From the Beginng she hit the stage in Germany
I bought the Vinyl Maxi and Album the next Day and it spins all the time.
The Rest is History all over.
She wasn't a one Hit Wonder..she became the biggest star all over.
She ist still my Light in the Dark...4ever
My mother bought Ray Of Light album in like 1998/1999, and I also had GHV2 and Music between 2001/2002 so I've been a listener since then! But I became a huge fan in 2006 after watching some of her older videos, I wad stunned.
I downloaded that performance at least a year after it happened, I think she was already on the Re-Invention Tour and I remember seeing several reports about the tour in the news and stopping what I was doing and looking up to the TV. I guess I found her interesting. Nothing about her age or relevancy or anything like that even crossed my mind. I was never someone to think about things like that about anyone, so it was easy to look up to interesting artists.
When I started going through her discography, I realised I already knew the songs subconsciously, but I never had a strong sense of her before I became a fan. She was just Madonna I guess, like the pope or something.
It's funny because it's literally my first memory, I remember looking through my parents' cd collection when I was like 3 and seeing this CD with the picture of the most incredible looking woman I had ever seen and asking them to play it for me. The cd was True Blue. Since that first time I heard it I was obsessed. Around that time I remember watching her What it Feels Like for a Girl music video on my uncle's tv at a party and I WAS OBSESSED (yes, my parents thought that a 5-year-old watching that music video was okay lmao). I researched and I found out that those two cool women were the same one (shook), so then I started to buy all her CDs with the little money I had saved.
Twenty-seven years ago, Madonna set the template for modern pop concerts with her Blond Ambition world tour.
From its hydraulic stage to Jean-Paul Gaultier's iconic costumes, it raised the bar for stadium-sized spectacle.
Now, after seven huge world tours, the star tells the BBC she's "exploring" a smaller-scale show in the future.
"I've done so many shows - world tours, stadiums, sports arenas, you name it - that I feel like I have to reinvent that now too," she explains.
"I like doing intimate shows and being able to talk directly to the audience.
"This is something I'm exploring right now: the idea of doing a show that doesn't travel the world, but stays in one place and utilises not only humour and the music in a more intimate setting but other people's music, as well, and other entertainment.
"Kind of a revolving door of amazing, gifted, unique talent - dancers, musicians, singers, comedians, me, humour. I don't know! Like, I'm trying to come up with all those ideas now."
The concerts will presumably owe much to the vaudeville-style Tears of a Clown show that Madonna performed twice in 2016 - once as a gift to fans in Australia, and again at a fundraiser for her Raising Malawi charity.
The low-key gigs featured the pop icon dressed as a clown, riding a tricycle, chatting to the audience and telling jokes when not performing stripped-back renditions of some of her favourite songs.
Footage of the Australian concert appears on the star's new DVD, released on Friday, which documents her 2015-16 Rebel Heart Tour.
In an exclusive interview with BBC News, she talked about touring life, changing attitudes to sex, and her recent dispute with a courier company...
Before we start, there's one thing I need to know:
Did your FedEx package ever arrive?
Ha ha! Yes, it has. FedEx is blaming customs, customs is blaming FedEx and we'll never know what happened. But I have it now.
So, I saw the Rebel Heart tour when you were in London and the DVD does a really good job of capturing what it was like to be in the audience.
How do you go about that?
I was there every step of the way, every day for months and months. It's really hard to capture the true feeling of the excitement and the passion and the heat and the blood, sweat and tears. I'm pleased with the way it came out.
There's a particularly touching sequence during True Blue, where everybody in the audience embraces each other.
I know, it's a very sweet, emotional moment in the show. I didn't expect it to be, but when I look back at the DVD it almost brings a tear to my eye because everyone seems so in love.
How do you put a show like this together? Where do you get the ideas?
Everything's based around my song choice. So first, I go through my catalogue of songs with my band and I start working on things that excite me and inspire me in the moment. Some songs I'm sick of doing and I don't want to do them. Other songs I say, "No, I did that on the last tour, I don't want to do it again."
So I try to rotate things and I also try to reflect my current mood and what I've been feeling, and what's been inspiring me artistically or filmically, politically, philosophically. I try to put songs together in groups that have thematic connection, and then I try to tell a story. And then I do the visuals. It's quite a process.
What are the songs you don't want to do again?
Well, I tend to not want to do the songs I did on the tour before. That's what I mean. So if I did Material Girl on the tour before, or Express Yourself on the tour before, then I'll say, "OK, I did that for 88 shows. I can't do it again."
How do you keep a healthy balance between new songs and your back catalogue?
It's just playing in rehearsal. It's really hard for me, especially with my older songs, to do them with the original arrangement. Because 33 years later, after doing it for so long, you just have to reinvent things. Well, I do.
And it's fun for me to take an '80s pop song and turn it into a salsa song, or turn it into a samba, or make an uptempo song into a ballad.
The overarching theme of the tour was being a rebel. In the intro you say, "when fascist dictators come for you dressed as righteous men" you have to rise up and take a stand.
If you were doing the tour against the current political backdrop, would that message feel more relevant?
Yeah, I created that voiceover for my short film Secret Project,. I feel like it was a foreshadowing of things to come, like a prophecy.
You felt something in the air?
I did then - and I think people all thought I was being a little bit dramatic and extreme, but I felt like I was witnessing the beginning of it on the tour previous [to Rebel Heart]. And, of course, look what's happening in the world right now. It's pretty crazy.
Twenty-seven years ago, the Pope tried to get one of your shows banned. Now you have pole-dancing nuns and nobody bats an eyelid. Is that progress?
Is it progress? Well, I guess in some ways you could call that progress. When I released my Sex book, the idea of someone being scantily-clad on the street was an outrage. But look at social media today and it's nothing.
People get used to things, but I wouldn't call that progress. What I think of as progress is people becoming more open-minded, and people understanding the difference between art and exploitation.
When I was banned by the Pope, I was playing with the ideas of religion and sexuality, which are usually kept completely apart. Sex is considered a sin in the Catholic church. And I was questioning that and challenging that point of view because I don't, obviously, agree with it.
So now that no one's batting an eyelash about nuns on the stripper poles, it doesn't mean that the Vatican or the Catholic church is soul-searching or investigating whether they made the right choices. I don't think people are thinking that maybe sexuality and God don't need to be separate. That, to me, would be progress.
The DVD also includes the Tears of a Clown show you did in Melbourne. Was that a one-off or a trial run for a different type of Madonna concert?
I like doing intimate shows and being able to talk directly to the audience; to play with them and use humour and pathos and truth, and share my life - and also make up stories. I like the freedom of it and I like the intimacy of it, and I would like to explore doing it more in the future.
Maybe a residency?
Yeah, a residency. If I look back at the Rebel Heart tour, my favourite [part] was really the last section where I got to just sit on the stage and play my ukulele and sing La Vie en Rose and talk to the audience. [it was] just more intimate. More audience participation and connecting to human beings - I feel I'm craving that more and more.
Did it feel like there was more room for improvisation in that section?
Yeah, I have freedom and I can make mistakes. That's another thing I do in Tears of a Clown - if I start a song off wrong and I make a boo-boo, I just turn around and go "Stop! Let's start again!"
When you're doing a sports arena show, you're linked up to video, you can't stop. Once the train leaves the station, you have to keep going.
There's a certain kind of adrenalin rush to that - but there's no room for error. So I like the idea of mistakes and freestyling. Free-falling, really. It's more exciting to me right now.
Madonna: Rebel Heart Tour is out now on DVD, CD and Blu-Ray and via digital retailers.
line break
Catalog No.UIXO-1001
JAN/ISBN4988031241646
Product Type Blu-ray
TV StandardNTSC
Number of Discs1
Label/DistributorUNIVERSAL MUSIC
Running Time 119minutes
Region free
Subtitles Japanese
People who ordered the bundle via her site aren't receiving their shirts?
Word is Tears of a Clown is pretty much all black and white. It has a full performance of Don't Tell Me, Borderline, some of her jokes and portions of Holiday. So I guess the Don't Tell Me mentioned included in the press release was true?
Like a Prayer is great but is similar to LAP/LAV with her outfit switching so often.
AUG092017
Patrick Leonard On Madonna, Part 2: Don't Underestimate Their Point Of View
Yesterday, I published the first part of my chat with Patrick Leonard, the musician who co-wrote so many classic songs with Madonna, and who is bringing an instrumental show of their work to NYC on September 12 at Joe's Pub.
Now, check out the second and final part of the interview, in which Leonard talks about how his daughter inspired “Dear Jessie,†the time he lost seven Madonna tracks in a limo and his work with Ms. Ciccone on the aborted film project Hello, Suckers! ...
BC: “Who's That Girl†is one of those songs whose title is used over and over to describe Madonna. Was there any thought put into its application to her overall mystique, or is that way reading into it? [Laughs]
PL: Way overthinking it. [Laughs] We were working, and there was a movie, and she needed songs for it, and we wrote them. And the movie was called Who's That Girl. [Laughs] Or did they change the name of the movie after we wrote the song? [The film was originally entitled Slammer. — Ed.]
BC: So many of Madonna's movie songs are superior songs. What was it about doing what was essentially an assignment that led to such amazing records?
PL: This is heady, philosophical bullshit, but when you have a 90-minute piece of content and a bunch of people involved with different desires and needs and agendas and storylines, there’s just a lot of emotional energy that you can put your toe in. Suddenly, there’s this giant, moving thing around you that took people years to make. I believe you can tap into that. It’s a lot harder staring at a blank piece of paper alone.
BC: Madonna is often characterized as manipulative and very planned out. When you were working on Like a Prayer, did she come to you with any direction as far as this being a more personal record, a real reinvention?
PL: I think it happens naturally. In hindsight, I can see it. I remember the conversations we had, even questions about lyrics. She’d ask, “Is this too direct?†I remember these things happening innocently. If there was a grand plan, I didn’t know what it was.
BC: I've always thought she was just better at working with what happened to her rather than knowing how everything she did would be received.
PL: That’s what an artist’s job is — to reflect what’s going on; in some ways, to reflect and enhance and embellish.
BC: I must ask you about “Dear Jessie†since it was named for your daughter!
PL: I have a moment in my mind that I remember, because in my studio, Madonna would sit on the couch and I would sit at my keyboard and I would show her what I had and we would make adjustments and we started working on that song and it just didn’t quite make any sense at first — it was a subject matter question. I remember using the song and title “Dear Prudence†as a reference and she said, “What about ‘Dear Jessie’?†and I said, “That’ll work.†She then wrote those lyrics and sang that demo. Bad-ass. And I have that demo, too, the day we did it. I put a little snippet on Instagram and people were saying, “God, it changed so much.†Truth is, we took the drums off. Otherwise, it’s the same recording. [Laughs] We added a couple other little things to it.
BC: When did your daughter realize how cool it was to be the basis of a song composed by her father and Madonna?
PL: I think she was in her twenties. People started saying, “You’re the Jessie from ‘Dear Jessie.’†She thinks it’s cool. There’s quite a few pictures of them together. Madonna’s an incredible mother and loving parent and in those days, here was this adorable little girl that was around all the time and they bonded, they really did. For that laugh on “Dear Jessie,†Jessie came down to the studio on the last day and I think my assistant chased her around the room to make her laugh. It was her first overdub. [Laughs]
BC: I wanted to ask you about non-Madonna album tracks, like “Just a Dream†for Donna De Lory, “Possessive Love†for Marilyn Martin and “Tell Me†for Nick Kamen. You worked on these with Madonna, but were they intended for her and then handed off?
PL: I think “Possessive Love†was just me asking her a favor. And the Nick Kamen song, I remember she knew Nick and Nick’s brother Chester had played guitar on Like a Prayer, so it was just something like, “Keep it in the family.†I don’t think any of those songs were songs we wrote and didn’t use and somebody else got them. There’s only a couple of songs, and there might not even be a couple — “Angels with Dirty Faces†is the only song I can think of where we wrote a song and wrote a lyric and made a demo and didn’t use it.
BC: People freaked out over “Angels with Dirty Faces,†an unused track from the Like a Prayer sessions. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
PL: I was surprised to find that one. When I heard it, I thought, “Oh, yeah, I forgot about this.†It all came back to me, and as it was playing, I thought, “This doesn’t quite work.†[Laughs] If you heard it, there’s all of these good things about it and it sounds great and she sounds great singing it and it seems like a must, but there’s that weird, intangible thing where you go, “There’s something missing. This one isn't gonna work.†I have an issue with record companies that release albums from people that were made years ago and they put these bonus tracks on it of stuff that didn’t make it on the original release. Most likely, the artists didn’t want you to hear this in the first place; they probably still don’t.
BC: Did the '30s Tin Pan Alley sound come easily for you when you did the I'm Breathless tracks with Madonna?
PL: It was easy-ish because my dad was a jazz sax player, influenced by that era. So I grew up with Gershwin and swing and big bands. I played “standards’ with my dad when I was 10 years old. So that style is somewhere tucked away in me.
I was just looking at the original chart for “Something to Remember,†and there’s not even an eraser mark on the page. Almost like I knew what I was doing. [Laughs] We did the whole thing, start to finish, in about three weeks. I remember that it was fast and fun to do.
BC: After that, it was a while before you did “I'll Remember.†Madonna is often attacked as a love 'em and leave 'em artist; did you ever think you had just worked with her for the last time? Was that a concern?
PL: No. We weren’t a band. These were choices. “I’ll Remember†came with With Honors. I did the score for With Honors, which was directed by Alek Keshishian, who was a very good friend of hers. Richard Page [of Mr. Mister] and I actually wrote the initial version of “I’ll Remember†and I don’t remember, I think Alek asked her if she would come in and sing it. She came in, she made some changes in it, I don’t remember how much she changed, but I know that Richard is credited on it and I know that he and I worked on the song initially. I found a cassette with just piano and her singing it the first time and her saying, “Okay, let’s try it.†Like always, she nails things. I don’t know exactly where the lyric content came from. I don’t know if Richard wrote ‘em or Richard wrote ‘em and she changed ‘em — I don’t know. “I’ll Remember†is not about my memory. [Laughs]
BC: After all the '80s pop, the rock of Like a Prayer, the '30s ditties — how at ease were you with Ray of Light, another right turn for Madonna on which you worked?
PL: We went to Florida to write those songs. She and I were in touch, and we hadn’t been in touch for a long time. I recently found the letters that went between us before we started work, where we decided to do this again. These letters say a lot about the decision process. It’s, “Oh, yeah, we wrote some really good songs together, let’s do it again.†[Laughs]
She did give me some direction early on. For “Frozen,†she said, “I would like something that’s The English Patient meets Nine Inch Nails.†We’d done the demos in Florida, which were quite different than what the record ended up because of William Orbit — who did genius work — but it was exotic, maybe not electronic necessarily, but maybe more exotic ... we had chant samples and were really planning on going for it in some crazy way, and then William came along and she wrote me and then we spoke and she was very generous about saying, “Is it okay if I do this, because I think he’s brilliant and I think it’s a good idea.†In the way these things go, all I could do was be supportive and as it turns out, I’m very glad I was.
But the demos for that record are fun, like for “Skin†and “Sky Fits Heaven†— they’re so bizarre! And I’ve never even heard of anyone having them.
I had a terrifying experience. When we were leaving Miami, having written them, I had a cassette that just said “M†on it and I had a rental car and when I returned the car, I left the tape in it. When I got on the plane, I thought, “Oh, my God ... I just left seven new Madonna songs on a cassette in a rental car ...†but they never turned up. So someone took that cassette outta there and they threw it away. [Laughs]
BC: Every true-blue Madonna fan knows about Hello, Suckers!, the proposed movie musical about Texas Guinan you worked on with her in 2004 but that was ultimately abandoned. What do you remember of those sessions?
PL: It was a re-imagining of cabaret stuff, and I don’t remember how many songs we did — I’m currently transferring those drives just for safety’s sake because they’re on an old format — but they were reimagined things and I think we wrote two new songs. I don’t remember the names of them. One of them was a ballad. And I remember that we sat and wrote this song, I think I’d done the musical part in the morning and she showed up and wrote the lyric and went in this little booth in this little studio I had at the time and sang it and came out and said ... what did she say? “Just like the old days†or “Some things never change,†something along the lines of, “Sounds like another great song.â€
These were funky, funky demos. These weren’t the kind of demos we were doing in the early days where I was doing them in my studio with all my stuff hooked up and knowing that potentially everything we recorded was gonna turn into a record, so, “It should be as good as we can get it right now.†This was kinda funky, like, “Let’s just get these demos done.â€
It got caught up in some kind of political thing and it just went away. I thought it was cool at the time. I thought it was a good thing, and there were some things on there that were really fun. I’m remembering that she was ferocious like she always was, doing these performances that were really off-the-wall, but really brilliant.
“Boum,†which leaked a few years back, and was not supplied by Leonard.
BC: Madonna once said Patrick Leonard “encouraged her as a songwriter to dig deep and explore areas of my emotional life that I possibly hadn't really gotten into yet.†You gave her that ... what do you think she gave you?
PL: She’s so much stronger than me; if I taught her anything, it was how to be weak.
BC: You taught her well! She has many beautiful moments of vulnerability in her work, most of which are overlooked in favor of the tough stuff.
PL: That’s for sure. What did she do for me? It’s a big question. There’s a lot that she did for me. In all these years in all this stuff, there was a flicker of unintended disrespect on my part. We got over it. There’s always been mutual respect, and I think that it isn’t often where the artist and the unseen collaborator feel like they shared equally and fairly, and I do.
Something about humility and gratitude, really. When I’m on Instagram and people say, “You guys need to work together,†and, “She needs you,†I wish there was a way I could get them all in front of me and say, “You guys, this isn’t right and this isn’t fair to her. You’re still fans and you need to really look at what she’s doing and what she’s trying to say. It may well be that there’s a subtlety in it that’s everything you need, you’re just not looking ‘cause you’re stuck in the past.†It’s not fair to her and I don’t like that, nor would I want someone saying it about me. It’s one of the reasons I’ve avoided looking back on music. I don’t want to go back to something and have people say, “That’s the best thing you’ve done.†I was 28 years old then, I’m 61 now. So what should I do? Bury myself in the yard? [Laughs]
It’s difficult for artists. There are almost none that I know that’ve actually been able to somehow do it more than a couple times. At some point, it’s sort of your job to teach, and you teach with what you’ve created because it’s your reference book, it’s the textbook you made, and it’s just the way that we’re wired. As much as I’m still trying all the time, it has occurred to me that it’s time to look back and talk about these things a little bit because they have value to people ... and maybe there’s some lesson or some story or something in them.
BC: Madonna is consistently attacked as a non-artist, someone who has somehow skated by for 35 years on sex and hype. How do you react when people scoff at her musicality, who don't see her as an artist?
PL: It pisses me off, to be honest. The people that do get credited as being real artists oftentimes are just “cool†and that gets interpreted as art. And these days, there are way too many talent-show winners, and they get called artists because they have some crazy-good voice. I have issues with these things, but I won’t go into it because I’ll probably have my house burned down by the people that make Auto-Tune. I can assure the world listening and looking at Madonna that they don’t have any reason to ever defend her or feel insecure about it and all I can say is I’ve worked with a lot of people — I’ve worked with a lot of people — and ... hard to be any better or more artistic than her.
There’s people with a more controlled voice — the word “better†is not fair, because how can you have a better voice than the voice that sang “Like a Prayer� You just go through the list of singer-songwriters through the years — Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, none of these people were “singers†But these are the ones that the most art came from. I think her lyrics were taken for granted all those years ago; you look at the individual lines and this is what people need to think about now, those statements she made all those years ago. I’m certain she’s still doing it.
My knee-jerk is to defend her always, but then I have the demos where she sang a song, having written it 15 minutes before, and it was a #1 record and remains valid 30 years later, who’s gonna tell me that’s not a real artist?
Slice from original Dear Jessie demo - no vocal
https://instagram.com/p/BXJOX9Ahro9/
Final Tour shows In Sydney To Be Filmed
March 15, 2016
Danny B. Tull and Nathan Rissman, both of whom have worked extensively with Madonna on her feature films and tour movies, will direct the live video which will be part of a larger project to be released at a later date.
Like A Prayer is a one the best pop songs in history..... & its by Madonna. The crowd reaction to it is always great.
Why wouldn't you want it? I understand some people wanting other songs more, but thats really another thing.
Would you prefer just the Showtime version with no extra song at all?
I also hope she continues to sing it on her future tours and will miss it when it goes missing again.
Remix, mashup or singalong it always works.
And the fighting continues on Madonna Infinity. Meanwhile, across the globe, Madonna delivered a special live performance that slayed Leo's event with some of the best sounding musical updates she's given in a long time. I mean, La Isla is close to the original arrangement but it's also slightly made a little...brighter if you will. And she put the "aaaah" background vocals back in which I've been missing for so long!
therooboy reacted to The Ghost in Everyone needs to download this audio it's amazing!
therooboy got a reaction from Frank in Rebel Heart Tour DVD | Showtime Premiere
therooboy got a reaction from Fighter in Rebel Heart Tour DVD | Showtime Premiere