acolyte

He did do production work on both albums, but are we 100% sure that he was the mastering engineer for either of them? Official credits on madonna.com unfortunately only list writers and producers but no personnel beyond that... which has been driving me crazy for ages.

What do you mean? Mike Dean hasn't been involved as a principal mixer or engineer in any other project besides Finally Enough Love. I think he did a fantastic job there...

This film is absolutely sensational. I am beyond impressed. Makes me so excited for the tour!

Posted this somewhere else, but I guess it's more appropriate in this thread: I simply can't imagine her doing a tour without a recent studio album at the heart of it, not to mention a greatest hits tour in the sense people are hoping for. Personally, I'm prepared for this show to be based on Finally Enough Love and her legacy as a dance act. She seemed really into the process of compiling and editing mixes for that retrospective and I can see her, for better or for worse, approaching the tour from that angle. As in the show being a continuous dance set drawing on her favourite mixes which might actually get her to play a crowd-pleasing selection of songs but not in the way casual concert goers would like to hear them. This will most likely get billed as a greatest hits tour for promotional purposes, but I'm pretty sure she's going to do everything she can to make this feel as un-greatest-hits-tour-ish as she possibly can. She's never really dipped into this walk down memory lane thing except for minor and singular moments. Then again, it's been almost four years since Madame X and we don't really know where she's at personally and artistically. Who knows what she's up to. Given the entire process, I don't think she'd agree to a tour unless she has something substantial to say. I don't think she'd put herself through a world tour for the money only.

I simply can't imagine her doing a tour without a recent studio album at the heart of it, not to mention a greatest hits tour in the sense people are hoping for. Personally, I'm prepared for this show to be based on Finally Enough Love and her legacy as a dance act. She seemed really into the process of compiling and editing mixes for that retrospective and I can see her, for better or for worse, approaching the tour from that angle. As in the show being a continuous dance set drawing on her favourite mixes which might actually get her to play a crowd-pleasing selection of songs but not in the way casual concert goers would like to hear them.

Do you reread your posts before hitting "submit"?

[edit]

So, what you're saying is that she's a nutcase that's not to be taken seriously due to her mental health issues? And to say that her stunt had little impact? On what and whom exactly? Because the Church didn't crumble to pieces? But what about all those thousands of survivors of sexual abuse who have been shunned, shamed and silenced? Do you seriously think that didn't have any impact on them? What she did was more than brave. I think you highly underestimate and misinterpret the "controversy" and backlash that followed. People didn't want to hear it. They just didn't want to face the reality and unspoken truth. We talk about "sexual violence" and "mental health issues" all the time because these are terms that can easily be brought up by the dinner table. What it really is, though, is rape and mental illness. Sinéad herself is one of far too many people raped by the apparatus of institutionalised religion. Literally. To give a voice to the suffering of countless people, perhaps a bit of hope, a sense of representative visibility AND naming the root of all evil is never something to be taken with a pinch of salt. In fact, it should be applauded and treated with respect, regardless of one's psychiatric records, public struggle with trauma and whatever it is that makes you uncomfortable about it and made you say these heinous things.

No offence, but being able to afford a concert ticket is one thing. Being able to afford a non-working day is something entirely different. Unless you have the time and money, jetting over to Manila because she plays there on a Saturday is a bit of a reach. I know you didn't put it that way, but I hope my point comes across.

Given the train of thought she seems to be on lately and all that Dita teasing it would be a shame if Erotica wouldn't be the first reissue announced this year. That album seems so relevant now, especially in terms of her legacy and where public discourse and pop culture are in terms of sexual self-expression and exploration. I'm not saying it's her magnum opus necessarily, but it encompasses everything she's stood up for her entire career in the most consistent way. I don't care much about remixes (though I know many of you do) given almost all of them are circulating in acceptable quality, but I would kill for "Dear Father", "Love Hurts", "Goodbye to Innocence", "Shame", "You Are the One" and "You Thrill Me" to make their debut in restored quality. Then again, she's not too keen on looking back, so her perspective of what's worth including on a reissue is most likely to differ tremendously from our expectations. Maybe it's my literature degree, but I'm all for comprehensive compilations, collecting every stage and variation of a work. Her tentatively revisionist and perhaps slightly opportunistic approach might interfere with that. Hopefully she'll find as much joy in these abandoned recordings after listening to them for the first time in year as we have had for years...

She wasn't just a few minutes late. A few hours is more like it. Dozens of shows were cancelled, some which minutes before doors were supposed to open. People were wildly upset for being stood up or left waiting for hours in the freezing cold. Losing money on all sorts of non-refundable expenses. The media was all over it and that didn't help to rectify her diva reputation. Nobody talked about the reason behind all those cancellations. Yes, news about the injury spread, but I haven't seen a single article that bothered to address the true physical and emotional hell she was going through at the time. I was at that Paris show when she broke down in tears on stage and it was heartbreaking. We as fans know about this and even though it may have caused us inconvenience, the general public certainly hasn't picked up on those nuances and continues to harbour the sentiments they obviously do. Would you as a casual listener consider forking out 300 quid to see an artist that is known to be late, cranky and prone to last minute cancellations, on a weekday not knowing if public transport will still be running to take you home? That is why I doubt she'll sell out stadiums easily. She has a reputation for good and bad reasons and I don't think that's ever going to change. One more thing: I never said Madonna wouldn't put together a superb piece of live theatre or that the quality of her shows is to be doubted. I didn't criticise what she's been up to artistically. All I did was point out that non-fans would be rather hesitant to buy a ticket based on her reputation. Most of us are probably going to be there and having a good time, but I'm afraid there aren't enough of us for her to sell out an entire tour. This is how I see it and, yes, maybe we do indeed live in different realities.

I don't believe it myself, but let's say that rumour is true (lol)... why wouldn't she do a setlist like that? Tickets go on sale long before we know anything about the show and that stadium audience won't know what hit them until the show is over. She's never been particularly interested in doing a crowd pleasing show in the first place, so here's hoping something along those lines will actually happen. With her touring reputation in the toilet, the thing that has me frowning upon that stadium tour idea is if she'll actually be able to sell enough tickets. She'll do whatever she wants as usual, but filling a massive venue is a completely different thing.

Some parts kind of sound like the interview with Stuart was conducted separately before Madonna ended up "commenting" on it? Perhaps due to scheduling conflicts. Then again, there are quite a few moments when he addresses her as "you" and they directly respond to each other, laughing and so on. Perhaps it's just two separate interviews and a brief conversation between the two edited into and recorded for this podcast. But the sound quality of his and her bits stays the same. It's weird. Has anyone bothered to reach out to Song Exploder?

I always thought the song was inspired by Nancy Friday's My Secret Garden which collects quite a multitude of women's sexual fantasies. The SEX book, too, seems oddly related to it. In fact, nearly ever fantasy discussed in this book checks all the boxes of what is included in SEX. Has M ever talked about this book or any other work by Nancy Friday?

Looks like she's recently had her buccal fat removed to accentuate her cheek area. This procedure is often done on patients who are inclined to stop or reduce regular use of facial filler since the reduction of buccal fat creates optical fullness in the mid-face area. This is just a transitory appearance, but I think she looks fine already. Camera flashes make it look worse than it is. Once the the cheek filler wears off naturally, this should actually look fantastic. Dissolving the filler prematurely could cause visible loss of tightness in the cheek area which wouldn't be aesthetically desirable.

Principal vocal recording sessions for the Evita soundtrack began in September 1995. The new material for Something to Remember was recorded the same month which means that she had already been training for quite some time I don't know if we have an exact recording date for "I Want You," but the fact that the music video was shot in August should narrow down that time frame somewhat sufficiently... She trained for six months with Joan Leder, starting probably around March 1995.

Some of you may have seen this already, but this is an interesting "expert" video on everything she's likely had done https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orqt61nCQCU

I never said that was the main problem. The problem here is the fact that the "live album" is an awkwardly butchered audio version of the film with mostly clunky transitions that don't blend well at all. Like a badly compiled MP3 CD bootleg.

After the clusterfuck that was the live album, I had extremely low expectations for the film itself. And now I'm glad I did because I'm truly blown away. This is by far her most beautifully produced concert film. The attention to detail and Ricardo's cinematic approach is breathtaking – he really did an amazing job. It's incredible how many memories of the shows I've seen this brought back. As someone who used to work in theatre, I stand reaffirmed that she conceived an incredibly intimate and artistically substantial show on that scale. Makes me kind of nostalgic for those past theatre days... I wish I could go back in time and relive the show in person. I'm so grateful we have this recording now – I'll go back to it quite frequently, I presume. There were some things, though, which I felt were quite... weird. All of it is outweighed by the overall excellence of this production but still: the Madame X Manifesto being moved to the beginning makes a lot of sense for the streaming viewer, especially since it's interspersed with a little retrospective of Madonna's past controversies and sort of reinforces the idea that she's "always been" Madame X. I find it too crucial to the "spy character" unveiled subsequently in the show, though, so I wish it had remained in its original position. Also, I would have preferred for the Vatican speech to start the documentary with the controversy montage instead... that just didn't work for me as a segue from "God Control" to "Dark Ballet." The black and white footage in "I Don't Search I Find" seemed so out of place, too – especially since that scene was lit so beautifully in concert (and we saw a snippet of it being filmed that way on Ricardo's Instagram profile). I'm puzzled by the reliance on non-soundboard sources for her speeches... How did that happen? While this tour did not have a live screen feed inside the venue, every show is nevertheless archived as a multitrack recording. Something else I really didn't like was the use of secondary video material that simply wasn't present during the show. While it may add some dramatic effect for the average viewer, I thought that was greatly unnecessary, mostly so in "American Life," the Fado Section and "Come Alive." That kind of distracted me from the performances. All in all, this concert film's flaws are easily excused by the passion, blood, sweat and tears that it obviously took to make it. It doesn't happen as much anymore these days, but this concert/documentary really makes me proud to be a Madonna fan!

I care because continuity is particularly important in a live album to me. It's just so weird that they'd go through the trouble of actually mixing the whole thing to near perfection and then sequence the songs in such a clunky way. Some very hopeful part of me still hopes this is an accidentally uploaded defunct version given the "Fado Club"/"Extreme Occident"/"Rescue Me"/"Medellín"/"Frozen" confusion.

I feel like the guitar in "Frozen" is a lot more prominent than it was at the Paris shows I've seen. And I think you're definitely right about "Vogue" – the pitch is significantly different.

I've heard bootlegs with better editing than this. A commercial release like that is indeed quite offensive to my ears. Just to clarify: I love how the songs sound on their own, it's just the continuity of the live album as a whole that has me extremely disappointed. It's like a YouTube playlist on random shuffle.

This live album (or whatever this is) is an abysmal catastrophe. What a lacklustre serving of absolute nonsense. They could have tried to issue a real live album featuring all the songs to commemorate the show as it was since absolutely no-one except for the fans care about an audio-only release. Instead we get a total mess of butchered transitions, random fade-outs, muffled audience sounds and speech recordings that sound like they've been recorded from inside the phone pouches. This load of crap isn't worth a single penny. In fact, it's actually kind of offensive to even consider releasing this to the public. I get that she wanted to reframe the concert film as some kind of statement piece, but it seems like all she's achieved is to erase any hint that this used to be a continuous live performance. I am extremely disappointed because the mixing of the songs themselves is great but everything else just sucks so bad.

The biggest missed opportunity in my opinion was "Who's That Girl." It could have been a substantial contribution to the Madame X persona on tour and there are so many ways in which this song could have been reimagined, most fittingly a dance-reggae version. The fado section was a bit lengthy when I saw it in Paris despite being shortened already, but "Who's That Girl" would really have elevated the mood (and pleased long-time and casual fans) before the typewriter segue into "Medellín." In my head it makes so much dramaturgical sense: "Who's That Girl" tracing out the elusiveness of the Madame X character, the typewriter intro then going into why she's constantly on the run and then presenting her latest transformation as a cha-cha instructor with "Medellín" – before concluding that journey's cycle with the contemplative "Extreme Occident" looking for a benchmark and steadiness of character.

I guess for "God Control" they're going for better close-up shots of her standing behind/in front of the backdrop during the song's opening.