222. Madonna, "Ray of Light"

 


I don't care if you don't like techno or EDM or electronica or Madonna herself, the title track of this album, the third cut, is an absolute banger, a gem of a pop song dressed up in electronic clothes but with a melody you'd kill for and an absolutely outstanding vocal performance by Madonna.

As it turns out, Mads got a vocal coach after she got cast in Evita and found out that stage singing is a completely different animal than pop singing.  "I studied with a vocal coach for Evita and I realized there was a whole piece of my voice I wasn’t using," she said in this fantastic interview in Spin. "Before, I just believe I had a really limited range and was going to make the most of it. Then I started studying with a coach. God bless her."  Together with British electronica icon William Orbit (more on whom later), who co-produced the album with her, she put together maybe the best vocal performance on any of her albums with some serious songwriting.  You don't always think "catchy vocals" when you think EDM but Madonna is here to prove you wrong.

I can remember liking "Ray of Light," the song, when it came out, but I'd never heard the rest of the album and now I wish I had.  It's exciting and fun and sounds fresh today.  There's some very trip-hoppy stuff, like "Candy Perfume Girl."  No surprise that Marius de Vries, who also worked with Massive Attack, co-produced some of the songs.  

Madonna was 39 and Orbit was 41 when they made this album.  Keep in mind, this was in the era of boy bands and Britney Spears' first album.  By this point, Madonna had already had an entire career and was thought of as already washed up.  What a remarkable reinvention by a couple of olds.

Orbit went on to produce Blur's album 13 (which I love) and some other stuff and then kind of fell off.  He reports that when he was 61, he moved back to England from LA and dude went off.  "Instead of worrying about my career, I could just be a hedonist,” he says.  “I’d never done coke before and in a short space of time I’d be the guy that could do the most.  And then I went to some festivals and I did LSD, mushrooms, MDMA, coke, some hormones that everybody was experimenting with.  Codeine.  I wasn’t aware of what I was doing and I ended up having a psychotic episode.”  Damn!

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Yes.

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