The Collaborative Madonna
Madonna Louise Ciccone, better known as simply Madonna, has been a major influence on popular culture and music. Excelling at getting noticed, Madonna draws quite a reaction from most people, ranging from very positive to very negative. However, most of this attention is centered around Madonna as a pop culture icon. "So much controversy has swirled around my career this past decade that very little attention ever gets paid to my music. The songs are all but forgotten." (Madonna, Something To Remember) But Madonna the icon, Madonna the movie star, and Madonna the industry, are all firmly rooted in Madonna the musician. Music is where she started and is still the basis of her career. Before the hype, Madonna had hit singles, and she has continued to produce hit singles and albums almost every year since 1982. Considering the short careers of most pop artists, she has been around for a long time, but even so, she still manages to stay in step with current trends, and even start a few.
Madonna manages to achieve all of this at least in large part because she is a skilled collaborator. Particularly in her music, one can hear the influence of collaboration with a variety of other artists, all bringing a variety of influences and styles, helping to assure her new releases match current popular tastes, if not lead and direct them. Madonna has been involved in many types of collaborations - long-term, short-term, varying amounts of input, and varying amounts of contact. In one form or another, she has collaborated musically with such well-known people as (with respective styles): Kenny "Babyface" Edmonds (Pop/R&B Ballads), William Orbit (electronica), Nile Rogers (disco), Prince (R&B), Andrew Lloyd Webber (Broadway/musicals), Lenny Kravitz (eclectic Rock), and Stephen Sondheim (musicals and other). She has formed long-term musical relationships with Patrick Leonard, Shep Pettibone, and Stephen Bray, helping to establish some commonality, if not continuity, between her diverse works.
Madonna's collaboration with Sondheim is at the low end of the interaction/input scale. I could find no record of them actually meeting together in person. However, both of them worked together on Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy, with Sondheim contributing some original songs, and Madonna singing the songs and acting in the movie. While the interaction does not appear to have been much, the collaboration was certainly successful. The song "Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man)", sung by Madonna, won the 1991 Academy Award for Best Original Song. This and two other Sondheim songs were included on Madonna's I'm Breathless (as in her character Breathless Mahone) CD, which included other works inspired by the movie such as the hit "Vogue", co-written by Madonna and Shep Pettibone. (Engel)
A similar collaboration seems to have occurred between Andrew Lloyd Webber, Tim Rice, and Madonna on the song "You Must Love Me" in the film version of the musical Evita. Webber and Madonna definitely met several times about the film, and the song was written for the film version, in which Madonna starred. (Evita Website) Madonna's musically creative input on Evita seems to have been limited, but her influence on the film cannot be denied, and the soundtrack naturally centers around her. Effectively, she has taken a Webber/Rice Broadway musical and turned it into an extended Madonna video.
A more interactive, though short, collaboration was with Prince on the track "Love Song" on the album Like a Prayer. Although the two co-wrote the song, as Andrew Blake says, "the Princely signs are there for all to hear: the eccentricity of the drum pattern, the sparseness of the production emphasizing the quirky lyrics and vocal lines, delivered in duet by [Madonna] and Prince." (25 Lloyd) He also says that the song appears "at first hearing to stick out like a sore thumb." However, when one listens to it with Prince's other works in mind, one realizes that Madonna is molding her voice to imitate the typical female singer's role in Prince's duets.
Madonna has been collaborating since the beginning of her solo career, starting with Madonna, her self-titled first album. This is probably because record companies rarely trust young artists to have too much control over their first record, but Madonna, though always keeping control, has always continued to co-write and co-produce most of the work on her albums. On this album she works with producer John "Jellybean" Benitez, with whom she later works on the single "Crazy for You." In these early days, she also appears to be fine tuning the nature of the collaborative process of working with an active producer - with Reggie Lucas she switches between co-writing, writing, and co-producing tracks.
Her second album, Like a Virgin, starts the unpredictable, ever-changing, but thoroughly Madonna method of producing albums and singles. What she does is keep something familiar, in this case a dance style, while changing other things, such as producers. She successfully uses this method to simultaneously keep her old fans and gain new ones, although Madonna personally seems to like to change things around, too, as is evidenced by the variety of projects she has worked on in her career (from books to movies to starting her own record company). On the album Like a Virgin, she worked primarily with Nile Rogers. The stylistic differences between her first two albums are subtle, but are in step with the style of the day. Her first album is stylistically similar to Michael Jackson's work in and around the time of Thriller (1982-83) - a dance style coming out of Disco, but leaning more towards Rock. Like a Virgin continues in this direction - the rhythms are much more Rock in nature (as in what we now call "classic rock"), although the overall style is still that of heavily produced, early eighties, dance music, with the characteristic clean sound, synthesizer bass lines, and bell-like accompaniment sounds, which shows Nile Rogers's influence. By the early to mid eighties, Disco was highly formulaic in nature, and Madonna and Michael Jackson's work from this time did not fit the formula. In fact, because of the melding of the styles, Gene Sculatti even claims that her first two albums started a new radio format, "Power" or "Hot", and established Madonna as one of the leaders of this format. (2 Sculatti) This format was the typical 1980's Top 40 format, straddling the fences between Rock, Dance, and R&B.
On subsequent albums, the things changed are unpredictable and the things kept the same are usually subtle, though noticeable. Madonna might return to a previous collaborator or co-writer, though not necessarily from the previous album. For instance, around the time of Like a Virgin, she co-wrote and co-produced "Into the Groove" with Stephen Bray - a few years later the two also co-wrote and co-produced "Express Yourself". The connection is not immediately noticeable, but it is there, perhaps in how the synthesizer "fillers" sound and function. Sometimes she will return to certain styles she likes, or even beat patterns (12/8 meter is a favorite of hers). She uses themes to connect her work with work she did not write as in the Evita/"Take a Bow" connection (using a Spanish/Latin theme, but not style). "Take a Bow", co-written with Babyface on the Bedtime Stories CD, was one of her best selling singles and was released just before work on Evita began. It is often debated whether or not this song (particularly its video) was written and produced with hopes of helping her get the starring role of Eva Perón, a role she had wanted for a long time, and for which many artists lobbied and were considered.
Madonna will sometimes work with one producer for most of an album, or even for two or three albums, as she did with Shep Pettibone. The two of them worked together on several albums, and Pettibone was the main producer on The Immaculate Collection and Erotica. Pettibone production style helps tie a lot of Madonna's work from this period together, particularly her dance music. For instance, with Madonna he co-produced "Vogue" on I'm Breathless, "Rescue Me" on The Immaculate Collection, and most of Erotica, the album on which his touch is most evident.
Madonna is a flexible collaborator. She molds her role in the collaboration to complement the people she with whom is working. "When I work with people who seem uptight, I open them up. I try to get them to go off the beaten path, to improve and throw the rules out the window. When I work with somebody who's very chaotic and disorganized like William [Orbit], then I have the opposite effect: I toe the line and become more focused. Crack the whip. William's a genius, but he's completely disorganized." (Shea; Walters) Often, she will take the lead, and let the collaborators perform a purely supportive role. Says Nowels, "A lot of what it means to be a good songwriting partner for Madonna is to have her be comfortable sitting in a room with you so she's free to bring out what she has. I was there to give her some chords, accompany her muse, and get out of the way." Other times, she will divide the work, as she seemed to do with Orbit on Ray of Light. Madonna might give him some words and melodies she had written, then he would go into the studio and record music. Orbit would then return the music, and give her other music he recorded. Then Madonna would make changes suiting the new music in the melodies and words she had written and would write new material to match Orbit's other recordings. In other words, sometimes they would work very close to each other, sometimes they would intentionally put some distance between themselves. (Shea)
In fact, Ray of Light is a very good example of Madonna's working and collaborating processes. She started work with Babyface - at first free writing and then completing a few songs (but not recording them). But Madonna decided that these songs were too similar to her the ballads on her last album. She felt that it was time to make a change, so she actually abandoned these songs (Babyface was very understanding). (Shea)
While still trying to decide on a theme/style/attitude for her next album she worked with Rick Nowels, writing seven songs. This shows Madonna's effective use of collaboration to help generate ideas and continue working through a problematic time (figuring out what to do on the next album). Three of the songs ended up on the final release, and one of them, "The Power of Goodbye," is currently doing well on the charts. After Nowels, Madonna reunited with Patrick Leonard, co-writing several songs, including the albums first single, "Frozen." However, Madonna did not want Leonard to produce the album because she did not want his production sound, which would have made her album sound a little too much like their earlier work together.
Madonna finally decided on William Orbit as a collaborator for the rest of the album - the last of the songwriting and the production phases. Her choice seems to have been based on several factors. Electronica was being hyped up as the "next thing" by most of the music media at this time. Madonna certainly was aware of this, and had signed Prodigy, a moderately successful electronica group, to her label. In fact, she tried to collaborate with some people associated with them, but with no success. Another big factor was that she was a fan of his. She also felt that his sound would be the best compliment to her voice and writing: "What I wanted was his sensibility, the textures, the really high-tech sounds. But William also works from a very melancholy place."
The songwriting process between Orbit and Madonna was a little unusual for Madonna, who usually likes to be very hands on, or in the middle of everything. Says Madonna:
"...he would often give me tapes of snippets he was working on - eight-bar phrases, 16-bar phrases, stripped-down versions of what you hear on the record. And I'd listen to them over and over and it would just inspire lyrics. I'd start writing a little bit and then I'd go back to William and say, "Okay, let's expand on this musical idea." And as we'd expand on the music, I'd expand on the lyrics. That was true for most everything except the albums's last track, "Mer Girl." I decided I would write a song to the music as given to me, and when William asked me if I wanted to do something with it, I said, "I want it just like it is, I want you to put the tape up right now and I'm going to sing it." And I did it in one take." (Shea)William Orbit and Madonna co-produced all of the albums tracks except for "Little Star," and they did so quite skillfully. Madonna's songwriting and Orbit's production style give the album a unifying sound, despite the songs being co-written with three very different writers. Another element that helps tie things together is Craig Anderson's string arrangements for "Frozen" and "The Power of Good-bye." Anderson's wandering contrapuntal and unison passages are composed in such a way that they perfectly match Orbit's electronic style - they are obviously acoustic, but function in the "electronica" context.
As with any long-term collaboration, towards the end of the over four month long, full-time process of making the album, Madonna and Orbit started having some creative troubles. Considering the hours the two put into the project, this can simply be attributed to burnout. However, Madonna once again uses collaboration to help finish the album - she brings in Marius De Vries to help with the last few tracks. He and Madonna co-produced "Little Star," the only song on the album that Orbit did not have a hand in. The song sticks out a little on the album, but is adequately set up by its placement after "The Power of Goodbye" and "To Have and Not to Hold," and before "Mer Girl", the last track.
Curiously, though, the order of the tracks on the album was a point of contention. This problem was solved by giving multiple copies of the album, with the tracks in different orders, to many of the people involved in the project. Everyone listened to the different versions for a few weeks, and then a consensus was finally reached, which became the track order for the album. The only changes were the removal of one track. (Engel)
Madonna's music is an excellent example of the power and possibilities offered by musical collaboration. Indeed, Madonna's success is built on it. True, some of the songs that she did almost by herself, such as "Lucky Star," have been among her most successful, but her music is deepened and has developed through her many collaborations and choice of collaborators. Madonna realizes this, and consequently spends much time developing contacts and working with people. Although Madonna is a talented songwriter and producer, her bigger talent, and her skill, is in her use of collaboration.
Printed materials:
Blake, Andrew; Lloyd, Fran; Deconstructing Madonna, Madonna the Musician (pp. 17-28); 1993; B.T. Bratsford Ltd.
Sculatti, Gene; The Immaculate Collection Liner Notes; 1990; Sire Records and Warner Bros.
Web Sites:
Official Madonna Website: http://www.wbr.com/madonna/ Copyright © 1998 Warner Bros. Records
Official Evita Film Website: http://www.wbr.com/evita/ http://www.wbr.com/evita/cmp/mmm.html Copyright © 1996 Warner Bros. Records, Copyright © 1996 Cinergi Pictures Entertainment Inc. & Cinergi Production N.V. Inc.
Engel, Jason D J: MadonnaLand: http://www.madonnanet.com/mland/
Shea, Richard; William Orbit Information Site (interviews section): http://www.orbit.ndirect.co.uk/ © 1998 Interviews section contained excerpts from:
Madonna; The Immaculate Collection; Sire/Warner Bros. 1990
Madonna; Ray of Light; Maverick/Warner Bros. 1998
Madonna; Bedtime Stories; Warner Bros./Sire 1994
Madonna; Evita, the Complete Motion Picture Music Soundtrack; Warner Bros. 1996
Madonna; Something to Remember; Maverick/Warner Bros. 1995