by Lucy O'Brien
Nowells is adamant that though they worked at such a pace, Madonna didn’t stint on quality. “She’s a real artist. She understands how to channel and compose a song. It’s not just jamming melodies. She understands what a chorus and verse should do, where to put a bridge, how to work her melodies.” When they wrote the song “The Power of Goodbye,” for instance, he was struck by her lyric-writing. “It was deep, poetic, and intelligent. When she’s on and at her best, she’s on a par with Joni Mitchell or Paul Simon,” he enthuses. The economy and elegance of her writing, especially on this album, was a reflection of her voracious reading. She took particular inspiration from Shakespeare’s sonnets and spare, provocative 60s female poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.
Nowells describes “The Power of Goodbye,” a meditation on ending, as “a beautiful poem. I was knocked out. Touched. I had a jungle drum beat, a soft pad sound and some minor chords that she jammed to. Later in the studio William Orbit cut the jungle beat in half and morphed it into a reggae beat, so it ended up with a different feel.” As each day passed, they explored new genres, trying out varied textures. It wasn’t always straightforward. One day they spent hours struggling with one idea—Nowells had a soundtrack sample from the cult German 70s film Vampyros Lesbos. “Madonna liked it, thought it was a cool title, and good to create something around the sample from this weird, freako film.” By six o’clock, however, they had to admit it wasn’t working. “I was panicking a bit, I wanted to have a good day,” recalls Nowells. “Then I just started playing three chords, and Madonna started singing. I followed her, and the rest was stream of consciousness.”
The result was “Little Star,” a warm, loving lullaby to her daughter. Probably because it was approaching the witching hour of seven p.m., Lola was on her mind. Madonna had spent all afternoon away from the baby and missed her. Within the hour, she and Nowells had a complete demo, a song that expressed some of the awe and overwhelming love that a new mother feels for her baby. Inspired by the moment, Madonna sang of how much hope and healing this new bond held out for her. The tenderness of the song also made a deep impression on Nowells.
“The next day I was driving to the studio and played back the demo in my car. I started crying because it was so beautiful. It affected me—to be able to create a song about a child that was so moving and carefully expressed.”
The other song they cowrote for the album was “To Have and Not to Hold.” Nowells wanted to create a beat around a Latin samba feel. “The verse came quickly—Madonna had it prepared—but I was struggling with the chorus. I got lost in the key relationships, and was having difficulty with the B-flat minor.” For inspiration, they listened to the music of Brazilian artist Astrud Gilberto. There was something in her technique, the subtly shifting modulations and remote harmonic leaps, that unlocked the puzzle for them. “Then I got the right chords, and we went on to finish the song. That was on our first day. You never know when you jump in with somebody. Early on you have to make things happen—a lot was tied to how successful we were that day. I was so pleased we ended up with this track that sounded smart, elegant, and European.”
Madonna also cowrote some songs with Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, but they were abandoned because, according to him, they had a “‘Take a Bow’–ish kind of vibe and Madonna didn’t want, or need, to repeat herself.” The favorite to oversee the album was William Wainwright (aka William Orbit), then a relative unknown who had emerged from the underground U.K. rave scene. Seven years earlier, he had done a memorably atmospheric remix of “Justify My Love,” and Madonna felt that Orbit could take her music into a totally new direction, giving the album a coherence that Bedtime Stories had lacked.
Orbit came out of a scene that had changed the face of dance culture. Acid house was described in Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton’s groundbreaking book Last Night a DJ Saved My Life as: “weirdly, disruptively, creatively universal. In the sixties you could tune in, turn on and drop out, but only if you were a hip photographer or if daddy kept up the rent on the Kings Road flat. This time, a voyage of discovery was opened up to nearly everyone.” Brewster and Broughton assert that it was a cultural revolution.
“You couldn’t fully understand today’s Britain without knowing the changes it brought. As [then–Prime Minister] Margaret Thatcher swept away the post-war community ideal and replaced it with the free market and its cult of selfish individualism, here was a youth movement that proposed the opposite. Here was music that meant little unless you shared it, and a drug that reminded its users that humanity’s greatest achievements are social.”
A key figure on the scene, Orbit had made a number of lush house tunes as Bassomatic and Torch Song, and, under the name Strange Cargo, released some ambient, instrumental albums. Although she always allied herself with clubland, the Ecstasy-fueled soundscape was one that Madonna had yet to incorporate into her music. She decided that Orbit’s abstract beats and classical sweep would be the perfect setting for her new songs. “I love the haunting, trancelike quality of William’s records,” she said. “I’ve always found something melancholy about his music. Since I’m attracted to that sound, and since I tend to write a lot of sad songs, we seemed like a good match.” She also later described her new album as one that would “sound great on drugs. It’ll make you feel like you’re in the K-hole. It whips you into a frenzy…You can imagine what it would be like to be high and listening to it.”
The tall, gangly Orbit was an unlikely collaborator. A self-effacing English gent, he found musical inspiration in the psychedelic trancelike states of club culture. He took a lateral approach to music-making, more organic and less governed by the clock than Madonna was used to. “Ray of Light was exceptional because it did take a long time,” says Marius De Vries, who was brought in to coproduce a number of tracks after his work on Bedtime Stories. “The gestation, which is very much Will’s thing, was a long process.”
The working relationship between Madonna and Orbit took a while to develop. Used to creating at his own pace, he was thrown by her need for control, while she bridled at what she saw as a lack of professionalism. When she first started working with him, she was shocked that he didn’t have a flashy studio, just a small setup with an Akai sampler and a few keyboards. And when Orbit turned up at her house one day with the wrong DAT, he had to beg for a week in which to get properly organized. Feeling that she needed a safety net, a worried Madonna called up her old friend Pat Leonard, asking him to help out. Before long, though, she became more comfortable with Orbit’s working process and changed her mind, acknowledging his “mad musical genius.” Orbit insists that he didn’t reinvent Madonna. “She’s much more of a self-directed person than that,” he said. “It was more that she produced me producing her. She turns me on to far more stuff than I do her.” When they went to gay London nightclub Heaven to see techno mischief-maker Aphex Twin, that was her idea, not his.
Madonna wrote an apologetic letter to Leonard, saying that it was going to be all right and she wouldn’t need him, because she and Orbit could do it alone. She had to follow her instinct, she said. She didn’t know why, but she felt that this English eccentric was going to be very important for her career. Although four songs they had worked on would appear on the album, Leonard was to take a back seat as a producer. Leonard was purportedly very upset, especially when Madonna said afterward, somewhat dismissively, that he would’ve lent the songs “more of a Peter Gabriel vibe.”
Sensitive to Leonard’s awkward “demotion” on the record, Orbit said: “It was hard for Pat. He did a great job of being manful about it, but Madonna was deconstructing his songs and tearing layers away from them. I’d try to help him by putting things back in, but she wouldn’t have it. Pat writes beautiful melodies, though. We were never going to destroy them completely.” With this record, Madonna was deconstructing her past, and Leonard was a living embodiment of that.
Sessions began in the summer of 1997, in a studio near the Universal Theme Park in L.A.
’s Studio City. From the outset, she had greater depth of expression in her voice. “I noticed how much her voice had developed and improved, and how much her confidence had come along,” observes De Vries. Rick Nowells agrees, saying that her experience with Evita had given her the ability to project. “In doing Evita, she had six months of singing those proper theater songs. She had to do a lot of training and building her voice.”
On the opening track, “Drowned World/Substitute for Love,” Madonna reflects on her compulsive desire for fame, how that burned through relationships and made them shallow and fleeting. Over Orbit’s backward tape-loop effects and bleeps, she sings with bell-like clarity. This song sets the tone for the whole album: as if the ghost of her former self is supplanted by the spirit of what she’s to become. At the time, she described her fame as “a cross to bear, the real thorn in my side. I wouldn’t trade my life for anything—I’ve been blessed with so much, I’ve had so many privileges—but, being famous, it’s like the agony and the ecstasy.”
WITH Erotica and Bedtime Stories, Madonna had made some tentative trips into her subconscious, but here she does so with greater focus and intent. On “Swim,” for instance, she evokes the sacrament of baptism as she dips into metaphorical waters, washing her sins away. “Water is a very healing element,” she said. “There’s water in birth and…in baptism, and when you go into the bath or the ocean there’s a feeling of closing, a feeling of starting all over again. That’s what’s going on in my life and I’m exploring that element in my songwriting.”
Filled with apocalyptic Old Testament images, the song has the sense of her sloughing off not just her own misdemeanors but those heaped on her by the world. As Catholic theologian Richard McBrien says: “The Church has always taught that Baptism is necessary for salvation…. Ideally the rite of Baptism is celebrated during the Easter Vigil. When not, the celebration should be filled with the Easter spirit.” It’s an interesting coincidence that her album was released at Easter time. Starting with a simple guitar riff, the track is filled out with a bubbling psychedelic undertow. The song is an adaptation of the 70s song “Sepheryn” by hippie musicians Clive Muldoon and Dave Curtis. Muldoon died from a drug overdose at the age of twenty-eight, but his niece, Christine Leach, happened to sing the lyrics while in the studio with Orbit, and that inspired Madonna.
By the title track, she is ready to be reborn. With its speedy acid electronica, “Ray of Light” is an ecstatic hymn to the skies. Marrying her melodic pop with bleep-driven techno, Orbit creates a sensurround for her voice. It is as if she’s being carried effortlessly by the sound. Orbit said later that he was lucky to be able to work with her post-Evita voice. “‘Ray of Light’ is just a semitone higher than she’s comfortable with, but we thought the strain really helped. She got frustrated when we were recording, but you want that bit of edge with singers, that thing of reaching. You can’t fake it, and you can hear it when she cracks it on the record.”
From here she plunges back into the ghosts of desire, with the dark Garbage-style distortion of “Candy Perfume Girl.” She’s all tingled nerve endings, ultra-awake and aware. She moves into “Skin,” bass-driven, abstract, with a submerged sense of yearning. “I really like that one,” says Marius De Vries, who coproduced the track with Orbit. “We were working in parallel studios, running back and forth between them. Inevitably it was competitive and edgy. We hadn’t met before and our work covered the same sort of territory, so we circled each other warily at first. ‘Skin’ was an icebreaker. The track started as a couple of simple beats and a lyrical idea. We constructed that in a very collaborative way, from the ground up—which is why it was so packed with detail. We were trying to fill out each corner of it with our own favorite sounds!”
From here Madonna lunges into the vigorous “mea culpa” song “Nothing Really Matters,” where she condemns herself for living selfishly and celebrates the fact of having a child. “[Lola] doesn’t know about me being famous, and it’s completely unconditional love, which I’ve never known because I grew up without a mother,” said Madonna. “When you have children you have to step outside of yourself…. You look at it from a different perspective.” The ferocious party girl was a memory. Madonna described her mood for Ray of Light as “complete wonderment of life…I was incredibly thoughtful and retrospective [sic] and intrigued by the mystical aspects of life.” Motherhood had transformed her in a positive way. De Vries notes: “She was more settled. Calmer. Lola was around all the time. One of the leisure rooms in the studio was converted into a kind of crèche. She was very cute. She was just beginning to make a nuisance of herself and walk.”
For this song, Madonna employed her psychological strategy of pitting two producers against each other, so that each would raise their game. According to De Vries, “Nothing Really Matters” was the song that he had most prepared beforehand. “I had my vision of how the song should be finished, and Will found that off-putting. On all the collaborations I’d left a lot of space for him, but for this I wanted to put something on the table and say, ‘This is what I think,’” he says.
The track begins with a strange, electronic, slightly broken noise. “Will said, ‘I hate that noise. It sounds like the DAT’s broken.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s the point.’ It’s quite slow for a dance tune of that nature, not a pacey tune.” Despite Orbit’s protest, the breaking DAT sound stayed in, because Madonna had the casting vote.
Then, with the song “Frozen,” Madonna changed the mood and slipped into a Pat Leonard chorus as easily as if she were coming home. This is one of her finest moments—taut and theatrical, with delicately shifting tones. She moves from liquid sweetness to icy drama, shape-shifting much like the video, which was shot after dark by director Chris Cunningham in freezing temperatures in the Mojave Desert. In the video, she flies through the sky like a witch with her familiars, dressed in flowing black, with her long dark hair streaming behind her. The gothic goddess is one of her most powerful images, echoing the ghostly themes of the record.
The first single from the album, “Frozen” was a suitable epic. But it took a while to get right. De Vries was brought in at the end to add his distinctive programming to the track. “Madonna felt the song hadn’t quite achieved its potential. So I had the song for a day and a half and I messed around with it,” he says. “I programmed up some beats and effects, and gave it the right amount of detail without cluttering it too much. I’m quite theatrical in my production. Camp, some would say. I try and consciously make every sound do something. I want the effect of every sound to be maximized. At the risk of overcrowding a record, there need to be sonic hooks that are less to do with melody than sound and dynamic.”
Toward the end of the album, Madonna moves into her Rick Nowells trilogy—“The Power of Goodbye,” which has the devotional charge of a church hymn; “To Have and Not to Hold,” a brooding mood piece; and “Little Star,” her dedication to Lola. “The subject matter in itself is quite dangerous. It’s easy to get sentimental,” says De Vries, who produced the latter track. “It’s a delicate tune. I knew it had to be handled with butterfly-like delicacy, but also knew it needed an engine room to it, an energy, so it didn’t become mawkish. That’s why I did something with this skittery, unsettled, never quite resolving beat—to counteract the warmth and coziness of the central idea.”
After the tenderness of “Little Star,” the final track is shocking. “Mer Girl” is another key point in Madonna’s life, her second Lynchian “eye of the duck” moment. With Orbit, she went on a psychic journey, as he encouraged her to look deep inside herself. Becoming a mother seemed to spark off a revelation about her own mother and the effect of her death. We move through a threatening dreamscape, as Madonna, her voice half-spoken, half-sung, describes running from her house, from a restless baby who won’t sleep and a mother who haunts her. She runs through a childhood landscape—a lake, a hill, some trees, the cemetery—as the rain beats down. The ground opens up and in spare, sparse words she conve
ys a sense of being buried alive with her dead mother, smelling her rotting flesh and her decay. She runs away in fear. She realizes that she has been running all her life.
When she recorded this vocal in the studio, the effect was immediate. “She stepped out of the vocal booth, and everybody was rooted to the spot,” says Orbit. “It was just one of those moments. Really spooky.”
When the album was finished, everyone knew they had made something resonant and groundbreaking. “It’s a very fine, courageous record,” says De Vries. “Madonna really explored the edges of production and sound design, and crafted something that wasn’t just about being radio-friendly. It was populist, with an artistic dimension, and that does take time. She started with more unfinished songs than usual. A lot of the writing was in the process of construction. And she had to allow Will to take his time. He doesn’t always immediately arrive at where he wants to get. He has to make a journey of it.”
As Orbit said later, “I walked into Madonna World and emerged, blinking, five months later.” He learned from Madonna’s ability to make quick, focused decisions. “She kept telling me, ‘Don’t gild the lily,’” he recalled. “And the other thing she’d say, as I was ready to crawl home exhausted, was, ‘You can sleep when you’re dead.’ In the studio she’s completely sleeves-rolled-up. You think of her as a…pop icon…. You don’t perceive Madonna as a great producer, but that’s exactly what she is.”
There were a few snags to be sorted out before the album was ready for release. Orbit’s liberal use of sampling led him into tricky territory, particularly on the track “Swim.” The song featured a flute sample by musician/producer Pablo Cook, a fellow member of Orbit’s band Strange Cargo. “He sampled that particular melody from my first solo album Geronimo, which I released under the name Exact Life. We recycled things a lot in those days,” says Cook. He enjoyed being on Madonna’s album, but felt that “technically, if a melody goes on a record, you should take a percentage of the publishing. Madonna is very strong and hard and down to the wire. I admire that in a woman, but when it enters your own backyard, it’s a different thing. I remember William calling me, trying to get me to give the sample up and accept a buyout. I could hear Madonna in the background, going, ‘Who is this guy? Who is this guy?’ I had Italian solicitors trying to buy me out. I took it to the wire until I could see my relationship with William falling away. I had people calling me up who’d worked on the album, saying, ‘Do you want to go to court?’” Cook ended up capitulating for the sake of his friendship with Orbit. “It was not an easy ride, but we’re good buddies now,” he says. Motherhood may have ushered in a kinder, gentler Madonna, but in business, she still favored the hard-headed approach.