Madonna Digest: Billboard interview

September 30, 1995 issue

"Something" In the Way She Grieves

Manhattan is the eternal metropolis of the impatient heart, where young artists, poets, and seekers come first to reimagine themselves. Occasionally, the expectant rovers return to reflect on the mature results. As the city embraces another woman, a single woman named Madonna looks down from her Upper West Side aerie and contemplates the equinoxes of the spirit as captured on "Something to Remember" (Maverick/Sire/Warner Bros., due Nov. 7), a 14-track treatise of her best old and new balladry.

"Listening to this record took me on my journey," says Madonna with a sad smile, shifting on the couch in her apartment overlooking Central Park. "Each song is like a map of my life."

Dressed almost austerely in a snug, black skirt and pink sweater, her blond hair pulled back in a crisply tucked bun as she drinks hot tea, the performer shows the tensile grace of someone who takes excellent care of her physical form. The broad, rounded features of the careless, young diva who cut "Holiday" in 1983 have vanished, however, replaced by a narrower, subtler countenance that harsh experience has made handsome.

"I don't really listen to my records once I've done them," she says. "I'm onto the next thing. And I think most of the time when my records come out, people are so distracted by so much fanfare and controversy that nobody pays attention to the music. But this is, for the most part, a retrospective, and I just wanted to put it out in a very simple way. The songs, they choke me up," she adds with a nervous chuckle, "and I wrote them. Isn't that weird? I can't tell you how painful the idea of singing 'Like a Virign' or 'Material Girl' is to me now. I didn't write either of those songs and wasn't digging deep then. I also feel more connected emotionally to the music I'm writing now, so it's more of a pleasure to do it."

Madonna has included three new songs on the collection: a moody cover (in funky and orchestral versions) of Marvin Gaye's 1976 hit "I Want You," which was suggested and subsequently produced by Nellee Hooper and features Massive Attack, and two bittersweet serenades ("You'll See" and "One More Chance"), co-created with David Foster during the third weekend of September in a whirlwind writing/recording session. Shortly after this talk, she was to leave for London to start recording the music for the film version of "Evita," the musical that was the toast of Broadway in 1979, the year Madonna wrote her first song in the basement of a dormant Queens, N.Y., synagogue.

"I remember calling up my father back in Detroit and making him hear it on the tape recorder over the phone," she confides, blushing. "He said, 'Oh, that's very nice.' I felt proud. The song was called 'Tell the Truth.'"

Thus, "Something to Remember" is a stock-taking exercise, as well as a farewell to Madonna's first 15 years as a singer/songwriter, the record's pensive material delivering on the candid impulse that launched her remarkable career. Born August 16, 1958, in Bay City, Mich., Madonna is the eldest daughter of six children born to defense engineer Sylvio Anthony Ciccone and the former Madonna Louise Fortin. A self-assessed "roller-coaster Catholic," she grew up sharing the middle bunk in a three-tier bed with two of her sisters. "I didn't have any free time as a child," she says. "My mother died of breast cancer when I was 7, and then my father remarried when I was 10. I had a lot of responsibility, taking care of my younger brothers and sisters."

Like her siblings, Madonna was obliged to study music, specifically piano. "But I couldn't sit still, and I begged my father to let me take dance lessons," which served as a means of escape from the family's cramped home in a black/Hispanic neighborhood in Pontiac, Mich. Madonna was in the church choir and acted in school musicals, while sharing her favorite tunes. "As a teenager, I loved Aretha Franklin's 'A Natural Woman,' and in high school I worshipped Joni Mitchell and sang everything from 'Court and Spark,' my coming-of-age record."

But her pivotal developmental trial was the death of her mother, and as Madonna passes this fall afternoon discussing the themes behind her often acutely wistful ballads, she ultimately says, "My mother is a part of a LOT of my music."

Although love songs, such as "Live to Tell," "One More Chance," and "I'll Remember," also invoke the early fever of a failed marriage to Sean Penn, tensions with a stepmother who could not replace her lost parent, or later relationships that fell short, a larger phantom overshadows each mourning of life's missed linkages. "I think about my mother and a certain emptiness... a longing... in my songs," Madonna explains. "There are tragic, traumatic moments where I think, 'I wish that I could call my mother.' It's this primal thing that has been a springboard for the work I do." How did she learn her mother was gone? "I was at my grandmother's house. The phone rang, and it was my father, and he told my grandmother that my mother had died. I'd just seen her in the hospital. The rest of that day I blocked out...I probably went outside and played. I was majorly into denial and didn't really understand."

Poised on the edge of the couch, Madonna pauses and gulps, growing glassy-eyed. "And it unfortunately wasn't something that my father ever really prepared us for or discussed afterward. I suddenly developed a strange throwing-up disease, where every time I would leave the house, I would throw up. If I was away from my father, I threw up. It was a nervous condition."

In recent years, when Madonna was under attack for her frank "Erotica" album and "Sex" book, the artist says she drew strength from her late parent's nonjudgmental "fervor" for fulfilling one's personal vision: "She had an unbelievable level of tolerance and forgiveness. She was tremendously religious in a really passionate...almost sexual... way, like she was in love with God. If you read the letters she wrote, even when she was sick and dying, she was completely happy about everything. It was frightening, but there was just that faith of hers. My mother loved to take care of people. My older brothers and I were sometimes brutal to her, and she never complained."

It sounds like the materfamilias had an essential serenity. "Exactly," says her daughter. "And I could probably use more of it in my life."

A brisk September breeze catches the leafy scent rising from the freshly mowed lawns of Central Park, the tangy end-of-season smell betokening the coming solstice. Madonna shivers slightly as she sips the last of her tea.

"I think my mother made people angry, because they couldn't shake her beliefs," she concludes in a near whisper. "And she was 32 when she died... just a baby. Madonna Louise. So, basically, I'm here to take her place."