by Lucy O'Brien
Bass player Guy Pratt, a London musician who came up through the punk mod scene before playing for Bryan Ferry and Pink Floyd in the ’80s, remembers her getting very irate when the drummer he had chosen for the sessions pulled out at the last minute. “That initially got me sacked,” Pratt told me. “Before I arrived in L.A., she was shouting to Pat, ‘If this fucking guy can’t get a fucking drummer to turn up he isn’t fucking playing on my record!’ Fair point. Pat had already had to sell me to her. I called him up. ‘Pat please, I gotta have this gig.’ Two days before I was meant to fly out, I was woken by the phone at four o’clock in the morning. I picked it up. ‘I hear you’re funny. Make me laugh,’ shouted this voice. I told her a joke, I did make her laugh, and that got me reinstated.”
The ordeal wasn’t over with, however. When he touched down at LAX, he rang Leonard and was told, “Can you come down to the studio? She wants you now.” Pratt got into his rented car feeling “absolutely knackered” after the flight from London. “I walk in, Madonna’s having dinner. ‘Thanks for coming.’ Very clipped, really horrible. Like, not thanks at all. And that was it. That’s all she wanted. ‘You can go home now.’”
The next day in the studio, Pratt was terrified. “She’s a formidable, frightening woman,” he recalls. “It stayed like that for a bit. Then I realized, you have to keep your wits about you. There were all these top L.A. session guys being very quiet and deferential, whereas Chester [Kamen, a guitarist] and I were the punk rockers. I thought, you’ve got to be fucking cheeky, or you’re not going to get anything on the record. I ended up getting into great arguments with her about Catholicism. She responded to it so well. She likes a bit of metal.”
Leonard’s choice of a few English players was deliberate. A fan of British rock, he wanted some of that attitude and quirkiness on the album. “Because True Blue had been so huge, he pretty much had free rein,” says Pratt. “We were recording it at Johnny Yuma, a fabulous new studio he’d built from the True Blue money.”
Not only was Madonna delving deep for lyrical content, she was also a new woman in the studio. Gone was the girl on the Like a Virgin sessions, just working on a hunch and instinct. With Like a Prayer, she had clear knowledge, not just of what different instruments were capable of but how to articulate and achieve the sounds she heard in her head. Guy Pratt recalls: “I remember the first take of my first session with all the band. We played the song ‘Oh Father’ once through with Madonna singing. As soon as we finished, she said: ‘OK, Jon [drummer Jonathan Moffet], do less of the high hat in the middle eight and more of a fill toward the end. Guy, I want duck’s eggs [semibreves] on the end, and Chester, bring in your guitar on the second verse…’ While singing this song for the first time with us, she noted what each of us had done, and could convey what she wanted in clear, concise English. We ran through it once again, did one take with vocals, once more with the strings, and that was it. I was amazed.”
Bruce Gaitsch was impressed with her decisiveness. “She’d say to Pat, ‘That’s as good as it’s gonna get.’ He’d raise an eyebrow. She’d say, ‘I’m serious. It’s done.’” Perhaps Madonna’s growing musical confidence led to a more personal album. She had to be more inside the music this time, because the album was more about her. “The whole record has a concept,” says Gaitsch. “She was getting in touch with her Catholic upbringing.” The Holy Trinity of the songs “Like a Prayer,” “Oh Father,” and “Promise to Try,” for instance, are a deep evocation of the effect that religion had on her life.
WHEN I was a young girl, my brother and sisters had this game of cards that, for want of a better name, was called Catholic snap. We had to pair together images of Church objects, like cruets (communion goblets), surplices (white linen vestments worn by the altar boys), and hosts (the wafers put on our tongue at communion). This was our catechism, a way of learning the liturgy. Those objects of Catholicism are indelibly imprinted on our minds. Catholics believe in transubstantiation: that the wine and wafer don’t just symbolize the body of Christ, they are the body of Christ. During the Mass they become the thing. It isn’t just a ritual; these objects are laden with transformative power. And every word in prayer has a precise meaning, over and above its everyday use.
This is the culture that Madonna grew up with. She collected crucifixes and rosary beads; for her, they weren’t just a prop, they were talismans. The crucifix is her central theme. “I don’t think that wearing the crucifix was an attempt to seek out controversy,” says Mary Lambert, director of the “Like a Virgin” and “Like a Prayer” videos. “I think it had meaning for her—religious significance, mystic significance. Madonna is a very religious person in her own way.” Madonna imbued her songs with concrete memories of her childhood faith. “Sometimes I’m wracked with guilt when I needn’t be. And that, to me, is left over from my Catholic upbringing,” she told the Rolling Stone writer Bill Zehme. “Because in Catholicism you are born a sinner and you are a sinner all your life. No matter how you try to get away from it, the sin is within you all the time…Catholicism is not a soothing religion. It’s a painful religion.”
What is remarkable about the songwriting on Like a Prayer is her use of liturgical words. On the title track, for instance, there is the surface meaning: forging sexuality and religion with fluent pop lyrics that sound easy on the ear. But underlying that is a rigorous meditation on prayer. “It’s a song that explores the word ‘prayer,’” says Andrae Crouch, leader of the Los Angeles Church of God choir that sang on the record. He told me that they researched the lyrics beforehand “to find out what the intention of the song might be. We’re very particular in choosing what we work with, and we liked what we heard.” The choir was well established in the L.A. community, and had sung for such artists as Quincy Jones and Chaka Khan, and on such Hollywood film soundtracks as The Color Purple. Their flamboyance matched Madonna’s conviction.
In this song, Madonna is unashamedly her mother’s daughter—kneeling alone in private devotion, contemplating God’s mystery. She sings of being chosen, of having a calling. Traditionally, a vocation is a summons by God. For her mother, a life of holiness meant looking after her children, being a good wife, and bearing her suffering with grace. A vocation that Madonna herself takes no less seriously is the fusing of female power in her music with spirituality and sexuality. Some Christians consider this blasphemous and see her as the fallen angel. Thinking she is lost, Madonna beseeches God in the song to help her. She has to surrender herself, like a child, before she can be rescued.
Feeling joy at being chosen, she is filled with an ecstatic sense of the Holy Spirit. This is emphasized by the full-blown gospel choir and church organ. Throughout the song, Madonna lurches from doubt to confirmation, and the music mirrors this, moving from the innocence of her voice and the choral harmonies to the segments where the drums kick in and the tempo swings. “Madonna wanted something churchy, a very full sound, so I tried to blow up what she did and make it as powerful as I could,” recalls Crouch. What makes it such a dynamic track is the sense of people possessed.
“That’s the best bass performance I’ve ever done on a record. The fact that I could do what I did on ‘Like a Prayer’ still startles me. It’s just nuts,” says Guy Pratt. “By the end, Madonna was going, ‘Guy, more! More!’ By the end of the fade I’d run out of licks and I had to go back to the beginning again.” He was so wrapped up in the moment that when he was later invited to hear a mix of the record, he couldn’t believe it was him. “There was this insane bass part, I thought, but no musician is allowed to perform on a record like that, this is meant to be a star vehicle for her. I asked Madonna: ‘The bass is amazing. Who’s that?’ ‘You, you dummy!’ she said.”
The song was a triumph and a number-one favorite with fans. As Pratt says, “Everyone from Johnny Marr to Dave Gilmour said, ‘Unarguably brilliant record.’” For Madonna, the song was something that emerged spontaneously between her and Pat Leonard. “I really wanted to do something gospel-orie
nted and a cappella, with virtually no instrumentation, just my voice and an organ,” she said. “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.”
Madonna was so immersed in the recording process that she didn’t have time to think about clothes and makeup. “You’d think she would look glamorous, but she didn’t come to the studio with diamond rings and glitter. I was expecting all the hoopla, I didn’t recognize her at first,” says Andrae Crouch. “She looked so normal—she wasn’t highbrow or nothin’ like that. She hugged us and made us feel comfortable.”
Crouch was struck by her dedication to the music. His sister Sandra was playing tambourine on the track, and for the recording they tried out different rhythms. After a while, Madonna stopped and said, “Sandra, will you go back to that bar thirty-two and do that,” and she tapped out the rhythm. Years of dancer training had given Madonna perfect timing. Crouch was shocked. “Madonna knew what bar it was and we’d gone through it just one time. I wouldn’t expect her to remember that in a thousand years—I can’t do that! She knows her music,” says Crouch.
Madonna’s focus meant that she went further than ever before into difficult feelings, and she wanted to keep the results clear and unadorned. Her decision to experiment with her voice “naked” works particularly well on the track “Promise to Try.” On this short, piano-led ballad, Madonna has an imaginary conversation with her mother, her voice husky with emotion. There’s the sadness of trying to keep her elusive, fading memory alive. Madonna knows she must let her mother go, but to do that means feeling utterly abandoned. It is not surprising that since her mother’s death, Madonna has tried to make the whole world love her, but the emptiness can never be filled. As an expression of grief, this song is notable for its restraint. “We did it with a double quartet and piano,” remembers string arranger Bill Meyers. “We pared it down. We could’ve put the whole thirty-five-piece orchestra on it, but we resisted that temptation.”
Instead, the orchestra ended up on “Oh Father,” the third song in her “Trinity.” This dramatic, slightly portentous ballad isn’t just about the disciplinarian father who, she thought, didn’t care. “It’s me dealing with all authority figures in life,” she said. Emphasizing each word, Madonna sings of her bewilderment at his disapproval and anger. Her delivery in places has a Courtney Love–style rasp, and she attacks the song with a personal passion. She says she recorded the song in “a very, very dark state of mind” while she was doing her Broadway stint with Speed-the-Plow.
The play was a bleak, cynical piece written by David Mamet. Madonna played the role of Karen, a secretary to a movie producer who bedded her on a bet. Karen later gets her own back, but is depicted as being just as seedy and conniving as the men who exploit her. In an attempt to exorcise the demons brought up by the part, Madonna found herself letting go in the recording of “Oh Father.”
She worked on the song with Pat Leonard 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 it,” Bill Meyers recalls. “It was a brilliant piece of work. She seemed very moved. The song suggested incest, and controversial themes like closet beatings and being afraid of him. I don’t know if it was autobiographical. Imagination is a powerful thing with artists; she could put herself in another person’s shoes.”
Madonna has never mentioned physical abuse in her family, though she has said that her father was a disciplinarian and that her stepmother was hard on her. It was probably more a case of emotional neglect: with her father locked up in grief, the children’s basic needs were taken care of, but there were no frills. When he married again, his new wife was wrapped up with the two babies, so the older children were often left to their own devices. Madonna’s girlhood was at times troubled and without much joy. “Maybe I wasn’t the greatest father in the world,” Tony Ciccone said later, “but life wasn’t easy for any of us.” Madonna used her imagination to escape. “Oh Father” is a potent example of the pictures she could create to express that bleak inner landscape.
Because of her difficult childhood, Madonna had insecurities, and this showed up in anxieties about her vocal performance. “She’s consistent,” says Meyers. “If she bends the note or sings something flat in a certain spot, she’ll do that each time. Some people need to do warm-up vocals, then hit their stride. Others burn out after a while, and some do it different every time. With Madonna, what she sang was what you were going to get. She didn’t vary it a whole lot. After we recorded ‘Oh Father,’ I said to her: ‘I think this is the strongest vocal performance you’ve ever given.’ She started to say thank you, then she looked confused. She’s so bright. She’d picked up what I meant. I realized I had to be careful, because she was very sensitive to her limitations.”
Besides religion, the other major theme that Madonna explored on Like a Prayer is family. There’s the percussive drama of “Till Death Us Do Part,” a song about domestic violence. “It’s very much drawn from my life, factually speaking…about a relationship that is powerful and painful,” Madonna said, obviously alluding to Sean. “It’s about a dysfunctional relationship, a sadomasochistic relationship that can’t end.” She drew the line at sacrificing herself, however, saying she would never want to stay in a violent relationship until death. Rapid-fire and moving, with a soaring melody, this is one of the strongest tracks on the album, an aching swan song to her marriage.
Also dedicated to family is the Sly Stone–influenced track “Keep It Together,” an upbeat meditation on sibling power. Produced by Steve Bray, it is robust and packed with harmonies. There is the sense that Madonna, isolated by fame and shaken by the failure of her marriage, is reaching back to the stability of family roots. Presenting a homey image of brothers and sisters joshing together, she felt a need to restore bonds that had become fraught or distant. Likewise with “Dear Jessie,” a slightly sugary lullaby to Pat Leonard’s young daughter, she harks back to a childlike innocence, summoning up a psychedelic fairy-tale landscape where pink elephants roam with dancing moons and mermaids. Madonna was to return to the lullaby more successfully on such later albums as Bedtime Stories and American Life—on this first attempt, she overdid the elaborate imagery.
Mining the same fairy-tale vein, she came up with a feel-good doo-wop style for “Cherish,” a plea to Cupid to provide her with a good match. The fanciful video, shot in the ocean spray by Herb Ritts, has Madonna looking delirious and cavorting with mermen. A song more typical for the old Madonna, this one would have fit more comfortably onto the more “candycoated” True Blue album, while other odd-ball tracks, like “Love Song” and “Express Yourself,” point to where she was going next.
Coproduced with Prince, “Love Song” is experimental, flawed, and rambling. Long-term admirers of each other’s work (and roughly equal in their superstardom), Prince and Madonna got together in the late 80s at his Paisley Park studio to write a musical. The process was haphazard, as the two of them had such different personalities. She liked things organized, quick, and simple, while his method was mercurial and improvisational. “[We] didn’t really finish anything,” Madonna said. “We started a bunch of stuff, then we would go on to the next thing.” Although they finished “Love Song” for her album, it has the feel of a work in progress—probably a reflection of how it was written. “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.” This was a new direction for her. Spare and intimate, with a lot of compression, dirty drum beats, and snare. Her voice was held in, clipped, and there in the mix as a mere texture. Each line of the song was like a long lick, and very Princeish in approach. A curious exercise for her, this was a flexing of musical muscles that lay the groundwork for future albums, like Erotica.
Then, bestriding the album like a colossus alongside
“Like a Prayer,” is “Express Yourself.” Produced by Steve Bray, it is a feminist call to arms, complete with muscular brass-playing and soulful voice. Here Madonna is the antimaterialism girl, exhorting her female audience to respect themselves. That means having a man who loves your head and your heart. If he doesn’t treat you right (and here’s the revolutionary rhetoric), you’re better off on your own. Like a female preacher, Madonna emphasizes each word of the chorus, invoking God and the power of orgasm. In parts Cosmo-woman, girl-talk, and swinging dance track, it presages the deliciously declarative stance of “Vogue” and shows Madonna moving from introspective to survivalist mode.
With its evocation of German expressionism and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the video for the song has become one of her best-known and most talked about. Directed by David Fincher, it depicts a cross-dressing Madonna holding sway over a factory of glistening musclemen in chains. She is the queen bee lording it over her workers. In this fantasy of sex and power, she wears an iron collar and chain, but she is in control. She summons a man into her boss’s boudoir, wrapping him in satin sheets. Not surprisingly, it became one of the most popular videos with her female audience.
TO CONCLUDE her album, Madonna returned to the religious theme with “Act of Contrition.” Beginning with whispered invocation, it features distorted guitar and backward-tracking of the gospel choir. Jubilant and anarchic, it is anything but contrite. When Madonna was born, a central tenet of the Catholic Church was confession. As historian James M. O’Toole writes, up to the mid-1960s, “confession had been central to American Catholic practice…it was something that Catholics did but Protestants and others did not. Often, Catholics did not like doing it, but they did it anyway…. Confession seemed to them to express something fundamental about human nature and about their own, individual relationship to God.”