Careless Notions

I'm probably one of the few people who liked this album, some of it quite a lot. I was spinning it off and on recently, and the years (and my subsequent experience with standards) have afforded me a better appreciation of the record. I liked it in 1990, but in 2017 I better understand why I liked it, and how it compares to other singers' (and composers') work. For starters, I think the tracks are all pretty much perfect for the Dick Tracy character of Breathless Mahoney, one of Madonna's few good cinematic performances. Maybe she could have been a star in a different era. The album also sounds phenomenal - it's an analog recording but sounds digital, very cool, crisp and transparent. It does not however suffer from '80s-itis. There's considerable bass, it's rich and not boomy, and it's deep. The low end is satisfying and natural on both the acoustic and electronic-driven numbers. Great EQ, excellent mastering by Stephen Marcussen. This might...

This was the first Madonna record I bought new right on release. I'd read her interview in Vanity Fair shortly before it came out, and that's where I realized she was definitely going to be transcending her earlier work with this album. A buddy of mine said she was going to be grabbing her crotch in one of her videos - Michael Jackson style - based on a shot he'd seen somewhere, but I thought he was nuts. Well... Statues coming to life, stigmata, burning crosses, making out with a black guy...yeah, the haters went totally apeshit. "Like A Prayer" of course was a controversy-driven monster the likes of which nobody had seen before on the pop charts. Introduced via a little morality play of a video , it functioned as a pretty good test of who was bright enough to understand what a metaphor is and who wasn't. More importantly for Madge though, the song itself was unlike anything she'd done before. Improbably gospel inspired, and with that bliste...

Another iconic cover - her second. This was the first Madonna album I bought, on CD, a good while after it came out but - if memory serves - before You Can Dance was released. "Live To Tell" sold me on the album, and I still think it's one of the finest singles of the '80s - Kate Bush caliber stuff. The video is dynamite too, especially for one of those "film clip" videos of the era. She gives a better performance here than in most if not all of her movies, somewhat dressed down as a housewife, rendering the song (by turns heart wrenching and ominous) even more effective.  As the lead single for True Blue in the late spring of ‘86 it was something of a mindblower - this was not what we’d come to expect from Madonna - and the moody ballad shockingly made it all the way to #1.  I was not a big fan of ballads, and at first I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but I quickly grew to love “Live To Tell” and it ultimately forced me to completely reappraise ...