either, as Madonna really wants to make an American hip-hop album, that will put her in the American mainstream for a change. We have no doubt it's gonna be amazing, but in any case we have been told by our sources that it won't be happening any time soon this year.

But don't worry, Madonna won't disappear at all this year, the campaign for "M by Madonna" for H&M is gonna be global and huge, and that's definitely something to look forward to.

As always we remind you that this album project is in such an early stage that anything can happen until the moment it will hit the stores, but we like to inform our readers about the buzz going around. Thank you!


January 18: Popbitch says Madonna may collaborate with Pharrell Williams, Andre Benjamin (Andre 3000 from Outkast), and Snoop Dogg on her new album.

January 25: At the premiere of Arthur & the Invisibles, Madonna is asked about her next album and answers: "I have not started yet but I will soon. I fancy more dancing."

February 1: According to a newspaper from Hong Kong, Madonna will record a new song appealing world peace, which is called "Give Your Love" with hundreds of other internationally renowned artists. Pretty much similar to "We Are The World" back in 1985. There is also a series of concerts planned to be held simultaneously in different cities in the world in August. The whole project is organized by a non-profit making organization World Peace One. More details can be found from their website: http://www.worldpeace1.com.
 

LATER: Madonna’s management confirms that she has been asked to do this project but has not accepted it at this time (2/5/07).


February 6: According to a gay Brazilian blog, good sources say Pharrell Williams is flying to London to meet with Madonna next week and work on two tracks for her next album.

February 7: Timbaland on an MTV interview: “I reached out to Madonna, and she was already trying to find me," Timbaland explained on Wednesday while in town for Justin Timberlake's FutureSex/LoveSounds Tour. “I'm like, 'She was? Hmm.' It's funny. People will reach out to me, and I guess I beat them to the punch sometimes. It's crazy to see how many people want to work with me. I'm still in shock.”

Z-100 Interview with Timbaland this week: "I wanted Madonna for my album. But she's in London and I'm here. We tried to work together and she was excited - and she don't get excited about nothin - but she was excited to work with me and I was excited to work with her. And she asked if I could send some music but my time is very short. So I couldn't do it."

February 8: Timbaland was on MTV’s TRL today and Vanessa asked him who he was working with for his new record, Shock Value (Mosley Music Group/Blackground/Interscope), to be realeased on March. He mentioned all the different artists like Elton John, Jay Z, The Hives etc, and he then mentioned that Madonna contacted him and wanted to do a few tracks with him... but not for his own album.

February 9: Larry Flick interviews Madonna today for Sirius Radio. When he says she should make “a full-on, balls-out rock-n-roll record.” She says:
 

“I’ll go downstairs and tell Pharrell that right now.”

He also asks, “So when you’re writing songs now, do you write on your guitar?”

“Yeah, I’ve been doin’ that right now, actually. I mean, I don’t write everything on my guitar, and I collaborate with lots of people and sometimes they bring the music, sometimes I do. It depends. I do love, it’s very therapeutic for me to write on my guitar.”

She also says she’s listening to Gnarls Barkley’s CD and Justin Timberlake’s.

The interview was done via phone from her London home on Friday, February 9. The interview aired for the first time, February 14 at 9:30am.

LATER: Madonna says the first thing she wrote with Pharrell was the track “Candy Shop” which will be the first track on her new album when it is released. (Q Magazine interview, May 2008)


February 11: At the Warner Brothers post-Grammy Awards party tonight, an insider says:
 

While LIZ ROSENBERG was dragging Michael Buble around, GUY OSEARY and STUART PRICE showed up to the party.

"I asked Stuart if he will collaborate to Madonna new album," Eric told Drowned Madonna. "He said: 'I can't comment on that for now.. it's all a big secret still'."

"When I congratulate LIZ for Madonna’s Grammy, she said thanks you very much sweet heart," Eric added. "And then I ask her to come on cam, but she said she was too shy for the camera... and that she had no comment yet for Madonna upcoming album."


February 15: Pharrell Williams and Al Gore announce (via press conference in Los Angeles) seven concerts to be held on July 7, 2007 to promote global warming awareness and the S.O.S. campaign.

February 16: Madonna is photographed leaving her London gym today with a CD in hand that says, ‘Moby tracks.’ It is unknown if this is just a mix CD, or if the DJ has supplied her with music for a collaboration.

February 23: Billboard: Next up on Timbaland's production docket are "Eve, M.I.A., Chris Brown, 50 Cent, Missy Elliott and Madonna," he says:
 

"Missy and I still talk. She's like a sister to me and I'm with her till death do us part. I haven't gone into the studio yet with Madonna. I need to call someone now to talk about that further." – this interview took place on late Friday afternoon, February 16, 2007 in Los Angeles.


February 27: In a letter to ICON dated today, Madonna says she has been recording with Pharrell Williams, but the rest is a secret.

March 5: Badly Drawn Boy folk/pop star Damon Gough is so keen to work with Madonna he has already written a song for her.
 

Gough referred to the singer on his 2002 hit “You Were Right,” and despite having worked with Hollywood star Jack Nicholson and French singer/actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, the 37-year-old is still desperate to record with the pop superstar.

He says, "I'd like to work on collaborations with some other artists like Madonna. She would be my first choice. "I do have one song in particular I think would be perfect for her. (It's) one that didn't get released so it didn't have an official finished title. But the working name was “In Two Minds”." (Contact Music)


March 12: French magazine, MUTEEN, says in its April 2007 edition that Madonna wants to compete with Beyoncé and Jennifer Lopez and has approached Timbaland and the Neptunes for a forth-coming album.

March 13: Chicago radio station B96.3 FM reportedly interviewed Timbaland today. He said he records all his music in a studio in Virginia. He also said that he has met with Madonna and they have an idea of what they are going to do together. He said he has been “laying down some beats for some music she has written” and they will enter the studio in late March or early April to record.
 

NOTE: Timbaland has been touring with Justin Timberlake on his FutureSex/LoveShow tour from January 8 to March 29. They will resume the tour on the UK leg at the end of April which could indicate this rumor is true because Timbaland will be in England in April 27.


March 15: Hiphop producer Swizz Beatz (a.k.a. Kasseem Dean) was on NYC’s Hot 97 radio station today where he announced he is currently working on some BIG divas’ upcoming projects – including:
 

Britney Spears
Whitney Houston
Jennifer Lopez
Eve
Mariah Carey
Madonna


March 16: In an interview with Jump Off TV, Swizz Beatz says his current projects include Usher, Mariah, Madonna and Rihanna.

March 17: The Sun reports that Madonna is moving to NYC, but she’s already cracking on with a new album with work split between London & Los Angeles.

March 19: Timbaland was on The View today in NYC, and Rosie O’Donnell said:
 

"Madonna told me herself that she was working with you," and asked him if it was true.

He totally avoided the subject and said:

"I don't know. We have secret code for that. We can't talk about it."


Madonna was also photographed entering a West London recording studio today (March 19). A handler with her was carrying a guitar case.

March 30: In the March 30 Entertainment Weekly, an article/interview with Timbaland says he’s in talks to contribute tracks to Coldplay's and Madonna's upcoming albums (the latter with Timberlake). Madonna’s rep says she MIGHT work with Timbaland & Timberlake.

April 2: Madonna has spent the last three weeks in a recording studio and has promised her label a new album by November. (PerezHilton)

RUMOR: A new Madonna track has been running around the studios (Warner) for the past few weeks and being tested as a collaboration with Justin Timberlake, who also got the track into his hands. (Falcon from DM board)

April 5: From a soon-to-be published interview with Justin Timberlake:
 

Q: WHO DO WRITE FOR MUSIC-WISE RIGHT NOW?
A: I did something for Macy Gray, and some stuff for Rihanna. And I will do something for Madonna in the near future.


April 6: In an interview with the April 2 edition of the METRO France newspaper, Timbaland says: "I have a track for which I would need Madonna, so I perhaps will give it to her for her next album... she is dying to work with me and me with her. I wanted this track for my album but I don't have time. I will have time for her!"

April 8: MadonnaTribe reports: Madonna has not abandoned some of her collaborators from the past few albums, and a few familiar faces from her recent releases and world tours are currently working with her in the studio in London. There are a few tentative release dates for the new CD we've been reported about, but let's stick to facts when it comes to "when the new album is coming out", but be warned: it won't be a very long wait and everything hints that there's a lot of very exciting things coming in.

April 10: Justin Timberlake was seen heading into a West London studio today with Madonna. He had just flown in from Los Angeles today, and they worked well into the evening. It is believed they are working on several tracks together. Madonna had to leave the studio by back door to avoid the press, and Timberlake left looking exhausted.
 

LATER: The sessions will produce: “Miles Away,” "The Devil Wouldn’t Recognize You,” and “Voices”


April 11: CONTACT MUSIC on Justin Timberlake:
 

Justin Timberlake: I am working on new music right now but not for myself.

Chloe Franklin: Whom are you writing music for, can you say?

Justin Timberlake: I did a Song for Macy Gray. Timbaland and I did a song for Rihanna. And we are currently working on new stuff for Madonna in London.

Timberlake was spotted heading into a West London studio with Madonna yesterday to work on the forthcoming album, reports British newspaper The Sun. He is in the country for a few weeks as he prepares to kick off the UK leg of his current world tour. Madonna is famous for reinventing herself and this time her album will have a real hip-hop feel. She has lined up a Who’s Who of the genre’s megastars, including Timberlake’s producer pal Timbaland to help her achieve R&B credibility. Hip-hop legend Pharrell Williams is already working on at least four tracks and his fingerprints look set to be all over the new release. Madge’s last offering, Confessions On A Dance Floor, was a massive success, with Brit DJ and producer Stuart Price the main influence on the 2005 album. There will also be some dancy Price-produced tracks on the new offering and she has also been joined by Chicago house DJ and producer Felix Da Housecat in the studio. A source told me: “Confessions On A Dance Floor was a worldwide smash — but this will be different once again. “The last album was a credible disco record and Madonna wants to give hip-hop the same treatment this time. “It’s not all hip-hop though, there are a lot of producers from a lot of genres in there. It could be her most ambitious project yet.” The album is due out in November.


April 12: Justin Timberlake and Timbaland are in the studio again today with Madonna. The renown producer sighs:
 

"We are working around the clock. Justin was meant to be out tonight but he's too tired. Madonna's a funky lady, she's up for everything."

On the music they’ve done so far:

"It's kinda like “Holiday” with an R&B groove."

They worked from morning until it was dark today.


April 13: Madonna is in the studio again today (coming straight from her gym) with Timberlake – who arrived 10 minutes after her.

April 18: US Weekly: Justin & Madonna’s Sexy Duets
 

Justin Timberlake is getting into the groove with Madonna: The pop prince – along with rapper/producer Timbaland – has written three or four dance tracks for the megastar’s upcoming album. “They have a good thing going,” Timbaland, 36, told US of the Madonna-Timberlake collaboration (which took place this month at a London recording studio). “He’s had a busy few days.” Indeed, a source tells US that Madonna, 48, has been cracking the whip, making her new protegé work up to 16 hours a day and then calling him in the middle of the night with new ideas. “Justin had no idea what a workhorse she is,” says the source. Adds another source, “They spent a lot of time talking about the sound they want.” (Though it has been reported her album will be hiphop-inspired, the insider says there will be “a lot of different sounds and styles.”)

The Britney Connection: Another topic of conversation? Timberlake’s old flame Britney Spears, whom Madonna famously kissed at the MTV VMA’s in 2003. “It came up in conversation that one of the songs sounded like one of Britney’s old tracks,” says the insider. “Madonna then smirked and said, ‘Hey, I tried to help her!”


April 21: E! News: Producer Sean Garrett says the next things on his plate are projects for Madonna and Michael Jackson. He is currently writing/producing for Britney Spears (three tracks so far) – (they’ve been in the studio for 5 months only breaking while she was in rehab) & Whitney Houston.

May 1: MTV.com: Timbaland Protege Danja working with Madge
 

"I think I got all the success first, before stating my presence," Danja recently explained to MTV News over the phone from London. "Before anyone really knew who I was I already had four #1 hits [Timberlake's "SexyBack" and "My Love," and Furtado's "Promiscuous" and "Say It Right"] and two Grammy Awards. So now I kind of got to work backwards."

With that MO in mind — and, conveniently, while Timbaland has been out promoting Shock Value — Danja has finally been able to make some serious noise of his own.

He's been spreading his "ringtone" sound, which he describes as the way he tests his melodies to make sure they're catchy right away.

Danja, however, is quick to note that his star turn isn't coming by way of Timbaland's scraps. He explained that in light of the duo's recent successes, both of their phones have been ringing nonstop, but that Khaled specifically sought out Danja's services, as did Trey Songz's camp.

"Me and Tim got a lot of the same phone calls once all of these hits started hitting," Danja said. "We'll call each other and be like, 'You trying to do this?' So we'll just do it together. Of course me and Tim are partners, and while he's on the road, I kind of just been holding down the studio. We're teaming back up for Madonna. [And] we teamed up for Duran Duran. We did a 50 Cent [track] together. We did a T.I. joint together. So we were kind of back and forth. But he doesn't call me and hand me work that he doesn't want to do. That ain't our relationship. I think we both do things that are inspiring for the both of us. If the energy ain't right for him, it ain't right for me. That's how we work."

Danja was introduced to Timbaland in 2001 after a music symposium in their home state. Afterward, the young producer was able to land a meeting with Timbaland that very night through a mutual friend, and Danja played beats for him.

According to Danja, Tim was impressed with what he heard, but negotiations between the two led Danja to decline an invitation to meet Timbaland in Los Angeles.

Two years later, Danja was able to score another sit-down with Timbaland through the same friend. This time, Timbaland did most of the talking and offered the younger producer advice.

"He was just kind of explaining the road he wanted me to take," Danja said. "At that particular time, he said he was ready to share a lot of his knowledge and everything going into the future."

By December 2003, Danja had relocated to Miami to work with Timbaland. Ever since then, they've amassed a number a hits for big names like Jay-Z, the Game and Diddy.

It wasn't until recently, though, that an experience actually made Danja put into perspective how far he'd come since first meeting Timbaland.

"I just had that moment recently in the shower," he said. "After sessions are over I'm kind of focused on what I'm doing. But for some reason a lot of things were hitting me at once. I felt grateful for being here. I went straight from Madonna to Duran Duran [in one day]. So I had to sit back, understand and realize where I am."


May 7: MTV.com interview with Justin Timberlake:
 

Timberlake: I just flew in from Glasgow. [I'll be] on tour in Europe and the U.K. ... until the end of September, when we come back to America.

MTV: And you're working with Madonna?

Timberlake: We did work in the studio together, we came up with some really cool stuff. I don't know what else to tell you except that you'll hear it soon.

MTV: What's the name of the song?

Timberlake: I don't want to tell you that, because she'll either kill me or she'll have me kill you. And I think we have enough celebrities going to jail. [He laughs.]

Timberlake was also featured on Access Hollywood promoting Shrek 3 and when Billy Bush asked him about working with Madonna he said:

On the experience:
"She's Madonna. It doesn't get any cooler than that."

"I spent a week in the studio with her in London and we... we produced about five or six... some really good tracks... some finished, some not finished."

"I'm gonna go back in July and work on some more stuff."

Billy Bush: Are you going to be singing with her?

Justin: "Uh, possibly, yeah. Her work ethic is very infectious in the studio. I was kind like, man, I'm too slow. She's a workhorse. I'm just a fan. I'm basically just a fan who, like, tricked Madonna." [laughs]


May 11: Matthew Rettenmund has an interesting report on his gay-friendly BoyCulture blog today:
 

“I hear Madonna's new song with Pharrell is called “Hey You” and will be a Microsoft-branded Live Earth charity download almost by the time you read this.”

The song is NOT a duet. It is also not planned to be sent to radio or released commercially. It is just for Live Earth and will only be released as a download for the Microsoft Zune platform. The song itself is about making a difference, loving yourself and others. It is not a cover of the Pink Floyd classic, nor is it anything like the music from Confessions on a Dance Floor. It is a very simple song with a midtempo beat (at best).


May 12: DrownedMadonna reports that the charity download single “Hey You” will be available next week.

May 13: From the Spymac.com blog: Madonna has a brand new track entitled “Hey You” that will be a digital release next week to support LIVE EARTH. The track is produced by Pharrell Williams and will also be featured on the forthcoming album rumored to have the working title MADAME.

May 15: Madonna tells The Daily Record: Madonna has also just announced that she has recorded a song, “Hey You”, with Pharrell Williams. She said: "I'll release it as a Live Earth charity track. I hope you'll support this project. It's very important to me." According to sources at Warner Music Denmark, it is confirmed that Madonna's new Live Earth tune will be available to download from the MSN platform this week.

May 16: The UK SUN: Madonna will be releasing a new song she has written especially for the Live Earth gig. “Hey You” is a collaboration with hip-hop legend Pharrell Williams and Madonna will perform it live at the July 7 Wembley Live Earth concert. She wants the song to hit the airwaves in advance of the event so the crowd know it and it will become an anthem on the big day. Madonna has been working with Pharrell on tracks for her forthcoming album. It is scheduled for release in November and will also feature songs she has written with the man with the midas touch, Timbaland.

Today, the 45-second intro to “Hey You” is leaked. There are reports that the chorus is very “operatic and weird.”

May 17: PRESS RELEASE: Inspired by the upcoming July 7th Live Earth series of concerts, Madonna has written a new song, “Hey You,” which will be available to be downloaded in the MP3 format on Microsoft’s home page, http://liveearth.msn.com, on May 16. The first million downloads of “Hey You” will be free as Microsoft has pledged to donate $0.25 per download to the Alliance for Climate Protection for the first million downloads.
 

Madonna is scheduled to perform “Hey You” live at the Wembley Stadium Live Earth concert in London, it was confirmed by her record label, Warner Bros. Records, who have also announced that they will be releasing a live CD/DVD of the Live Earth Concert Series.

Madonna’s new song, “Hey You,” recorded in London, was produced by Pharrell Williams and Madonna. She is one of seventeen headliners that have been announced including Red Hot Chili Peppers, Genesis, Beastie Boys and others who will perform at Wembley as part of the 24-hour, 7-continent Live Earth Concert Series.

"On 7/7/07, Live Earth will inspire people from around the world to combat global warming with live performances from superstar artists like Madonna," Live Earth Founder Kevin Wall said. "The early release of "Hey You" is an incredible boost to our efforts to get people engaged in the environmental cause. We are thrilled that Madonna donated her art to Live Earth and is a part of this movement for us."

Live Earth is a monumental music event on 7/7/07 that will bring together more than 100 headlining music artists and 2 billion people to launch an ongoing, mass movement to combat the climate crisis. Concerts will take place in New York; London; Sydney; Tokyo; Shanghai; Johannesburg; Rio de Janeiro; and Hamburg. Live Earth’s 24 hours of music across 7 continents will deliver a call to action and the solutions needed to answer the call. Live Earth marks the beginning of a multi-year campaign led by The Alliance for Climate Protection to move individuals, corporations and governments to take action.

The concerts will be streamed live at LiveEarth.MSN.com and available on CD/DVD.

LATER: The lyrical content of “Hey You” borrows heavily from Madonna’s own unreleased/unfinished track “Keep the Trance” (Madonna/Mirwais/Price) which was written in 2005 for the Confessions on a Dance Floor album. It features approximately 75% of the same lyrics in a similar rhyme scheme.


May 21: VSD (French magazine): Madonna is preparing a new album for 2008. No title has been revealed, nor the style of the music, but Justin Timberlake is in on the adventure.

May 25: “Hey You” is now available for purchase as a better-quality download, one week after its free-download release.

Warner Music's release schedule has been updated and there is a Madonna Best Of Remixes set tentatively scheduled for Fall/Winter 2007, and a new studio album scheduled for early 2008.

May 28: Jasmin (French magazine): The singer is preparing a new album (with Timberlake, Annie Lennox and P!NK).
 

LATER: Madonna and P!NK contribute vocals to an Annie Lennox track (along with 21 other female vocalists).


June 3: France’s STAR CLUB magazine (who interviews Justin Timberlake) says that the singer will return to the studio with Timbaland soon for a period of time to work with Madonna (who’s album is expected in November 2007) and 50 Cent.

June 10: According The People.co.uk: Madonna is dithering about releasing songs recorded with Justin Timberlake. She went into the studio with Justin, 26, last month in a bid to get some R&B credibility. A pal explained: “She wants to reinvent herself.” But he added: “She's got second thoughts because she's not sure the stuff she did with Justin is quite right for her new sound.”

June 15: A video for “Hey You” is released. The video is directed by Johan Söderberg and Marcus Lindkvist and it's the same broadcast yesterday on MTV Turkey. Söderberg has already worked with Madonna. He also edited the “Hung Up” video, I'm Going To Tell You A Secret and directed and edited the “Sorry (Remix)” backdrop from the Confessions Tour.

June 20: Justin Timberlake interviewed by the UK’s Daily Record:
 

With his personal life settled, Justin is back to concentrating on work.

He is looking forward to throwing himself into more acting next year, revealing: "I like letting the control go on a film, especially with a director you trust.

"In music I am 100 per cent in control but in film I feel like a footballer and just have to ask, 'What position do you want me to play? Good, I'm in.'"

But before then, he is continuing a new-found collaboration with queen of pop Madonna.

The exiting pairing has already produced five songs - a couple of R'n'B numbers and a couple of dance records.

Justin said: "Some of the dance stuff hasn't the in-your-face energy of “Hung Up” but it's got this mellow R'n'B thing on top of dance accompaniment which Timbaland is doing the beats for.

"It's all still in demo phases and I don't know if it'll be an album but four or five songs will make really good records."


June 21: Entertainment Weekly:
 

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You and Timbaland have been writing and producing songs for Madonna's next album. How's that been going?

JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE: The records that we've done so far are really exciting. There are some dance records, there are some mid-tempo ballads, there's all types of different stuff. But I don't want to gas it too much. People might like it or people might not. I don't want to say, like, [carnival-barker voice] ''It's going to change the world!'' You know what I mean? But we like it.


June 23: The UK Sun: Justin Timberlake, who has sold 14 million albums as a solo artist, recently worked with pop queen Madonna on her new album with producer Timbaland. I asked if Madonna’s fearsome reputation was deserved. He replied: “I didn’t find that she was a slave-driver — she’s just a workhorse. I admire that.”

June 28: Liz Smith at Variety Magazine reports that Madonna's next album is expected to be released “late this year.”

Justin Timberlake is No. 68 on Entertainment Weekly's Top 100 list of "The Stars We Love Right Now." Justin is busy collaborating with Madonna for her next album, which arrives late this year.

June 29: It is revealed that during her latest trip to New York, Madonna had a meeting and a dinner with Warner. Guy Oseary and Angela Becker were there. They discussed possible release options for her new album - whether there will be a release this year or next year. Madonna would like to release her new album this year, alongside October-November, because she would like to tour next year. Anyway, there is not a DEFINITIVE release date as of yet. We also have been told that there are already 8 songs in the mixing studio and there will be an exclusive listening within the next months - 3 songs - to only Warner executives. Furthermore, Madonna does NOT include "Hey You" in the tracklist for now, but they are discussing wheter adding it as a bonus track or not. Anyway, the new album will be very different from "Hey You". (DrownedMadonna)

London Times (Timbaland interview excerpt): He is also unforthcoming about the sessions he has been conducting in London for Madonna’s next album, conceding that Justin Timberlake may have been involved, and saying of the work done so far: “I love it.”

July 8: In post-Live Earth news reports, it is mentioned that Lebanese-born (but London-based) pop star Mika is participating in the new album. Mika had a #1 hit in the UK earlier this year.
 

LATER: In an interview with Boyz magazine (January 2008):

Boyz: What are these rumors about writing for Madonna?

Mika: I have absolutely no idea where they came from. They've been around for about eight months and I keep denying it. I was even on Graham Norton and I had to say, 'It's all make believe'. He just looked a bit disappointed and went, 'Oh'. I think that was the only reason he booked me on his show.


July 9: Madonna attended Justin Timberlake’s show last night at the O2 Arena in London. Today, the pair was seen entering a Notting Hill recording studio to record more tracks for her new album. After a long day in the studio, Timberlake is seen having dinner with friends at Nobu, and acting “unusually chipper.”

July 11: Madonna may have more than just Justin Timberlake and Timbaland in her pocket working on her next album. Although the trio was spotted arriving at a Notting Hill recording studio in London on Wednesday, Keisha Buchanan was also seen entering the studio. Keisha, 22, is the lead singer and a co-founding member of English girl group Sugababes and the only member of the original line-up to remain with the group. Keisha also might recording demo tracks for her own un-released debut solo album.

July 16: Yesterday (July 15) Justin Timberlake spent the day in a west London recording studio with Timbaland and Madonna. Things must have gone well as the producer and the Material Girl looked in fine spirits when they emerged late last night.
 

LATER: Madonna tells a German interview (5.26.08) that by the time they’d written “4 Minutes” they knew each other and had already written some songs together. It seems likely that it was written in this July 2007 session – especially since Madonna had “social consciousness” themes on the mind post-Live Earth.


July 18: Lyrics to a song called “Candy Store” are leaked in several M user forums.
 

See which flavor you like and I'll have it for you
Come on in to my store, I've got candy galore
Dont pretend you're not hungry, I've seen it before
I've got turkish delight baby and so much more

Get up out of your seat (your seat)
Come on up to the dance floor
Ive got something so sweet (so sweet)
Come on up to the front door
I need plenty of heat (heat)
Form a special connection
Just start moving your feet (your feet)
Move on over to me

I'll be your one stop (one stop)
Candy shop (candy shop)
Everything (everything)
That I got (that I got)
I'll be your one stop (one stop)
Candy store (candy store)
Lollipop (lollipop)
Have some more (have some more)

All the suckers are not all we have in the store
Chocolate kisses so good
you'll be beggin for more
Dont pretend you're not hungry
Ive got plenty to eat
Come on in to my store
cause my sugar is sweet!

Get up out of your seat (your seat)
Come on up to the dance floor
Ive got something so sweet (so sweet)
Come on up to the front door
I need plenty of heat (heat)
Form a special connection
Just start moving your feet (your feet)
Move on over to me

I'll be your one stop (one stop)
Candy shop (candy shop)
Everything (everything)
That I got (that I got)
I'll be your one stop (one stop)
Candy store (candy store)
Lollipop (lollipop)
Have some more (have some more)

My sugar is raw (erotica whisper)
Stickey and Sweet (high pitched vocoder)
Dance Dance Dance (like erotica moaning kind of echoes throughout whole song)

See which flavor you like and I'll have it for you
Come on in to my store, I've got candy galore
Dont pretend you're not hungry, I've seen it before
I've got turkish delight baby and so much more

Get up out of your seat (your seat)
Come on up to the dance floor
Ive got something so sweet (so sweet)
Come on up to the front door
I need plenty of heat (heat)
Form a special connection
Just start moving your feet (your feet)
Move on over to me

I'll be your one stop (one stop)
Candy shop (candy shop)
Everything (everything)
That I got (that I got)
I'll be your one stop (one stop)
Candy store (candy store)
Lollipop (lollipop)
Have some more (have some more)


July 21: More on the rumored “Candy Store” track:
 

"It's a GREAT track. I adore it... more than "Hung Up" and its got HIT written all over it.

It's sort of electronic hip hop. It has that Justin Timberlake beats, with electronic blips and low level groans. It's VERY American sounding, BUT VERY European at the same time. The beats and the bass are very Justin Timberlake, Timbaland etc., but there is a whole electronic thing, almost like Mirwais-lite. It's very layered. Her voice goes from deep, to high, to spoken. The music has beats, and groans, and blips, and guitars. There is a lot going on.

This could, very well be just a demo... and it may not end up on the final album... but I'm pretty certain it WILL be the lead single and a great way to kick off a new era." (Ditaluver@mnation)

LATER: (7/23/07): The track was co-produced with Pharrell, who speaks at the end of the song.


July 25: Rumors FROM THE ICON MESSAGE BOARD:
 

hi madonna fan. the following is a list of six working titles for
songs for madonna's up and coming album.

1. Going Down
2. Turn It Up
3. Do I Care?
4. Wizzle
5. Candy Store (featuring Pharrell)
6. Pretty Little Thang

The rumors of a electronica/dance trip-hop sound are accurate. the
bass kicks ass. Madonna is on the right path with these new songs.
It's very now. “Wizzle” is a song written by Madonna alone. It
started out as a joke and turned into a very well produced track
with the help of Timbaland. It's a play on words and funny. Use
your imagination

On the lyrics: “Turn it Up” is a classic Madonna dance song.
reminds me of “Vogue.” Justin Timberlake helped write “Pretty
Little Thang.” Lyrically it is a song that reminds me of “Thief
of Hearts.”

“Do I Care?” is another Justin and Madonna collaboration. He lends his vocals for the background. A lot of hard beats were applied to many of these tracks. “Candy Store” is being talked about in being the lead off single. There are more, but these are working titles I've heard myself. There is a sexual
innuendo to these songs. Look for a 'parental advisory sticker' placed on this new album.


July 26: A low-quality version of the bridge from “Candy Shop” is leaked online.

July 27: More rumored tracks and lyrics show up online: “Unnamed Track as of yet from Madame”
(lyrics are very similar to “Rain”) = reportedly a Pharrell collaberation
 

Here comes the sun
(here comes the sun) = Pharrell vocal
I'm tired of coming undone
(oh, coming undone)
There's been so much darkness
Too much of the time
I think its a sign
(must be a sign)

Here comes the rain
(Here comes the rain)
Wash away all the pain
(wash away the pain)
Coming together, going apart
I want you to stay
(Hope you wanna stay)

Always the bride's maid, never the bride
Two steps behind, you've got too much pride
Always supporting, never the star
Get it together, cause the beat goes on

Here comes my hand
(here comes your hand)
take it while you can
(take it while you can)
Ill throw you some rope
if it will give you hope
want you to understand
(understand)

LATER (8/20/07): It is revealed that this is the song “The Beat Goes On” done with Pharrell.


“It Hurts” (written by Madonna, produced by M + Timberlake)

“My Engine’s On” (written by M, Guy Sigsworth; produced by M, Guy Sigsworth & Timbaland)

Madonna may name the album BLACKSTAR.

July 28: The exclusive listening for WB executives has already happened – three songs were heard, one of which has “hit” written all over it, and it wasn’t the previously leaked “Candy Store.” The tentative release date for the album is October 29, 2007. Madonna is currently in talks with director Chris Applebaum to direct a video. (DrownedMadonna)

July 30: MTV News: Could a 17-second snippet of a song called “Candy Shop” be a leak from Madonna’s upcoming album? Fans speculate that it’s of a track Madonna was working on with either Timbaland or Pharrell — but reps for none of the three camps would confirm. “I have no comment about the song ‘Candy Shop,’” Madonna’s longtime rep Liz Rosenberg told MTV News. “Madonna has studio time booked and is continuing to work on her new CD. The songs are not mixed, and until that time, we can’t finalize the track list.” The yet-untitled album is due later this year.

Today, Madonna has a BIG meeting with WB in NYC. All parties agreed to postpone the album’s release to late November 2007. More meetings will be held soon to determine the final release date.

August 8: MTV.com: Timbaland Talks About His And Justin Timberlake's Collabo With Madonna For The First Time: 'She's Got A Hot Album'
 

NEW YORK — Timbaland is finally back in the States after touring overseas with Justin Timberlake, and yes — his trip was productive. Not only did the duo shoot a video with 50 Cent, but they also worked with a cultural icon.

"We just did Madonna's record," Timbo said, sitting in the TRL green room. He was part of the cavalcade of stars — including Kanye West, Common, Rihanna and Robin Thicke — who came out for the VMA press conference on Tuesday. "Me and Justin did the records" for the album, he continued, saying Madonna is almost done with the effort. "She's great. ... She's got a hot album. Her album is up there with Justin's album."

Tim says he and Justin wrote and produced 10 songs for Madge's LP, many of which will make the club jump.

"Ah, man," Tim gushed. "There's this one song, we taking it back to 'You must be my luck-eee starrrr!' ... Remember 'Ugly' by Bubba Sparxxx? I got a beat similar to that. The hook is no words. It's saying stuff named after coffee — all these different names for coffee — is the hook. ... The name of the song is 'La, La.' Pharrell did a hot one for her too called 'Candy Shop.' She's off the chain."

The production legend said there isn't a title for the opus yet, but he will be reconvening with the singer in September to finish it up. Other than Madonna, 50 Cent is the only other person outside of Tim's Mosley Music Group that he's worked with lately.



Melbourne Herald Sun Interview with Justin Timberlake:
 

More importantly for Timberlake, he's written and produced songs for everyone from Rihanna to Reba McEntire, not to mention Duran Duran, Macy Gray, 50 Cent and Madonna.

Paparazzi photographs of Timberlake and Madonna leaving recording studios in London have appeared in magazines all around the world. The pair share more than a CV that includes kissing Britney Spears.

So far Madonna, Timberlake and FutureSex/LoveSounds co-producer Timbaland have written six songs for her forthcoming album.

"There's a couple of duets in there," a cagey Timberlake says of his work with the queen of pop.

Madonna offering the creative olive branch to a young performer (Timberlake is still only 26) must be like getting to meet pop's answer to Yoda (admittedly a hotter version thereof). She was topping charts when Timberlake was filling nappies.

"She's a very talented lady," Timberlake says diplomatically. "There are definitely moments when I think, wow, I'm singing with Madonna. But she's so cool. She's very clever, very innovative. I was humbled WORKING with her. She's fun to work with and she takes advice. Plus she has an amazing mind."

Pressed, Timberlake says some of the Madonna tracks have grooves that sound like her first album, but with more advanced lyrics.

"It kind of meets in the middle between what she does and what I do. It's exactly how you want to hear Madonna right now. It doesn't sound quite like anything she's done yet it still sounds like Madonna."


August 13: The UK Sun: Madonna is going to NYC in September to put the finishing touches on her new album. Then, she’ll be taking off a few weeks to be with her family.

August 16: Timbaland declared in an interview for an English magazine that Madonna's first album (Madonna) was a big inspiration for the new album. He said that he, Madonna and Justin Timberlake listened to it several times to take the energy of the sound of the first album. When asked about the title of the album, Timbaland said it was not definitive but it could be called Odyssey.

August 17-18: NYC: Certainly, the photographers crowding David Beckham’s Galaxy team's hotel in midtown Manhattan were more used to snapping movie stars. After an opportunity with Beckham, several were heading across town to grab pictures of Madonna, who was filming a video clip nearby. (SMB.com)

August 19: The NY Post reports that Bronx-native Swizz Beatz is currently working on material with Madonna and Mariah Carey:
 

Bronx native Swizz Beatz, born Kasseem Dean, who laid low after helping turn DMX into a superstar, while creating smashes for Jay-Z, Busta Rhymes and Eve, among many others.... Dean headed into a different part of his New York studio - the recording booth - and laid down lyrics for 12 tracks, including the first single, “It's Me Snitches,” which has already received a lot of radio play....But even though it's his time to shine, he's still willing to share the spotlight. Dean has already been recruited to produce new records by a slew of artists - from Madonna and Mariah Carey to Usher, Chris Brown, Cassidy and Britney Spears. Now there's someone who can use a bit of sweet Swizz Beatz.


On the UK chart show today, Kayne West was interviewed and said he was talking to Timbaland about sampling weird sounds and he said that when Timbaland was working with Madonna, there was a track where he couldn’t get the kick-drum right, so he mic’ed a table and tapped out the sound he wanted.

August 20: A 20-second mono-snippet of “The Beat Goes On” leaks. It features Pharrell on background vocals:
 

Here comes the sun
(here comes the sun)
I'm tired of coming undone
(oh, coming undone)
There's been so much darkness
Too much of the time
I think its a sign
(must be a sign)

Here comes the rain
(Here comes the rain)
Wash away all the pain
(wash away the pain)
Coming together, going apart
I want you to stay
(Hope you wanna stay)

Always the bride's maid, never the bride
Two steps behind, you've got too much pride
Always supporting, never the star
Get it together, cause the beat goes on

On and on the beat goes
On and on the beat goes
On and on the beat goes
On and on the beat goes
On and on the beat goes
On and on the beat goes
On and on the beat goes
On and on the beat goes

Here comes my hand...
(here comes your hand)
Take it while you can...
(take it while you can)
Ill throw you some rope
if it will give you hope
want you to understand....
(understand)

Here comes your smile
(here comes your smile)
Hope it stays for awhile
(stays for awhile)
You know its contagious
It might sound outrageous
But I feel so alive...
(feel so alive)

Always the bride's maid, never the bride
Two steps behind, you've got too much pride
Always supporting, never the star
Get it together, cause the beat goes on

On and on the beat goes
On and on the beat goes
On and on the beat goes
On and on the beat goes
On and on the beat goes
On and on the beat goes
On and on the beat goes
On and on the beat goes

I can’t keep waiting for you
I can’t keep waiting [take it down]
Anticipating with you
You keep me Waiting [take it up]
I can’t keep waiting for you
I can’t keep waiting [take it down]
Anticipating with you
You keep me Waiting

Always the bride's maid, never the bride
Two steps behind, you've got too much pride
Always supporting, never the star
Get it together, cause the beat goes on

On and on the beat goes
On and on the beat goes
On and on the beat goes [take it down]
On and on the beat goes
On and on the beat goes [take it up]
On and on the beat goes
On and on the beat goes [take it down]
On and on the beat goes

INSTRUMENTATION

I can’t keep waiting for you
I can’t keep waiting [take it down]
Anticipating with you
You keep me Waiting [take it up]
I can’t keep waiting for you
I can’t keep waiting [take it down]
Anticipating with you

Cause see the beat goes on……….


August 21: The full high-quality song of “The Beat Goes On” leaks. The track is digitally labeled as being from the album Madame. It is rumored to be one of six tracks that was heard at a listening meeting with WB last month.

August 24: A WB fall release sheet shows updates for its October schedule:
 

• MADONNA "TBD" (2 CD) 2 289404 WB
• MADONNA "TBD" (2 CD + MVI) 9 289468 WB
• MADONNA Best Of Remixes 2 231356 WB


August 25: Another snippet of “Candy Shop” is leaked with the digital designation that it is part of a ringtone.

August 31: The Santa Cruz Sentinel runs an article on stylist and Santa Cruz native, Arianne Phillips. It mentions that “she’ll also be working on Madonna’s next album.”

September 2: According to inside sources, nothing is coming THIS year (at this point) regarding a Madonna release.
 

Warner and Madonna started to put something out this year, hence the different configurations on the schedule. So we should wait the new year for her new album.

Even the Best of Remixes 2 is not happening this year anymore. Its release was decided last April. The remixes album has been in the air since 2004, and Drowned Madonna revealed it 3 years ago. Once again Warner has NO plans this year to release anything special like an Anniversary Box Set. There is a possible release of sort into 2008. So look into the new year. (DrownedMadonna)


September 3: MTV.COM: Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Madonna and Whitney Houston: With all those legends lined up to either finish collaborations or get in the studio for the first time with Akon, you would think his dance card would be filled and he might not have time for anybody else. Not if you're 50 Cent. 50 has the Akon collaboration on his LP Curtis, and the in-demand singer says he and 50 Cent are going to do even more songs together.

September 8: British underground hip-hop producer T2 has revealed in an interview with RWD Mag that he has been asked to collaborate with Madonna:
 

Q: What’s next for you?
A: I’ve been asked to collaborate with people like Madonna, and at the same time I’m still keen to work with people from the hood. So there’s a lot of things in the pipeline. I’m all for developing artists and I’m still on the look out for new talent as well.

Q: Ok rewind - you’ve been asked to work with Madonna?
A: I can’t really go too deep into that at the moment, but I can say that it is what it is, so just have a look out. We’re not even aiming low, we’re looking to take it as far as possible.


September 14: RUMOR: Madonna has just commissioned Fedde Le Grand to do remix and submit demos which might make it (or not) to the album. Check out Le grand’s "Let me think about it" by Ida Corr. That song really blew Madonna. (There's a portion in that song that sounds suspiciously like Madonna doing back up vocals "umm umm umm" I don't know if it's really Madonna or just coincidental) Some of the leaked songs won't be able to make it to the album cut. Sorry guys but everythings very quiet these days. I'll update more once I got some items to share. (MadonnaNation board)

September 15: Today, in Jerusalem, Israel, Madonna meets Israeli president Shimon Peres and tells him that she would include a song about peace in her next album.

September 18: According to today's free UK paper Metro, Madonna is quoted saying that she recorded 22 tracks for her forthcoming album but has been asked to edit it down to 14.
 

Here are 12 titles from the 22 tracks recorded for the new album: "Candy" (real title of "Candy Shop"), "Fundamental connexion", "Keep my love", "Still doin' it", "La,La", "Happy"*, "The beat goes on", "Mary M", "L.S.D", "Tears for Freedom", "Light my Fire", "6". (MadonnaNation board rumor)


September 19: MTV News: Akon's melodic thuggin' on the airwaves has helped turn records by superstars like Gwen Stefani into harmonic hits. Now the singer is moving into the realm of three of music's most iconic legends: Madonna, Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson. While Akon hasn't been in the studio with Madonna yet, he said he expects to "shock the world" with her Madge-esty before the end of the year.

September 20: RUMOR: It ain't over till it's over! The album is not finished yet, there's no title yet. Working title is still Black Madonna. Apparently, though she have recorded a lot tracks good for more than 1 album. Madonna is still open to work with other producers. She still getting and soliciting demos from different artists and producers aside from penning some new songs for her album. This might be one of her most expensive album. She's kinda worried that her sound would sound old when it's release next year considering that there are many artist releasing new album this fall. This might be her last studio album for Warner and she wants to end it with a big BANG!!!!Expect more names to pop up anytime from now til before the release of the album. (MadonnaNation board)

October 10: In an interview to Italian music magazine Musica & Dischi, the man in charge of Warner Music Italy, Massimo Giuliano, not only says that Warner artists had a great year in Italy in 2007 (Confessions Tour was a huge commercial hit) but mentions that Madonna's new album is expected for a February 2008 release. As previously reported Giuliano confirms that this album is one of the last two records Madonna owes to Warner to end her current contract with them.

October 13: In an article from the Wall Street Journal about Nate 'Danja' Hills, the 26-year-old producer that is helping reshape the music industry's hit-making machine in the digital age:
 

Hills, who used to collaborate a lot with Timbaland in the past, has recently teamed up again with him for an occasional collaboration on a high-profile project: Songs for Madonna's next album. Demand for his aggressive, sculpted beats, offset by spacey melodies has packed his calendar with clients ranging from Mariah Carey to rapper Missy Elliott.


October 16: During the press hoopla over Madonna’s new $120 million deal with Live Nation, WB and Madonna both say that they will still be working together for her final album for Warner which is due next year.

October 17: Publicist Liz Rosenberg says that the 49 year-old icon's next record (which may feature songs from recent studio sessions with Timbaland and Justin Timberlake) could drop in March 2008, with yet another greatest hits package slated for later next year or early 2009. Rosenberg adds: "We intend to work our asses off to make them both huge successes." (EW.com)

October 18: According to DrownedMadonna.com, Madonna’s new album is being reassessed and the Pharrell stuff could not be in.

October 21: Nate “Danja” Hills (who produced Britney’s “Gimme More”) told People magazine: “The songs are crazy. It's harder with a hiphop influence but you can still dance to it.”

October 25: News about the album (madonnalicious):
 

• It has a tentative release date in the US of Tuesday 11 March

• It has a working title of Connextion - although this will be changed for release.

• It currently contains 12 tracks

• The Beat Goes On track that was leaked a few months ago actually is the finished product for the album

• Another song is a ballad, much like the tone of Promise To Try but is more about a rebirth than death

• There is another song with a strong techno 'thump' with just Madonna singing, no other musical sound and it works pretty well, almost haunting and stays with you


October 28: Today, Pharrell Williams posts this on his Billionaire Boys Club blog:
 

L.A. Part 1, fun times at the studio - October 28th, 2007 | Category: Announcements

Hidden in a secret studio the work goes on. 2 rooms, one for Madonna and one for N*3*R*D! The Bape crew is in town and Goodman who is here filming for NIGOLDENEYE broke the fish eye lens so we took it upon us to have a little fun!


October 31: Madonna is seen entering a recording studio in Los Angeles. According to one website, she was there with Pharrell Williams.
 

LATER: According to MadonnaDownload (Nov. 3), Madonna was recording this whole week. She was joined in the studio by Pharrell on Halloween, but he wasn’t there any other time. She went every day this week in the afternoon and stayed until night time. On Friday, Nov. 2, she arrived in the evening (after she attended services at the Kabbalah Centre) but no producer was with her.


November 1: Madonna is seen in the recording studio again today (reportedly with Pharrell again).

November 2: Madonna is photographed entering the studio again.

November 3: Madonna is photographed entering the studio again – this time with a book.

November 4: At a Miami book signing, Rosie O’Donnell tells a fan about Madonna’s album and that she’s “heard the whole thing and it is great” – adding “the stuff with Timberlake is awesome.”

November 5: Here are the latest news about Madonna's upcoming album that Drowned Madonna has heard:
 

Madonna has not finished with the final product yet. She's been back in the studio over the last few days mixing some of the last tracks.

As for now, Madonna plans on doing a photoshoot for the album after the holidays.

Finally, the tentative release date is Spring 2008, probably April, Madonna's entourage told Drowned Madonna.


November 8: Savage Garden’s Darren Hayes, a friend of Mike "Spike" Stent, posted on his MySpace blog that Stent is currently working on Madonna’s new album in Los Angeles. They are mixing the final cuts now.

November 10: Madonna's photo shoot for her new album has been brought forward to December 12, 2007. There is not definitive photographer yet, but there are high chances that it will be Steven Klein once again. (DrownedMadonna)

The French press is still reporting that Mika has a duet with Madonna on her next album.

November 11: The tentative release date for the new album is still April, late April to be precise. The first single will be chosen within the next few days though. (DrownedMadonna)

November 13: MadonnaTribe has just heard an exclusive report from the recent session in Los Angeles which is likely to bring yet another collaborator to the new Madonna album. While Madonna was putting the finishing touches to her new album at RecordPlant studios in L.A. last week, Kanye West was recording his own stuff in the next room. Kanye was actually working on the new Michael Jackson album - and it may be just a fortunate coincidence that brought him to temporarely switch from the King to the Queen of Pop. Pharrell - who was working with Madonna next door - invited Kanye in to meet her, the two hooked up and Madonna came up with an idea for Kanye to rap on one of her songs on the spot!

Drowned Madonna has been informed that Madonna will film her appearance for the upcoming Annie Lennox's new video “Sing” within the next 2 weeks. She is thinking, JUST THINKING, of going brown for the video.

Also the new album could be launched using a brunette look a-la-“Frozen” but with a much more in your face sense of fashion. Word is that the new Madonna's look for next year could be more punk than rap. We remind you that this is JUST ONE of the options under consideration right now.

November 15: In an interview on Pete Tong’s show on BBC Radio 1, Stuart Price said Madonna wanted to make an “urban album” this time around, so she’s working with Pharrell and Timbaland. He didn’t believe a new world tour was going to happen any time soon.

November 17: Star Academy, the French version of American Idol, annouced today that Madonna may return for another appearance (and possibly as a judge) in early 2008. The show ends in February 2008.

November 18: MadonnaTribe has heard some exciting and exclusive news about Madonna's new album that we are happy to report for the very first time online. There are 5 final songs that are produced by Justin Timberlake and Timbaland and that had their final mixing at Hit Studios (Miami) last week. From what we have been told there's a song called "4 Minutes to Save the World" and it's an upbeat and very catchy hip-hop Madonna/Justin Timberlake duet. Another song is called "Across The Sky". It has lots of acoustic guitars, the flow is very much like "The Power Of Goodbye" and sounds like a real hit. Madonna is hitting really high notes there while Justin Timberlake is on back vocals. The third song is titled "Dance Tonight", a funky mid-tempo tune, yet another Madonna/Justin duet, think "Rock Your Body" by Timberlake with the claps and everything, this apparently has the same structure as well. Even the "Devil Wouldn't Recongize You" is a fourth song. Amazing ballad, very "Cry Me A River" by Timberlake in its structure and Justin on back vocals on this one too. The fifth song is named "Miles Away" and we have been told this is the THE BEST of the whole bunch. A hit written all over it. Full of acoustic guitars, beautiful up-tempo song and Timberlake on back vocals again. The song structure may recall Love Profusion, but it's much better.

From what we have been reported, there's no need to worry about Madonna's new album. It's going to be an incredible album that will mark the year of her 50th birthday in such a fantastic way.

1. 4 Minutes to Save the World (duet with Timberlake)
2. Across The Sky
3. Dance Tonight (duet with Timberlake)
4. Even the Devil Wouldn't Recongize You
5. Miles Away

From Fanzine: “to continue a member's story here, apparently first single resolutions are being made as I write this down. Up until now a collaborated first single with not only Madonna was taken under considerations (perhaps a Timbaland/Timberlake collaborated track), now however, there's a new fierce candidate! A crazy dark dance track produced by Danja features solo Madonna singing partly with vocoder and strong stylish beat. A mega-hit production. With only a small spoken part by Danja. Some say her vision on this record is going to take pop to a whole other level. Definitely exciting!"

November 21: MadonnaTribe: The total number of tracks currently making the album is 13.

November 30: From BANG Media International via Monsters and Critics:
 

Madonna’s new song with Pharrell Williams is so "hot" it will "make the music speakers bleed".

The ’Hung Up’ singer has been in the studio with hit producer Pharrell creating tracks for her upcoming album, and he claims their collaboration will take the music industry by storm. Speaking at the launch of his new shop Billionaire Boys Club and Ice Cream in New York on Wednesday (28.11.07), Pharrell said: "It was crazy. I don’t want to say too much. I’d rather wait for you to hear it. It’s awesome though. It makes the speakers bleed. It’s hot!"

Earlier this month, it was reported Pharrell had been recording with the 49-year-old singer at Record Plant Studios in Los Angeles.

The pair reportedly bumped into Kanye West, who was working with Michael Jackson in a studio next-door, inspiring the hip-hop star to rap on one of Madonna’s new songs.


December 2: On Monday, December 3, Madonna will meet with Warner executives at their NYC offices to discuss the album. Madonna is shopping around for video directors and choreographers for her first single. She is looking for NEW people to choreograph for her and she also would like to pair with a new director... BRAND new. But she wants only top A LISTERS video directors. Madonna want a great video for her new single. The budget for the video is huge! Choreographer and directors will send their reels to Madonna next week. Then, Madonna will narrow down to a few. Whoever will get call to talk to Madonna, will have to fly to New York City and listen to the single in presence of Madonna at the Warner Bros. offices and discuss about the video. Security is VERY tight!

RUMOR: Joseph Kahn has applied. He has directed videos for Eminem.

December 3: Today, 30 WB people were invited to the NYC offices to see “Madonna’s candy, sweet candy.” The invitations had a candy theme, as did the conference room where the listening party was held.

December 4: Drowned Madonna can exclusively reveal that Madonna's new album is tentatively titled Give It To Me.
 

"This next song is called 'Give It To Me' and that’s what I want to call the record," said Madonna.

The first single is still undecided. It will either be "4 Minutes To Save The World" or "Candyshop."

"The Beat Goes On" is on the album, but is completely reworked. It also now features Kanye West.

There is one track that is dance and acoustic some way at the same time and it is called "Miles Away." Madonna has a lot of harmonies on it. Her voice sounds great. A gem!

There are 13 tracks on the album, which also includes a re-invention of "The Devil Wouldn’t Recognize You", which, as you probably remember is a song that Mike McKnight revealed and described in an exclusive interview held by Drowned Madonna several years ago. The song was originally wrote by Madonna for a musical and was also originally planned to be performed in the Re-Invention Tour.

The album is still planned to be released on LATE APRIL, as Drowned Madonna - the only discordant voice from all reports - revealed. Madonna herself said that her album will be out the last week of April.


Drowned Madonna can tell you Madonna album listening party in details:

The room was decked out in a candy theme, champagne was being served, candy everywhere you look for everyone. The conference room it was held in was totally transformed.

There were red and white stripes & stools as the theme plus like colored bricks and lots of candy all over.

There were all Re-Invention Tour stage shots in the room including a big poster that may be the cover of the Lisbon DVD. No other photos of anything else, just RIT.

Madonna came at 5:30pm with Ingrid Casares and Guy Oseary, wearing all black - blouse, skirt, and boots. Liz Rosenberg was there of course, she is the one who organized the party and set up the theme.

Madonna sat on a couch with Liz Rosenberg and Ingrid Casares as the tracks played.

Madonna dictated what tracks would be played and specifically said they were not being played in any order.

She said she had just finished mixing the album a few days ago.

Madonna played "Candyshop," then "4 Minutes To Save The World" first. She then had a vote on which one would be the first single. She said many times throughout the session that the first single has yet to be decided.

She is all about "Candy Shop" and looked upset and surprised there was a better reaction to "4 Minutes To Save The World".

"4 Minutes To Save The World" is like a dancey "Hey You". It goes something like "Hey girl, save the world...".

"The Beat Goes On" sounds NOTHING like the demo we heard. As we told you, it features Kanye West. Madonna said it's not a single. Madonna made the song out to seem like a joke.

"Miles Away" and "The Devil Wouldn't Recognize You" has then been played.

Many times she would not announce the names of songs before playing them but there were songs with the following main hooks:

"She's Not Me" , "Feel It In My Heartbeat" and "Dance Tonight" .

There is also a song which Madonna called a "psychological mind f*ck" which questioned who was the master or slave, if you’re walking the dog or the dogs walking you.

Finally, Madonna said there are thirteen tracks, but she only played 10 songs.


December 6: Madonna has christened her final Warner Bros. studio album Licorice, and will release the set in late April. The news was broken today (Dec. 6) on former Billboard editor Larry Flick's Sirius Satellite Radio show "OutQ." On the broadcast, Flick also aired two songs from the album, "Candy Shop" and "The Beat Goes On" featuring Pharrell. Both cuts leaked online earlier this year. Unconfirmed reports say Madonna previewed the album in recent days for Warner Bros. staff members in New York. Kanye West is said to guest on "The Beat Goes On," while an older unreleased tune, "The Devil Wouldn't Recognize You," appears in a new version.

RUMOR: Moe on the MadonnaNation board says: “I can say that Candy Shop and TBGO the final album versions are so far from what leaked months, and I hear the album is amazing.”

December 7: REUTERS: Madonna's record label has denied reports that her new album will be called Licorice and will come out in late April.
 

Billboard.com reported that Sirius Satellite Radio host Larry Flick, a former Billboard editor, announced the title and release date on his "OutQ" show Thursday.

"Sirius does not know what they are talking about," Warner Bros, spokeswoman Liz Rosenberg said in an email to Reuters. "Wrong title. Release date wrong etc."


MadonnaTribe: MadonnaTribe has received more info about one of the songs on Madonna's new album. One of the 5 songs we first reported on November 18 from the Timberlake/Timbaland session is a nice, mid-tempo love song with classic "Madonna lyrics" and a theme concept that loosely reminds of the idea behind the song "Like a Virgin".
 

“Across The Sky,” tells the story of a woman who is quite disenchanted by love, a woman who knows deception, a woman who lied and has been lied to quite a lot in her life. A woman who admits she is not a saint but that finally feels like a new person now that she has found a new love in her life and she is ready to travel "across the sky" with her man, poetically holding his hands in hers.

Musically the songs contains a lot of acoustic guitars and has a very catchy chorus. Justin Timberlake is "oooing" on backing vocals. Apparently, the song would be perfect for a third single release from the album.

Fans who might be worried that Madonna has been looking for much new musical directions with this album must be reassured that she has re-invented and adapted that genre to her own unique style.

MadonnaTribe: Madonna will be shooting the album cover on December 22nd in the United Kingdom. The photographer is again Steven Klein. The album design will be once again in charge of designer Giovanni Bianco.

MadonnaTribe: MadonnaTribe sources can bring more exclusive news about the title track of Madonna's new album. “Give It To Me” is a song produced by Pharrell Williams, and it's a very catchy uptempo track that reminds of early Madonna tracks from the "pre-Madonna era" such as "Love on the run". The fans who were worried that this album would be too hip-hop would be happy to know that it's very 80's in its structure and it's pure Madonna. A person who apparently heard the song said it sounds quite "cartoonish".

The “Give It To Me” phrase has nothing to do with a supposed “sexual content” as rumoured on a few Madonna forums, but it's said in the sense of "I'll handle the situation for you".

A male voice is also singing backing vocals on part of the second verse and Madonna reprises a couple of lyrics from "The Beat Goes On" on this one.

The break is very strange, the song basically stops suddenly while Madonna says "Don't Stop It" the male voice, probably Pharrell himself says "to the left, to the right".

This song would also make a great single!


December 12: MadonnaTribe sources can bring more exclusive news about two tracks of Madonna's new album. Of the lot of songs produced by Timbaland and Justin Timbelake that MTribe reported about shortly after they had their final mixing in Hit Studios Miami in November, "4 Minutes To Save The World" is possibly the one with a stronger "classic" Timbaland vibe.

If there's actually some "hip hop" or "urban" vibe in Madonna's new album, we've been told that "4 Minutes" is probably the track where you can feel it the most. The song has an instantly catchy vibe, with percussion layers and hypnotic synthetized strings. While in other songs of the album Justin can be heard on backing vocals - as exclusively reported on this site in mid-November - "4 Minutes To Save The World" is actually a duet as in this song's verse Madonna and Justin basically sing one line each or better answer one to another on a back and forth basis.

On the other hand, we've been told that "Dance Tonight" sounds like the funkiest song of the lot. You could say it's a dance track from the beginning to the end - there's dance in the title, dance in the theme, dance in the lyrics, and dance in the instrumentation.

It has a captivating late 70's - early 80's disco sound - fingered bass, claps, triangle - recalling songs that made the history of dance as we know it and groups like Kool & The Gang, Skyy, Delegation, even a bit of the early Michael Jackson and huge references to the signature sound of Narada Michael Walden and to the origins of disco-rapping.

To compare it to another Madonna songs the most similar thing that comes to mind is "Don't Stop" or maybe "Your Honesty" from the Bedtime Stories sessions.

Lyrics-wise "Dance Tonight" also shares the same idea of fun of "Don't Stop" reprising the classic Madonna theme of letting yourself go and be guided by music, and doing positive things while you dance the night away.

December 12: Timbaland, being interviewed today at NYC’s Z-100 Jingle Ball, said to be on the look-out for Madonna’s first single – due out next month (January 2008). He said: “For the first quarter, January, we wanna look out for Madonna's first single which features me and Justin (Timberlake),” said Timbaland. “I did most of her album,” Timbaland added. “Me and The Neptunes did the album. She (Madonna) has an incredible album!”

December 15: Final confirmation is just in from M-Tribe's sources that the first single from Madonna's upcoming album will be "4 Minutes To Save The World". We can also exclusively report that Madonna will film the video for the opening single of her 2008 album in January. The clip will be directed by Jonas Akerlund and both Justin Timberlake and Timbaland are going to be there too.
As exclusively reported on this site last month, "4 Minutes To Save The World" is an upbeat hip-hop Madonna/Justin Timberlake duet and is one of the tracks produced by Justin together with Timbaland - a song with an instantly catchy vibe, with percussion layers and hypnotic synthetized strings. In more album related last minute news, we've always been told that "Across the Sky" is not set to be released on the album anymore.

BREAKING NEWS: Today, Timbaland previewed “4 Minutes to Save the World” at Philadelphia’s Jingle Bell in front of a live audience. Before the show, he did an interview with Q102 radio. He said he just came from Miami (prior to doing the Jingle Bell concert in NYC), but he did not accompany Timberlake in Australia for his tour. Part of the interview: On his possible retirement: "No, the next thing I'm shooting....the next video I am doing is me, Justin and Madonna." Is there anyone else he wants to work with? "That was it, that set the deal, Madonna set the deal....after I did her album I'm cool. Me and Justin went in and did her album in London."

December 19: In an interview with Celebrity Magazine, 50 Cent says the following: Can we expect any other collaborations from you in 2008? 50 Cent: ''I'm currently recording a couple of songs for Snoop’s next album and Ice Cube and I are working on some hot jams. And I've already collaborated with Madonna on her forthcoming album.''

December 20: Madonna does a photoshoot with Steven Klein in London today for the new album. The shoot today is minimalist with Madonna in white fishnets, cream lace-up boots and white thong panties.

RUMOR: From MadonnaFanzine regarding the video for “4 Minutes to Save the World”: From an overlooker at RSA Films they sketched some concepts for black leather outfit for Madonna in the story about a couple of somewhat spies, I imagine Madonna, Timberlake and Timbaland. Lots of arrows in the sketches too which indicates on action and movements, and that big supposed dance mash tease between Timberlake and Madonna.

December 21: Actress turned singer, turned designer Tuesday Knight is designing and working with Madonna on photo shoots for her upcoming album. Tuesday has also designed jewelry in the past for Madonna for her film Evita and for her 2003 VMA Performance with Britney Spears. When Madonna and Tuesday met recently to discuss the plans for her designs, Madonna loved everything that is coming off of Tuesday’s new line. Madonna's manager Angela Becker has previously told In Touch Weekly: 'Madonna is a big fan of Tuesday’s and loves her jewelry a lot. She is always showing us what she is designing next, and it should be considered Art.'

December 22: LATER: The album cover photoshoot reportedly was supposed to be today with a boxing theme.

December 25: A Spanish fan says that:
 

The tentative release date for Madonna new album in Spain is April 22nd which fits what Drowned Madonna exclusively revealed about the release date. The album will also be available in USB format.

The document also lists a new Madonna Collection including all her singles to be released November 25.

Finally a new Timbaland album is due november the 4th and according to the document it will include a collaboration with Madonna as well as other artists like: Dido, Linkin Park, Cher, Kanye West, Celine Dion, Christina Aguilera, Gwen Stefani, Akon and Mary J Blige.

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The Immaculate Collection

 

1990:

mid-August: Madonna attends Herb Ritt's birthday party in Malibu where she meets model and fledgling singer, Nick Scotti. After hitting it off, Madonna will land Scotti a recording contract with Warner's Reprise Records 3 months later (in November 1990). A song she wrote around this time with Steve Bray, "Get Over" was co-produced by her and Shep Pettibone for her upcoming greatest hits collection. It will instead be given to Scotti with Madonna on backing vocals. Scotti's version will also be featured on the soundtrack of the Warner comedy Nothing But Trouble - which is released February 15, 1991. Madonna's complete version (with just her vocals) has not yet been leaked but does exist.

LATER: Also this month in Los Angeles, Madonna meets with Archer Communications (a Canadian sound tech company) and they convince her to use their new QSound 3-D audio technology on her greatest hits.

Late August/September: Lenny Kravitz brings Madonna the song "Justify My Love" to record. He will later reveal this information:
 

"The response at the time [1990] was enormous. I wrote the song soon after the success of Let Love Rule [which was released in September 1989 and peaked at No. 61 on The Top 200 on Feb. 10, 1990]. At the time I was the newest kid on the block. I wrote the song in the studio and when it was finished I thought: "This is not right for me". I didn't know Madonna at the time but I called her and said: "I have a number one hit song for you." And she said: "Oh really?" and I said: "Yes, a number one song." She asked to meet me in the studio and play the music for her.

She heard it one time, then a second time and said: "Ok let's record it." It was crazy, it really went to number one. It was my first number one in the charts." (Feb. 19, 2005)

LATER: In an interview for Truth or Dare with Kurt Loder (April 1991), Madonna says Lenny Kravitz brought her the musical track "Justify My Love" with lyrics already written but she changed the things she wanted to change lyrically (and vocally).


mid-September: Shep Pettibone begins work on assembling Madonna's greatest hits collection and re-mastering them in QSound with engineer Goh Hotoda. The process will take about a month and half (per his statements in the Erotica Diaries, 1992). It is during this time that he and Madonna also record "Rescue Me." Both "Justify My Love" and "Rescue Me" are recording at studios in NYC & NJ.

September 18: Madonna attends the NYC premiere of Goodfellas with Herb Ritts and her new boy toy Tony Ward - who will later appear with her in the "Justify My Love" video.

LATER: In a MadonnaTribe FACT OF THE DAY (dated 3.19.2007) we learn this:
 

Firstly, the name The Ultimate Collection was scrapped in favour of the now familiar The Immaculate Collection. Why this was changed is unknown.

However, the two vast changes which 'The Immaculate Collection' underwent were the tracklisting and the cover design. Coming to the tracklisting you can see, from the following UK promotional press folder sent out to the media in anticipation of the collection's release that the tracklisting was due to run non-chronologically and the set was to feature only ONE new song, not two, as came to be the case upon release in November 1990:

Original Tracklisting:

1. Like A Virgin
2. Material Girl
3. Crazy For You
4. Live to Tell
5. Papa Don’t Preach
6. Open Your Heart
7. Like A Prayer
8. Cherish
9. Lucky Star
10. Borderline
11. Into the Groove
12. La Isla Bonita
13. Express Yourself
14. Holiday
15. Vogue
16. New Song (as yet untitled)

It is unknown whether the one extra track was to be "Justify My Love" or "Rescue Me" as completed test pressings of the album from that far back are not known to exist, but considering the lead up time required for such a project, and the resultant lack of a video or any promotion for "Rescue Me" it is likely that the one extra track was "Justify My Love."

The most startling change which happened to the album though must surely be it's sleeve design! As every fan knows, Madonna did a daringly different photo shoot with legendary photographer - and long time Madonna collaborator - Herb Ritts for the album's artwork, showing arty black and white shots of Madonna lurking about and larking about in a men's restroom.

RzY3I2d.jpg

What most fans probably don't know is the photo which was due to be the front cover was this design above.

Keen eyed readers will spot that this image ended up actually being the rear sleeve to the LP and CD releases, and the small logo designed by Jeri and John Heiden was meant to be a small shield design purely to house the title.

So, why was this most unusual shot of Madonna, with her newly collagen stuffed lips relegated to the rear of the sleeve and the Heiden's shield image promoted to the entire front cover? Because Madonna decided, upon closer inspection of the image, that she looked (in her words) 'too much like Mike Tyson'!


September 24: This fall will usher in a number of ‘best-ofs’ including one from Madonna (tentative). (St. Petersburg Times)

October 3: Madonna does a photoshoot with Patrick Demarchelier today and he says in a documentary (released later – possibly 1997) that he photographed Madonna in a session and then afterward, when she changed to go out that night, he stopped her and took a few more shots – these extra last-minute snapshots became the cover for the “Justify My Love” single with Madonna in a leather hat and vest.

October 13: MADONNA, "The Immaculate Collection,"Sire. Her first greatest-hits collection will feature 17 tunes, including two new songs-one written with Lenny Kravitz and one co-written by Shep Pettibone, who also co-wrote "Vogue" with Madonna. Nov. 13. Her first collection of video clips since the Like A Virgin era comes out November 15. (LA Times)

October 17: Archer's QSound is in vogue with Madonna (The Gazette. Montreal, Que.: Oct 17, 1990.)
 

TORONTO - A Calgary company that has had mixed reviews for its three-dimensional sound system is hoping to get into the groove with pop star Madonna. Archer Communications Inc. said yesterday it has signed a deal for its 3-D audio technology, known as QSound, to be used on a greatest- hits package by the corset-clad chanteuse. The album release, on CD, cassette and vinyl formats, is scheduled for Nov. 13 on the Sire-Warner Bros. label. Through a licensing arrangement with Warner Bros., Archer will earn a royalty from each album sold, said company president Larry Ryckman. He would not reveal how much the company will receive.

"This is a case of a Canadian technology being used by one of the biggest stars in the world," said Ryckman. "I'm very excited about that."

Madonna chose to use the QSound system after Archer engineers demonstrated it for her in Los Angeles, he said. Spokesmen for Madonna could not be reached for comment. Madonna's Greatest Hits will be the first album released with QSound, a computer-based system that modifies recorded sounds so they seem to be coming from somewhere other than loudspeakers. By separating and mixing in the recording studio, engineers can "place" the apparent origin of the sounds anywhere within the listening room. Listeners need only a regular stereo system to hear the 3-D effect.

In August, Archer announced it had signed a licensing agreement with PolyGram, one of the world's biggest record companies. The deal allows PolyGram to release at least 20 recordings using the QSound system over the next 18 months. The company's biggest splash in the marketplace was supposed to be a Coca-Cola commercial shown during the Super Bowl game last January. But many viewers failed to notice any difference in the sound because they did not have access to a stereo broadcast of the game.

Madonna's Greatest Hits, is a remix of some of the artist's most popular songs, including Like A Virgin, Into The Groove and Lucky Star. The upcoming album will feature QSound remixes of her multi-platinum hits including Like a Virgin, Lucky Start and Into the Groove and two previously unreleased tracks. Archer's stock closed unchanged at $13.75 yesterday on the Toronto Stock Exchange.


November 8: The single for “Justify My Love” is released to radio today.

Novemeber 9: Madonna & boyfriend Tony Ward, begin filming the video for “Justify My Love” in Paris today with Jean Baptiste Mondino. (filming also continues November 10-12).
 

LATER: "When Madonna called me," says director Jean Baptiste Mondino, "about filming 'Justify,' I said, 'Why don't you come over here (to Paris)? It would be nice to do something simple.' We locked ourselves in the Royal Monceau (a Paris hotel) for two days and one night without any idea of what we were going to do. The only idea I had was for her to come with a suitcase, like she was going for a fantasy. We rented to whole floor and shot everyone in their own room; there was no set. That's why the video shocked people. You could see it was not a fake.

"We didn't think we were going to do something wild," he says, "None of what you see was planned. But when I started to edit, I said, 'This is never gonna be shown.'" Sure enough, MTV refused to air it, unwittingly paying Madonna a favor: She got to play the clip on "Nightline" an made a bundle off it on home video.

The video features Madonna’s current boyfriend Tony Ward, dancer Jose Guiterrez and French model-fashion muse Wallis Franken (in the “night porter” role – tall, skinny, no boobs, short black hair). In May 1996, Wallis will commit suicide by jumping out of a window. She was apparently a masochist who went from homelessness to a life of luxury via her husband, and bisexual fashion designer, Claude Montana - with whom she had an abusive relationship.


November 13: The Immaculate Collection is released.

November 26: The video for "Justify My Love" is submitted to MTV for review and approval. It is rejected outright and ban it from the network the very next day.

December 3: Madonna appears on Nightline to defend the video.

December 7: "Justify My Love" is released as a video single. In 6 month's time it will sell over 500,000 copies - the biggest selling video single of its time.

December 11: The Royal Box is released. Far from a proper boxed set, it features the CD, cassette and VHS of the TIC with some post cards and a poster.

LATER: The art director at Warner Brothers tells VH-1 that the cover art and design for The Immaculate Collection was meant to represent the Gaultier corset that Madonna wore for the Blond Ambition Tour in 1990 (the gold triangular points, I assume). The cover was modeled after hosiery and lingerie packaging from the 1940’s and 50’s.

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Something to Remember

 

1995:

February 16: Madonna is reportedly set to record a cover of “I Want You” for an upcoming Marvin Gaye tribute project. (Liz Smith)

March 8: Finally, another duet from Bono and a dead singer but this time Frank Sinatra is not going to be in the room, on the phone or musically mixed in, in any way whatsoever. This time, we're speaking about the role Bono will play as well as several other musical heavies in the tribute album Motown is putting together to honor soulful singer and domestic-violence statistic Marvin Gaye.
 

It's gonna be big, as you can imagine. That's why Bono has good company in Madonna, Stevie Wonder, Neneh Cherry, Lisa Stansfield, Public Enemy, Digable Planets, Marvin's daughter Nona Gaye, and assorted others. The album, "Inner City Blue: The Music of Marvin Gaye," will be released in September. Amazingly, Michael Bolton who's made a career out of stealing sheet music wasn't even asked to participate.

And who'll sing what? Bono and Marvin will croon a duet of "Save the Children" while Madonna who has been recording at Eddie Germano's Hit Factory will be joined by the Brit rap-reggae-hip hop-klezmer group Massive Attack on "I Want You." Stevie Wonder will sing "Stubborn Kind of Fellow." Public Enemy promises to take "Inner City Blues" to a new depth while Nona Gaye would do her papa proud with her version of "Time to Get It Together."

Rounding out the album are Stansfield's "Just to Keep You Satisfied," Cherry's "Troubleman," Rosie Gaine's "Distant Lover" and Speech from Arrested Development will do right to the anthem "What's Going On." He'd better. So far, we haven't yet heard through the grapevine who will sing "Heard It Through the Grapevine."

Look for a TV special to follow. (NY Daily News)


April 1: Before Madonna goes into the studio to begin work on the EVITA soundtrack, she will record some new material for an album due out later this year. (Liz Smith)

April 8: Madonna recently recorded a cover of Marvin Gaye’s classic “I Want You” with Nellee Hooper’s friends, Massive Attack. (MTV News)

Late July/early August: Madonna shoots her second Versace campaign in Italy with Mario Testino. The shots will later be used in the Something to Remember album artwork.

August 3: Liz Smith reports that Madonna will release a collection of ballads this Christmas, it will feature some of her greatest slow songs as well as two new ones – a cover of Marvin Gaye’s “I Want You” and a newly recorded version of “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore.” The collection is tentatively entitled, I Want You.

August 29: Madonna has completed a video in NYC for “I Want You” which will premiere on MTV in mid-September. However, the ballad compilation due this fall is entitled Something to Remember. The album is now scheduled for a late October release and will feature three new songs, including the Gaye tribute “I Want You” which Madonna recorded with Massive Attack. (MTV News)
 

LATER: The video for “I Want You” is rumored to be based on the Italian film Voce Humana, directed by the famed Rossellini. In the film, Anna Magnani plays a woman who spends the entire film in her apartment (in a slip dress) arguing with her lover on the phone. Madonna will again draw on Anna Magnani in 2009 when she borrows her look from the 1951 Visconti film Bellissima for her Dolce and Gabbana fashion campaign for Spring/Summer 2010.


September 5: Hitmaker David Foster will produce a track on the compilation.

September 10: The tracklisting is leaked and the cover art is described as Madonna against a wall with wet hair in a Versace dress. (MLVC Mailing List)

September 14: “I Want You” is scheduled for release on Oct. 3 and is described as a “haunting and minimalist” update of the R&B classic, combining hiphop and industrial elements. The video clip, lensed by Earle Sebastian, is a beautiful black & white piece shot in a New York City apartment in August. The video is described as stark and minimalist with a spare number of images. The album release date has been moved to November 7 and David Foster is contributing a second new song to the collection. (Icon Newsletter)

September 16-17: Madonna records songs with David Foster in NYC. (Timothy White article, Billboard)
 

LATER: Foster will record several demos with Madonna including – “I Can’t Forget,” “You’ll See” and “One More Chance.”


September 20: WB reports that David Foster’s contributions will be two new songs: “You’ll See” and “One More Chance.”

October 2: The video for "I Want You" premieres on VH-1.

October 5: “I Want You” will not be released as a commercial single thus making it ineligible for the Billboard Hot 100. The first single release is expected to be “You’ll See” sometime next month.
 

LATER: Massive Attack’s website explains the situation:

“I Want You” was made for a tribute album to the late, great soul singer Marvin Gaye. The tribute album called Inner City Blues, would feature Marvin Gaye's songs re-interperted by various artists specfically for the project. Over a year before the release of the album 'Motown', the record label in charge of assembling the artists for the album approached Massive Attack and asked them to pick a song from Marvin Gaye's back catalogue to re-imagined and suggested they do a collaboration with Chaka Khan, an well-known American R&B singer. A backing track was made to accomadate her vocals, but due to Chaka Khan flaking on the recoding sessions, she was dropped. The possibilty came up briefly then of procuring Aaron Neville, another well-known American R&B singer but that fell through as well because of legality issues.

At this point, in stepped Massive Attack's old Wild Bunch cohort, Nellee Hooper who made the suggestion of Madonna as vocalist. Hooper who had just recently finished producing Madonna's Bedtime Stories album was able to setup a meeting between Massive Attack and Madonna and from there surprisingly getting Madonna's vocal contribution involved less red tape and less prima donna behaviour than either previous option, Chaka Khan or Aaron Neville.

Daddy G and Mushroom never got the oppertunity to meet Madonna during the recording sessions for "I Want You." Only 3D along with Nelle Hooper would meet with Madonna over in New York for a period of two days, record the vocals with her and then bring them back to Bristol to be worked on.

Madonna was so impressed by the finished product that she choose to include "I Want You" as the first track on her next album, Something to Remember.

The original plans for "I Want You" included a full-scale single release. Premiere Madonna remixer of the time, Junior Vasquez, did some remixes of the track and a promo video was even shot, but in the end legality problems between the Motown label and Madonna's record label prevented this from happening.


October 6: The video for "I Want You" premieres on MTV.

October 10: “You’ll See” has been tipped as the official lead single for the album and will be released on Oct. 24.

LATER: The bauhinia flower is the type of flora used on the cover for the “You’ll See” single. It was the flower used in the new flag for Hong Kong once it was returned by Britian to China.

October 12: Liz Rosenberg confirms that there will be no actual airplay or commercial single for “I Want You” and that it was just a promotional video for the Inner City Blues project.

October 23-24: While in London to record the Evita soundtrack, Madonna takes these two days to shoot the video for "You'll See" with her "Take A Bow" video director, Michael Haussman - it will debut on MTV in early November. The video is a "sequel" to her previous bullfighting hit. The footage is visually based on the film Casablanca and - more specifically Ingrid Bergman's character – the bolero hat and walk through the train draw from this film's imagery.

November 2: Madonna does an interview with German channel VIVA2 where she talks about working on this record:
 

Madonna said that Massive Attack were always hanging around the recording studio with Nellee Hooper and Madonna while they were recording Bedtime Stories. Madonna and Massive Attack talked about working together and so since Madonna was suppose to do the Marvin Gaye tribute thing, they decided to work together for “I Want You.” [This would appear to contradict, somewhat, Massive Attack's statements - above]


November 7: The LP is released.

1996:

February 2: WB reports the next single from the retrospective will be “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore.” Street date for the single is March 12 but there is some debate since Mary J. Blige and Faith Evans also recently recorded a version of this 1970’s Rose Royce hit (for Faith’s Bad Boy album) and their cover has been getting some unsolicited play at R&B stations. Meanwhile, some overseas markets will get “One More Chance.”

February 16: The commercial single for “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore” is set for release March 12 and will include a remix by Soulshock & Karlin who have worked with Tupac, Mary J. Blige, Monica, Seal, Brandy, Toni Braxton and Brownstone.

"The LP has currently sold 240,000 copies in Chinese-speaking Taiwan, no easy feat – even for a Western superstar." (unsubstantiated statement from the MLVC mailing list)

February 26: WB reports Jean Baptiste Mondino will direct the new video.

March 10: WB reports that the video for “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore” was shot last week in Argentina where Madonna is shooting Evita. The label also reported it is not going to solicite adds for the record at U.S. radio until March 25.

March 21: MTV premieres the video for “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore.” Madonna wears a dress by Victor Alfaro – a designer well-known for his “Grace Kelly”-style clothing.

March 22: Madonna, back in NYC briefly from Argentina before she heads to Europe to finish Evita, does a small radio station interview-tour to promote the new single “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore.”

April 26: Madonna has given the go-ahead for a dance remix of “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore,” and WB will be servicing it to radio and clubs next weekend. The single is also slated to be the next European release and WB has sent promo copies to radio stations there with 4 new remixes. (MLVC mailing list)

May 4: Warner Bros. International reports that as of January 1996, Something to Remember had sold 4.2 million copies outside of the U.S. (Billboard)

May 11: Billboard DANCE TRAX: Madonna's take on the Rose Royce chestnut "Love Don't Live Here Anymore" (Maverick/Warner Bros.) sure has gotten its share of recent remixes. Although we are still feeling most connected to the languid R&B tone of the SoulShock & Karlin version, we sure were grinning from ear to ear after our first encounter with Marcus Schulz's bumpin' house mixes.
 

He has done an excellent job pairing her sweetly theatrical ballad vocal with an appropriately NRG-etic beat that is embellished with vibrant organ lines and blippy synth effects. When combined, these keyboard lines add up to a very pastel, tea-dance-ready twirler. His five mixes lean largely toward the middle of the club road, though harder heads should investigate the Early Morning dub for a little underground comfort. Schulz's interpretations of "Love Don't Live Here Anymore" are out on promotional 12-inch and CD promos on Monday (May 6). Release beyond clubs and radio is still under discussion. Sure would be wise to give La M's many dance-rooted disciples a chance to purchase this cutie.

Track listing for the 12”:

• A1 - Extended Journey 8:03
• A2 - Hot Mix Edit 6:44
• B1 - Hot Mix Radio Edit 4:50
• B2 - Edge Factor Dub 8:31
• B3 - Early Morning Dub 10:04


May 15: The maxi-single featuring dance remixes of "Love Don't Live Here Anymore" is scheduled to be released May 28th in the U.S.

June: Warner Bros. ends up cancelling the U.S. domestic release of the maxi-single for "Love Don't Live Here Anymore" due to the song’s poor showing on the radio chart.

July: Warner Bros. says "Love Don't Live Here Anymore" and 3 all-new dance mixes by Italian DJ Mark Picchiotti will be released later this month in the U.K. on a 12” single. He is an extremely hot remixer in Europe right now and he reportedly did some promo mixes with Teri Bristol for “Bedtime Story – Chapter II” in 1995.
 

• Mark!s Full-On Vocal (10:20)
• Mark!s It’s A Girl Dub (8:02)
• Mark!s It’s A Boy Dub (9:37)

It’s apparently his “trademark” to use exclamation points for apostrophes in his remix titles. The U.K. promo pressing has a limit of 500. Whereas the U.S. remixes are more “lush house,” these remixes have been described as “trancey” or “slightly industrial.” (MLVC mailing list)


July 28: The U.S. 12” vinyl promo only had 1,000 copies made and is now a collector’s item because WB scratched the maxi-single release.

July 30: Adrian Wilde receives a single MTV VMA nomination for Best Cinematography in a video for “You’ll See.” [He will end up losing to the Smashing Pumpkins’ clip for “Tonight, Tonight.”]

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Just read the debut album one and wow at all of it. I’m listening to Never Knew Love Like This Before by Stephanie Mills and the beginning really does sound like Borderline (it bops like Borderline too). Will read the rest eventually. jj2 Thank you for sharing!

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