The Superwonky Madonna Podcast I've Been Waiting for All My Life...
"Inside the Groove" takes Madonna seriously as a musician, producer and collaborator, going deep into the production bones of 30 years of master-built hits.
Anyone who knows me well knows that two of my obsessions are Madonna and, more broadly, the making of pop-dance music. I don’t know why, but I am enthralled by the story of how certain iconic disco, pop or dance tracks were created—what was the spark, the seed and the germ, and then how they got built and sometimes rebuilt from there. I am obsessed with the evolution of disco (both in the club and the studio) in the 1970s, plus the dazzling palette of sounds that the synth revolution of the 1980s made possible for producers. I have read books like Love Saves the Day, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor over and over again—they cannot get granular enough for me. Recently, watching the great newish doc on the Bee Gees, my heart quickened when I saw how they literally looped—as in, ran the actual analog tape in a constant loop—a few bars of recorded drum to create the entirety of the drumline through “Stayin’ Alive.” And without fail, I still get chills when I hear the opening drum and bass line of “Billie Jean” coming out of a car or playing in a store. Same for that sexy, mysterious opening synth line of “Vogue”—a single note that holds the promise of all to come in that epic track.
That’s just one of dozens and dozens of Madonna tracks that have always fascinated me with the intricacy of their tracking and sampling. One of Madonna’s many forms of genius was her nose for exactly the right producers to take her to new places every few years—I’ve always loved that restlessness about her, that she never wanted to simply redo a winning formula, even if it led to the rare (but still spectacularly interesting) commercial failure like “American Life” or “Madame X.” For me, she’s akin to artists like the Beatles, Prince and Bowie in that regard—that constant evolution of her own sound, even if she always generally kept danceability at the center. And while I’m among those who agree that Madonna’s voice is no great gift of God—like Barbra’s, Whitney’s or Mariah’s—I’ve always admired how she still made her voice do whatever was required of it to carry the whole track. This was especially so after she took intensive vocal lessons in 1995 in advance of “Evita” and learned to open her voice up to sterling new upper registers that served well all her work to come.
So why am I dithering on like the Gen X queen that I am? It’s because my two obsessions have finally been conjoined! Yesterday, amid the horrible Manhattan humidity, I bumped into my longtime friend Michael Bailey, who—in fact—was one of the Gen-X-and-older friends who chimed in on my Facebook query the other day and made me change the name of this Substack thing from “Old Queens” to the (I hope much gentler!) “Caftan Chronicles.”
As we sweated and chatted, Michael told me about a podcast called “Inside the Groove,” started last year by a British music obsessive named Edward Russell, that meticulously breaks down, and tells the story behind, a different iconic Madonna track roughly every week or so. (Russell previously wrote a Madonnaphile website called Madonnarama.) How did Michael get me hooked? He said, “Listen to this”…and then he played me an obscure 1971 British folk track called “Sepheryn.” Holy shit! It was “Ray Of Light”! Zephyr in the sky at night, I wonder/Do my tears of mourning/Sink beneath the sun?" What!?!? Fuck! And yet, despite my shock, it made perfect sense. I’d always found the lyrics to “Ray of Light” unusually out-there for Madonna, whose self-penned lyrics (again) always serve her songs well but aren’t particularly poetic or deep. I’d always chalked up her newfound cosmic pen to the spiritual awakening she’d supposedly had through Kabbalah and the birth of her first child, Lourdes.
I’ve spent the past several hours bingeing on episodes of “Inside the Groove.” The guy who wrote “Sepheryn” died in 1976, but apparently his niece became a musician who, in the mid-1990s, reworked the song with William Orbit, the producer who helped Madonna create her ambient, electronica-rich sound for the entire Ray Of Light album of 1998. (To let you know just how much a queen after my own heart this Edward Russell is, he calls Ray of Light “the start of Madonna’s second imperial phase.” Yaaassss! That’s the level of absurd pseudo-academia I want in my fellow Madonnaphiles!)
I’ve so far listened to episodes breaking down, into deliciously granular pieces (including the separated master tracks from each song, so that you can hear everything from the bassline to Madonna’s vocals in sterling isolation), “Vogue” (his first episode), “Ray of Light,” “Borderline,” “Open Your Heart” and “Music.” (I love how Russell jumps around in his episodes, bopping amid the 1980s, 90s, 00s and 10s.) Thankfully, I have dozens more episodes to listen to. I’m going to try to save some for long car trips, which are my favorite times to sink into audiobooks or podcasts.
A beautiful thing I love about these episodes is that they make you think about the universe of talent that helped make Madonna Madonna. This spans from some of the more familiar names like master dance remixer Shep Pettibone (with whom she created “Vogue”…out of several previously existing parts, including an unused drum remix track for Janet Jackson’s “Miss U Much”) and Patrick Leonard (with whom she produced some of her best-known mid-late ‘80s hits) to Reggie Lucas, a stunningly talented guitarist who played for Miles Davis in the ‘70s, was a key part of the success of Madonna’s first, eponymous album and died at 65 in 2018. Have you ever noticed how the sweet keyboard at the beginning of 1984’s “Borderline” sounds a bit like the sweet keyboard at the beginning of Stephanie Mills’ 1980 “I Never Knew Love Like This Before”? The late, great Reggie Lucas wrote them both.
So much of these episodes cover not just the history of Madonna’s oeuvre, but the history of 1980s and 1990s dance and pop—including what was made possible by technological innovations like drum and synth machines. For example, I had no idea that the endless samples in the LinnDrum machine, which provided the percussion of dozens of the 1980s best-known pop and r&b hits, were recorded clips of the live work of a little-known drummer named Art Wood, who died in 2006. To me, there is something absolutely haunting, eerie and poignant about that—to think that your work lives on more vividly than you do, and not even via a direct recording, but via a machine into which your actual work was programmed and then extruded by multiple producers.
I had a very strange moment listening to the isolated drum track from “Borderline”—which I was doing, in fact, while taking advantage of the day’s coolness by roasting rosemary potatoes while a stew simmered in my slow cooker. (I can’t wait for more fall coolness so I can begin cooking and baking in earnest again. I barely do so in summer because my kitchen isn’t AC’d.) I started crying, startling myself. Why? I was a freshman in high school in Massachusetts the year “Borderline” came out, 1984. My memory of that year is an ambient wash of bullying, anxiety, fear and loneliness. It wouldn’t be until my sophomore year that I fell in with a clique of very cool seniors, some of them gay, who opened for me a portal into another world—the world of New York City, Warhol and Basquiat; Interview magazine and even the punk and dance clubs of Boston, like Spit and The Rat(hskellar). In 1984, those machine-mediated drumlines were fueling the dance floors of my future home, New York City—Danceteria, Area, the Pyramid, Private Eyes. But I could hardly know that then.
What is it about a drumline? Does it live not just beneath our conscious selves, sinuously, containing cellular memory as strong as Proust’s madeleine, but beyond consciousness—like a wave we ride into future selves we’ve yet to know, yet can somehow foresee via our ears and feet? Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
Enjoy the rest of the weekend! And cross your fingers that my next Caftan Chronicles interview, with someone very much tied into matters musical I’ve been bloviating about here, actually takes place on Monday as promised!