Sire 25442
Producers: Madonna, Patrick Leonard, and Stephen Bray
Track listing: Papa Don’t Preach / Open Your Heart / White Heat / Live to Tell / Where’s the Party / True Blue / Isla Bonita /Jimmy Jimmy / Love Makes the World Go Round
August 16, 1986
5 weeks
When Patrick Leonard, a songwriter/producer whose credits included work on the Jacksons’ Victory Tour, was asked if he was interested in a job as the musical director for Madonna’s Virgin Tour, he initially balked at the proposition. Leonard wasn’t really a fan of the singer, but he agreed to meet with Madonna and discuss the job. “After meeting with her, I really couldn’t say no,” he says. “It seemed too intriguing.”
It was during that 1985 tour, in support of Like a Virgin, that the singer’s third album first began to take shape. “We wrote ‘Love Makes the World Go Round’ while we were on tour,” Leonard recalls. “Then we wrote ‘Live to Tell’ and recorded it, and that sort of got the album going.”
Madonna wrote the latter song for At Close Range, a film starring her then-husband, Sean Penn. “I wrote that song completely and totally out of mad crazy love for Sean and I wrote it in 10 minutes,” Madonna says. “He showed me a rough cut of the movie and said, ‘Write a song for this movie,’ and we came up with that.”
The song was also recorded quickly. “We recorded it on an eight-track at my house,” Leonard says. “We transferred it and added to it, but the vocal was from the eight-track demo.”
Much of True Blue was recorded in that fashion. Often demos cut at Leonard’s Hollywood home would be turned into finished songs at Channel Recording, engineer Michael Verdick’s home studio. “The studio was probably only about 10-by-12 [feet],” says Leonard. “It was a very small room.”
The informal setting worked well for Madonna. “I didn’t really come into my own skills as a writer until that point,” she says. “Pat was a real collaborator in that respect. When I got together with him, I decided I liked writing better with people instead of in a vacuum.”
Stephen Bray, who, like Madonna, had been a member of the early ’80s-group the Breakfast Club, co-wrote three of the album’s songs. “‘Where’s the Party’ was written after everything else was basically finished,” Leonard says. “Steve and I and Madonna got together and we recorded it almost entirely in my family room.” Although the home-recording atmosphere kept the sessions relaxed, it wasn’t all fun and games. “Madonna’s a taskmaster and always has been,” says Leonard. “When we worked, we worked hard, but we also had some fun.”
During the making of the album, Leonard became a father. “I remember we were working on ‘Live to Tell’ and I had to leave to go to the hospital, because my daughter was being born,” he says. Coincidentally, the responsibilities of parenthood were discussed in the album’s most controversial song, “Papa Don’t Preach,” in which Madonna takes on the persona of a pregnant, unwed teen who chooses to keep her baby. The song was embraced by such unlikely allies as Tipper Gore, head of the Parents Music Research Center (a lobbying group devoted to protesting the use of explicit rock lyrics) and right-wing pro-life groups.
“I knew that song was going to be controversial, because it can be read so many different ways,” says Madonna. “The irony of that was that the Catholics were on my side, even though it was a teenage rebellion song. The subtext under all that was, ‘Don’t tell me what to do.’ It was just a ‘fuck you’ to all authority figures.”
While Madonna and Leonard may have been confident about their ability to record hits, executives at Warner Bros. Records, the parent company of Madonna’s label, Sire, weren’t so sure. “They were a little nervous, because I was basically an unknown,” Leonard says. But once Warner Bros. A&R executive Michael Ostin and label president Lenny Waronker visited the studio to hear the playback, their fear subsided. “At one point they were laughing at each other, because it was apparently the right record,” Leonard says.
On June 7, 1986, “Live to Tell” became Madonna’s third Number One single; ten weeks later she scored her fourth with “Papa Don’t Preach.” That same week, True Blue became her second consecutive album chart-topper.
THE TOP FIVE
Week of August 16, 1986
1. True Blue, Madonna
2. Top Gun, Soundtrack
3. So, Peter Gabriel
4. Invisible Touch, Genesis
5. Control, Janet Jackson