There is an elemental aura to the music of Madonna's transcendent new Warner Bros. Records release, an alchemy of sounds and images, an interplay of dreams and visions. Here is a world captured in a drop of water, a face in the heart of a flame, a soul set free on a Ray Of Light.
Her first collection of new songs since 1994's Bedtime Stories, Ray Of Light, featuring the stunning new single Frozen, marks a musical departure astonishing even for this quintessentially chimerical artist. Working closely with an elite cadre of inspired collaborators, most notably globally-acclaimed producer and remix magician William Orbit, Madonna has created a sound that blends and borrows from the best of the ambient and electronic music revolution and fuses it with her own unerring pop sensibility. The result is nothing less than song transformed into pure light.
Alternately elusive and explicit, playful and profound, risky and welcoming, Ray Of Light is, finally, the most audacious, atmospheric and sheerly awesome song cycle in the artist's epochal recorded output. From the unflinching honesty of Drowned World/Substitute For Love to the fabulous frivolity of Candy Perfume Girl; from the sultry whisper of Skin to the nurturing bliss of Little Star; and from the exotic ecstasy of Shanti/Ashtangi to the harrowing beauty of Mer Girl, Ray Of Light, reveals a woman in the throes of a life-changing transformation, both artistically and personally.
"I always think in musical terms," she asserts, "and this time I knew I wanted to go after a sound that was different from anything I'd done before, to reach a different emotional and spiritual plane. I've been going through a metamorphosis over the past few years. 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."
Ably assisting Madonna in translating that perspective into music is William Orbit. Known previously to the artist for his remixes on selected tracks for her Erotica album, Orbit also has the well-earned reputation as a preeminent musical innovator on such projects as Massive Attack and his own Strange Cargo releases. "I'd been listening to his music and felt it was a close reflection of where I wanted to go -- a perfect backdrop to the lyrics I'd been writing. I thought there could be an interesting juxtaposition, combining William's very trippy, trancey sound with very lush orchestral arrangements and lyrics that were reaching for something new and unexpected."
Work on Ray Of Light began in earnest in the spring of last year, "I spent about four months traveling around," Madonna continues. "I was in New York, LA, Miami, England, just writing with different people, trying out lots of new ideas."
And, as it turned out, renewing some old creative connections. Along with such cowriters as Rick Nowels and Susannah Melvoin, Madonna turned to a trusted collaborator, Patrick Leonard, who had a hand in some of the biggest and most enduring hits of her career. "I wanted to work with Patrick on specific tracks, like Frozen," she explains, "because, as a classically trained musician, he brought a whole other element to the mix, particularly his string arrangements." Leonard co-produced other Ray Of Light standouts Sky Fits Heaven, The Power Of Good-Bye and To Have And Not To Hold, completing a studio team that also included famed arranger and producer Marius De Vries.
With the key players and musical elements in place, Madonna and Orbit settled in for some serious studio time. "He's a complete madman genius," she smiles. "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."
The extraordinary accomplishment of Ray Of Light emerged after the music and movie marathon that made Evita the entertainment event of 1996, and Madonna the leading lady of the decade. "Doing Evita was a wonderful and challenging experience," she explains, "but when it was over I was seriously inspired to do my own thing. For two years I'd been expressing someone else's passion, and being away from my own stuff for that long gave me a chance to store up a lot of information and experience."
The most significant of those experiences, of course, came with the birth of Madonna's daughter Lourdes, in late 1996. "Obviously that was a big catalyst for me. It took me on a search for answers to questions I'd never asked myself before. What was I going to say to my daughter about what's really important in life? What was I going to teach her about the world and our purpose for being here? As a result, I took a long look at my own life over the past few years and began to see how much of it was dominated by my career. What am I going to do next? What's my next project? Suddenly all that didn't seem quite as important."
While career considerations took second place to motherhood, for Madonna, creativity has always come as naturally as breathing. "I'm always writing in my journal," she reveals, "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."
And it's this consummate artist's flourishing creativity that ignites Ray Of Light. "I think people respond to emotion and passion and truth," she concludes. "That's what I've tried to embody in this record." And, like fire, earth, water and air, they are the elements from which Madonna has created a new world.
