Fact #118110

MADONNA’S RAY OF LIGHT – THE ORAL STORY
Compiled by Johnny Black from his own original interviews, plus pre-existing magazine and website material.

14 October 1996 : Madonna gives birth to a baby girl, Lourdes, in Los Angeles.
Madonna : That was a big catalyst for me. It took me on a search for answers to questions I'd never asked myself before …

William Orbit : Long before we started working on the album, Madonna was going through changes. I think she was heading in the direction we eventually took anyway.

Madonna : I started studying the Kabbalah, which is a Jewish mystical interpretation of the Old Testament. I also found myself becoming very interested in Hinduism and yoga, and for the first time in a long time, I was able to step outside myself and see the world from a different perspective. 

I started reading the autobiography of Yogi which is a brilliant book and then I found a really great teacher. Now I just can't imagine going through the day and not doing it. It has completely changed my outlook on life, not just yoga but it has had a huge influence on me. I mean it really .... it centres you in a way ... first of all it's not really exercise, you know what I mean, I think people have the wrong notion about yoga. I think people have two notions about yoga - they think you're sitting there in the lotus position saying 'ommm' and it's really boring and there is nothing going on, or you're twisting yourself into a pretzel - and it's so much more about meditation ... I won't bore you with it ... you sort of have to do it to understand it ...

William Orbit : She was itchy to make a change, and I came along at the right time. It bothers me when the press say, ‘William Orbit revived her dwindling career.’ It’s so not the case. If anything, she revived my dwindling career.

1 February 1997 : The soundtrack to the film Evita reaches No1 in the UK.
William Orbit : Another important contributing factor to how Ray Of Light turned out was the Evita record, which didn’t cut it with most of her fans, but it helped her grow as a singer, because she’d taken voice lessons.

Madonna : I studied with a vocal coach for Evita and I realized it would let me sing Italian operetta. Maybe that affected me unconsciously. There was a whole piece of my voice I wasn't using. Before, I just believed 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.

Spring 1997 : Madonna begins the writing process with various collaborators.
Madonna : I wrote with everybody - William, Pat Leonard, Rick Nowels - I even wrote some tracks with Babyface but they never made it onto the album.

Kenny ‘Babyface’ Edmonds : We came up with a couple of songs we liked before she changed her idea about the album's direction. They had a Take A Bow-ish kind of vibe and Madonna didn't want, or need, to repeat herself.

Rick Nowels (co-writer of The Power Of Goodbye, To Have And Not To Hold, and Little Star): A lot of what it means to be a good songwriting partner for Madonna is to have her be comfortable sitting in a room with you so she's free to bring out what she has. I was there to give her some chords, accompany her muse, and get out of the way.

Madonna : I'm always writing in my journal, collecting thoughts and ideas, and during this period certain things began to stick in my mind, like the whole idea of karma... that what you put in is what you get out and that everything you do comes back to you. We're responsible for the chaos in our lives, just as we're responsible for the creativity.

March 1997 : Madonna’s Maverick Records partner Guy Oseary rings William Orbit.
William Orbit : Guy rang and suggested I send some tapes to her. I didn’t really take it very seriously, so I didn’t send anything. I’d done a couple of mixes for her in the past and I’d always thought it would be great to work with her because of the way she operates. I’d thought, for example, that Human Nature was a great record. It didn’t sell so well, but it had a very experimental electronic, stripped-down de-constructed aesthetic that meant she had a kind of musicality I could relate to. I could imagine working with her.

But I was signed to Warner Brothers at the time, making what would have been the fourth Strange Cargo album, and I was getting the impression from them that they were rather underwhelmed with what I was doing. I’d sent it to them and got this reply saying, well, we don’t get it. So that didn’t incline me to want to send it to anybody else. I was thinking, ‘I’ll just keep working and keep it to myself.’ I believed in it but I didn’t think I should expose it just yet. I never did Strange Cargo records for any reason, other than they just come out of me, so if people can’t see any commercial potential in it, then I won’t pursue it.

12 May, 1997 : Guy Oseary rings William Orbit Again to remind him about sending tapes to Madonna.
William Orbit : Guy Oseary called again to follow it up, quite insistent, so I did. It was a DAT with about thirteen tracks on it, including Ray Of Light.

Madonna : I was a huge fan of William's earlier records, Strange Cargo I and 2 and all that. I also loved all the re-mixes he did for me and I was interested in fusing a kind of futuristic sound but also using lots of Indian and Moroccan influences and things like that, and I wanted it to sound old and new at the same time.

17 May, 1997 : Madonna rings William Orbit.
William Orbit : Five days later, sitting in my garden, I got a call from Madonna. She said she was working on my tracks. This is quite common with Madonna. It’s how she works. She doesn’t mess about with intermediaries, she just gets inspired, gets stuck in, gets on the phone – that’s her style.

She asked if I would like to come out and meet up with her. They sent me a plane ticket and off I went.

Early June 1997 : Madonna and William Orbit meet in New York.
William Orbit : It was a hot day, bright sun and sudden downpours, and I got soaked. I turned up … I was incredibly spaced out, wasn’t really ready for it at all. I walked up to her apartment block and this old dude on the door said, ‘Go right up.’ I went up in the elevator and I got lost, couldn’t find the apartment, so I had to come back down, and I think he realised he should be more doormanly, and he said, “Wait here.” Then this man turned up and nodded at me, and I thought he was a delivery guy, but he turned out to be Guy Oseary, and he knew who I was and he took me up.

Madonna : William showed up with his plastic bag full of tapes … he arrived at my door looking like a drowned rat. He looked really fragile.

William Orbit : I walked into the apartment and the first thing I saw was a Picasso which I recognised, and then I realised it was the real thing.

Madonna : He was very humble and unassuming and endearing, like a little boy. As soon as I met him, I liked him.

William Orbit : Her living room hi-fi wasn’t working, so we adjourned to her gymnasium, full of exercise machines, with another hi-fi. She played me the stuff she’d written with Babyface and Pat Leonard, and I’m sitting thinking, ‘What do you need me for? You’ve got all these tracks, they sound very slick, what can I contribute?’

We spent the next week at the Hit Factory getting my back tracks up in stereo, and she sung what she’d worked out, and it was clear that something was happening.

For starters, she had dug into the music properly. She understood the musicality of it, and she wasn’t just singing all over the top of it, which is what singers tend to do. You give them this lovely, intricately-crafted piece of music, and you can hear their mind thinking ‘OK, it’s in the key of X, the tempo of Y, I’ll just sing whatever on top of it.’ They treat it as a floor that they can do their thing on top of, which is frustrating because you really want something that’s fully integrated with what’s already there.

At the end of that week, she said, ‘Would you work on my record?’ and I said, ‘I’d love to.’

Madonna : I asked William to produce some of the cuts and I wanted to hear what they were gonna sound like, and I liked it so much that I decided to have him work on the whole album, but I wanted Pat who I have worked with on lots of records to come in and co-produce with us on the tracks that we had written, so Pat came in for a couple of songs and then he left and then William and I continued working.

William Orbit : After the Hit Factory … I was very disorganised at that time … I went back to London for a couple of weeks, I was going through a crisis with my team. I had this engineer at Guerilla in Crouch End, who was drinking too heavily, and I was trying to get all my material prepared to go back to America, and he just lost it. The whole team wasn’t delivering properly.

mid-June 1987 : Work starts at Larrabee North Studio, Universal City, Los Angeles.
William Orbit : I finally flew out to Los Angeles and they put me up at the Sheraton Universal in Universal City, for almost five months, which was my first experience of living in a hotel for an extended length of time. That was a bizarre experience because the Sheraton was hosting a huge international porn convention, so I’d get back from the studio late at night and see all these extraordinary-looking individuals hanging around. It’s such a huge industry, its annual revenue dwarfs the music industry and the publishing industry combined. They would have their porn Oscars at the hotel.

The first day, I was in paralysis because I was used to going off and being left to get on with it, but she said, ‘I’m not the kind of girl that leaves the guy to get on with it. I’m gonna be here. Get used to it.’ It took me a while to get used to someone looking over my shoulder.

Larrabee was a real state of the art studio. I’d never even worked on an automated desk before. It wasn’t so much a learning curve as a learning cliff. I realised right away that my equipment was really superannuated, like my old Atari 1040, held together with gaffa tape. Touch and go at the best of times, it caught fire twice on the sessions.

I think the people there thought I was a bit odd. I remember this cardboard box arriving from London, and I opened it to find all my computer discs packed in socks, because my people packed it in the middle of the night, and all they could find as packing material was socks.

I was working with her at a time when she was itching to do something more contemporary, her voice was getting better all the time, so I was lucky. Now, obviously, my stuff did have a bearing on the sound of things, but she was the one who found it, took it, saw the potential, framed it in the right context. Had she not done that, the tracks I had made would never have achieved more than a Strange Cargo record. So we were a good combination, but her career wasn’t in decline, it was going through its natural ebb and flow, as any career does.

There weren’t a lot of musicians around. Mostly it was just me, Madonna, Pat McCarthy, who was a brilliant engineer, and a tape-op called Matt. On Ray Of Light, every guitar you hear is me and my little £150 Ibanez, which I got in the mid-80s. On a lot of the tracks I did everything.

At the start, we’d had a series of engineers, one of whom was a super-slick super-Grammy kind of guy, who had his own style of working, and was very good in his own way, but I couldn’t relate to it at all. I couldn’t see a connection between his way of working and what I was doing. I felt I was being defeated at every turn.

Finally, Pat McCarthy came in, Irish engineer, and he was brilliant. He was recognised as one of the world’s best engineers but, like me, he also has a very non-linear approach. He’s a producer now, he’s done REM, people like that. He has an incredibly surrealist approach to his work, which was really cool, and Madonna had worked with him before and she trusted him, so that made things much easier.

He understood what I was doing, and he kept her confidence up in the technical side of it, so we were a fantastic team. I love him.

Got to tell you about Matt, the tape operator. He was a smart guy, knew his stuff, but his attention wasn’t on the job at all. He was having a strange affair with somebody and he was always on the phone to her. I was saying, ‘Look, Matt, this is a really important record you’re doing. This is Madonna. Pay attention.’ And he’d promise to get right on top of it, and next thing you know he’d be on the phone again to this mystery woman. There was obviously something very traumatic going on. If you walked in on him, he’d slam the phone down real quick. It was only after we finished everything that we learned he was ringing the receptionist at the studio. This femme fatale was along the other end of the corridor, and none of us knew it.

It was very hot in the studio, I remember. I never used to go outside. I couldn’t stand the sunlight. I looked like a cadaver. One day MTV came along and poked their cameras in and I was mortified at the thought of anybody seeing me looking like that.

One minor hazard was that Lola (Lourdes) would come in every day and, like any toddler, she’d make a bee-line for the knobs and buttons. We’d look away and the whole sound had changed. She'd turned the red knob, or the strawberry flavoured looking knob when nobody was looking. We had to keep an eye on her.

Madonna : Drowned World is about dealing with fame and the material world and wondering what place it has in my life. And basically being able to let go of that, you know what I mean, and having that in perspective.

William Orbit : It's one of my favourite tracks. You feel like you're drowning in it. I listen to it a lot, which is something I don't do. I can't resist it.

Apart from a couple of tracks, like Shanti/Ashtangi which we cooked up on the spot, most of the tracks pre-existed, so Madonna would work on vocals and lyrics at home, or driving around in her car, and then she’d sing them to her nanny or somebody just to see the response.

Madonna : Shanti is a song that I sang in Sanskrit ... that comes from practising yoga because I study Ashtanga yoga and before we do yoga every day we sing, we do chants ... and I also studied with a Sanskrit professor who my yoga teacher recommended to me and I pretty much took a couple of different prayers from an ancient ... text which was written in the thirteenth century and then sort of put my own spin on it, a little poetic licence, added a few words here and there ... and it's an ancient language, not many people speak it ...

William Orbit : It’s important to point out that I wasn’t the only producer working on the album. Patrick Leonard did some great work…

Madonna : I wanted to work with Patrick on specific tracks, like Frozen, because, as a classically trained musician, he brought a whole other element to the mix, particularly his string arrangements …

I was obsessed with the movie The Sheltering Sky and that whole Moroccan-orchestra-super-romantic-man-carrying-the woman-he-loves-across-the-desert vibe. So I told Pat that I wanted something with a tribal feel, something really lush and romantic. When he started playing some music, I just turned the DAT on and started free-associating and came up with the melody.

So Pat came in for a couple of songs and then he left and William and I continued working.

Wiliam Orbit : About a third of the way through, I thought I was going to get fired. Madonna was used to working with super-slick producers, whereas I’m very lateral, which she saw as being disorganised.

I went to her house to play back Power Of Goodbye…

Madonna : That song is really about .... how sometimes the most brave and courageous thing you can do is let go, to say no, and also from the whole concept that you only can love something if you are willing to let it go…

William Orbit : …it was like Abbott and Costello. We’d taken the wrong DAT with us, there was a lot of fumbling about, and she was not amused. I ended up saying, ‘Gimme a week and I’ll turn this one round.’

I virtually lived in the studio for that week, turned it all around, and from then on, it was great.

Madonna : He's a complete madman genius. I'd come to him with an idea of where I wanted to go musically, hum melodies or read lyrics and then leave him alone in the laboratory. Sometimes he'd go in the direction I wanted and sometimes he'd swerve off somewhere else entirely. We'd end up with trance tracks that were eight minutes long and then keep adding and subtracting until we had real verses and choruses. We really put our noses to the grindstone... and it was a process that was longer than I'm used to, but I was after something special and I didn't want to settle for anything less.

William Orbit : So Power Of Goodbye was a turning point. She became confident that I knew what I was doing.

Madonna : I had the line, "Never forget who you are, little star" written in a journal and I also had a couple of other lines like, "May the angels protect you and sadness forget you" cos I had written this little poem to her and then when I was writing with Rich Nowels I took that poem which was really like four or five lines and turned it into a song (Little Star) ... I produced that one alone with Marius De Vries .. so Pat had nothing to do it and William had nothing to do with it.

(Candy Perfume Girl) is a song about sexual ambiguity, about desire, about obsession, it's totally ... it has a psychedelic, trippy feeling to it ... it's like a dream almost and when William played me the track for that I complete flipped out and actually Susanna Melvoin has written some of the words on that song, so that's also a collaboration indirectly

There's a song on the album called Nothing Really Matters, and it was very much inspired by my daughter. It's just about realizing that when the day is done the most important thing is loving people and sharing love, so of course I want more of that love in my life.

15 July 1997 : Gianni Versace is shot dead outside his home in Miami Beach, Florida.
William Orbit : We were recording Swim on the day Versace was murdered. Madonna is very friendly with him and his sister Donatella, who was in the street, completely distraught, on her cellphone to Madonna. It must have been very upsetting, but she did the vocal, which is probably why it has such an emotional impact.

William Orbit : By about two months into the album, I was getting very possessive about it. It was obvious that we were making something very special, and when things started to go a bit disco, I was very bothered by it. Marius (De Vries) came in with these very bright and breezy tracks which I felt didn’t have the depth we were achieving, and that upset me. I felt we had to keep away from the instantly gratifying disco pizzazz, because I knew we had a lasting record. You just know it when you’re doing that.

Madonna : Ray of Light (the track) is a completely mystical look at the universe and how small we are...

Christine Leach (singer-songwriter) : My uncle, Clive Muldoon, and his partner, Dave Curtiss, wrote a song in the 70s, called Sepheryn, which became Ray Of Light.

I’d been working with William one fateful night in 1996, at Guerilla Studio in London, and he played me a backing track that fitted so well with the lyric to Sepheryn that I just started singing it.

William Orbit : It was excellent, and I said so. I thought she’d written it, and she didn’t say she hadn’t. So that was among the tracks on the original DAT I sent to Madonna. Even at this point, Christine still didn’t tell me she hadn’t written it, which led to some problems with the split-up of the publishing royalties.

Christine Leach : Later, I was sent a cassette in the post, of Madonna’s version of the track and I nearly fainted. I love Madonna’s music, and I’m very proud of my connection to her. She really must have loved the track because she affects an English accent when she sings it, and even her ad libs are the same as mine.

Madonna : I'm also singing (on the track, Ray Of Light) in a register of my voice that I don't normally sing in, it is almost operatic-sounding. And another thing is there is a lot of guitar on it and I haven't had a lot of guitar on my music in a long time. So, that's why I say it is off the beaten track for me but still it's my favourite track.

William Orbit : The final track, Mer Girl, was another crucial point for me. Musically, I was very proud of what we’d achieved with that track, but there was some outside pressure to change it, and she just said, ‘No, it’s a piece of art. Don’t touch it.’ I thought, ‘I’m in good hands here.’ I knew I wouldn’t have to worry about the music being trampled on by AAndR interventions, because she had the right take on it, and what she says goes with Warners.

Madonna : It's a song about dealing with death. There's the obvious thing about my mother's death but also Princess Diana's and Versace's death. I mean there seemed to be so much death actually around the time that I had written it.
3 March 1998 – Ray Of Light is released.

Dave Curtiss (co-composer, Ray Of Light) : I didn’t even know Ray Of Light had been recorded. A friend heard about it on the radio and told me. I was a bit annoyed at first because Madonna wanted 30% just for changing a couple of lines, but then I realised that 15% of millions is a lot better than 100% of nothing.

I did very well out of it. It’s been a life-changing experience. I’d say I’m financially secure for at least the next five to ten years as a result of my 15% of one track by Madonna.