Madonna was in Africa in late November, visiting schools built by her
Raising Malawi nonprofit, when the first leak hit the Web: 40 seconds
of "Rebel Heart," a defiant, dance-y track she had recently been working
on. Three weeks later, the leak became a flood. Madonna was back in New
York on December 17th, when fans started alerting her via Instagram
that 13 demos recorded for her unfinished 13th album, also called
Rebel Heart, had been illegally posted online and were spreading like wildfire.
It was an unprecedented leak: Nearly a full album's worth of work
arrived four months before its planned April release date. "She was
devastated," the singer's longtime manager Guy Oseary says.
Related: Exclusive: Madonna's First 'Rebel Heart' Interview
Madonna's response was swift and dramatic: She decided she would complete six tracks and get them up for sale on iTunes as soon as possible.
The songs leaked on a Tuesday; they needed to be online by Friday if
fans were going to buy them before 2015. "The deadline for getting this
music out was a 50-yard dash," Madonna says. Some in her camp urged her
to not rush out the songs, but she insisted. "Starting Wednesday, it was
like, 'You've got to get this music out – I can't take it,' " adds
Oseary. "What could we do? You've got to just battle through it."
With most of Apple about to go on holiday break, the challenge wasn't
simply mixing and mastering the tracks to Madonna's satisfaction, but
getting them loaded into the iTunes store, which can be a laborious
process. (Oseary, who also manages U2, worked closely with Apple on the
surprise release of U2's
Songs of Innocence last September.)
Madonna and her team worked for nearly 72 straight hours to make it
happen, getting key help from Interscope's Steve Berman and iTunes'
Robert Kondrk. She didn't learn until 11:30 p.m. Friday that the
finished songs were indeed going to reach fans before the new year. But
the payoff was immediate: The songs, which Madonna called "an early
Christmas gift," shot to the top of the music service's charts in 42
countries. "The fans are extremely loyal," she says, "and I'm really
supergrateful for that." (The full 19-track album now has a March 9th
release date.) "Every time a country would tweet about getting it, it
put a smile on my face, because it meant it was working," Oseary says of
the iTunes rollout.
No one in Madonna's camp will say who was responsible for the leaks,
but Oseary says security has been tightened. "We figured out the holes,"
he says. "Clearly, we have experience now in what to do and what not to
do in the future." (On December 23rd, however, several days after we
spoke, 14 additional demos leaked online.)
Madonna started work on the follow-up to 2012's Number One
MDNA early
last year. From the start, she was focused on one thing in particular:
making the songs stand on their own. Throughout the sessions, Madonna
would ask herself if she could perform each track stripped down, alone
with an acoustic guitar. "This is all part of my Armageddon thinking
right now," she says. "The world is changing and what does it all come
down to at the end of the day? It comes down to the songs."
The first step was finding the right collaborators. For years, she
used to work with only one producer on her albums, but that hasn't been
the case since 2005's
Confessions on a Dance Floor. For
Rebel Heart,
she again worked with an array of stars, including Nicki Minaj, Chance
the Rapper and Nas, often posting photos of the sessions on Instagram.
"Writing music, you have to be vulnerable," she says. "It's almost like
writing your diary in front of somebody and reading it out loud. Some
people made me feel comfortable and I felt connected to them, and other
people seemed very strange to me."
Minaj, who turns out a ferocious rap on "Bitch I'm Madonna," was
again one of her most in-sync creative partners, having also appeared on
MDNA. "Whenever we work together, she sits with me and listens
to the song and says, 'Tell me what this song is about to you,' "
Madonna says. "She's very methodical in her thinking. It's a
back-and-forth until she gets it right."
Madonna says she found herself drawn to Diplo, who worked on a
handful of tracks, thanks to their shared love of globe-trotting and
"absorbing and seeing the beauty in other cultures." Several
up-and-coming producers made key contributions as well, like Blood
Diamonds and DJ Dahi, who worked on the ominous "Devil Pray."
The biggest guest was one of the last to arrive to the party: Kanye
West came in near the end of the sessions to provide the grimy
production for "Illuminati," a track that plays with one of the
Internet's favorite conspiracy theories. "People often accuse me of
being a member of the Illuminati, but the thing is, I know who the real
Illuminati are and I know where that word comes from," Madonna says.
(Her definition: scientists, artists and philosophers who flourished
during the Age of Enlightenment.) She says West loved the song so much,
he actually jumped up and down on the mixing board: "We were worried he
was going to hit his head on the ceiling."
Her first sessions with two groups of songwriters from Avicii's camp
wound up guiding her to two distinct thematic paths: songs about letting
her heart steer the way and tracks about her stubbornly rebellious
spirit. "I never consciously think, 'I want to write a song about this
subject' – music leads me to where I want to go emotionally," Madonna
says. "One team had a more upbeat approach to songwriting, sonically
speaking, and the other team chose darker chords."
While
MDNA was widely considered Madonna's "breakup album"
(she had divorced British director Guy Ritchie in 2008), she dives
headfirst back into personal territory on
Rebel Heart, writing about triumph after heartbreak on "Living for Love," a buoyant throwback house track produced by Diplo.
"Lots of people sing about being in love and being happy, or they
write about having a broken heart and being inconsolable," Madonna says.
"But nobody writes about having a broken heart and being hopeful and
triumphant afterward. That was my challenge. I didn't want to be a
victim."
Source: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/madonna-strikes-back-inside-her-star-packed-new-album-rebel-heart-20150114#ixzz3OoQNgdts
