Madonna has revealed that one of the most memorable eras in her career was preceded by a “frustrating” period of conflict, as she battled high expectations after her meteoric rise to stardom and a manager attempted to retool her sound while they prepared to release her second studio album, 1984’s Like a Virgin, with superstar musician-producer Nile Rodgers.
“I thought there were so many great songs on the record, and then suddenly my first album [1983’s Madonna] started to become popular. I mean, it was a good thing. It was a good thing, but also frustrating,” Madonna said in a new conversation with Rodgers in Paper magazine, with the Chic band co-founder and iconic David Bowie collaborator explaining that the pair finished work on Like a Virgin while her self-titled debut LP was “still the focus” for promotion.
“I was irritated that another song of mine was doing so well and now I had to wait to put something out that I was so excited about,” Madonna continued. “Not that I didn’t love Reggie Lucas and ‘Borderline’ and my first record, but the thing is, when I put out my first record it didn’t really do that well. People didn’t know who I was and then they weren’t sure who I was, so it kind of had a resurgence right at the time we were going to release [it].”
Rodgers added that things got worse when Madonna’s ex-manager, Freddy DeMann, started pressuring them to make Like a Virgin sound more like Michael Jackson’s 1982 masterwork Thriller because label executives were still “a little bit unsure” of her potential for global success.
“I’ll never forget when we played the album and Freddy said, ‘Can it sound a little more like this?’ And he put on f—ing Thriller [laughs],” Rodgers recalled. “And we said, you know, Michael Jackson has been a star his entire life and he worked his way up to Thriller. So he said, ‘Well can you put a little more bass on it?’ And all Madonna did was just write [the words] ‘Bass Up’ on the record. We never changed a thing. She just wrote it on the box the next time.”
SOURCE: Paper Magazine
