Writing and Inspiration
During the autumn of 1985, Madonna started writing and recording songs for her third studio album, True Blue. She brought back Steve Bray and hired a new songwriter collaborator, Patrick Leonard, to help her co-write eight of the album's nine tracks. The album's first track "Papa Don't Preach", was written by Brian Elliot, who described it as "a love song, maybe framed a little bit differently". The song is based on teen gossip he heard outside his studio, which has a large front window that doubles as a mirror where schoolgirls from the North Hollywood High School in Los Angeles regularly stopped to fix their hair and chat. The song was sent to Madonna by Michael Ostin, the same Warner Bros. executive that discovered "Like a Virgin". Madonna only contributed with some minor lyrical revisions, making "Papa Don't Preach" the only song in the album that she did not have a strong hand in writing. In 2009, during an interview with Rolling Stone Madonna was asked by the interviewer Austin Scaggs as to why the theme of the song was meaningful to her. She replied saying,
just fit right in with my own personal zeitgeist of standing up to male authorities, whether it's the pope, or the Catholic Church or my father and his conservative, patriarchal ways. For 'Papa Don't Preach' there were so many opinions – that's why I thought it was so great.
Read more about this topic: Papa Don't Preach
Famous quotes containing the words writing and/or inspiration:
“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.”
—Annie Dillard (b. 1945)
“Although this garrulity of advising is born with us, I confess that life is rather a subject of wonder, than of didactics. So much fate, so much irresistible dictation from temperament and unknown inspiration enter into it, that we doubt we can say anything out of our own experience whereby to help each other.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)