Oh Father - Writing and Inspiration

Writing and Inspiration

"'Oh Father' is like the second half of 'Live to Tell', in a way. It was a combo package—it was about my father and my husband. I was dealing with male authority figures once again. That is a great source of inspiration in my writing.

—Madonna talking about the song to Craig Rosen, author of The Billboard Book of Number One Albums.

When Madonna started work on her fourth studio album, Like a Prayer, she was already in an emotional state of mind, following her divorce with then-husband, Sean Penn, her thirtieth birthday, and unfavorable reviews for her acting endeavors. She had certain personal matters on her mind that she thought could be the musical direction of the album. While writing the songs for Like a Prayer, Madonna also acted in a Broadway production called Speed-the-Plow. In the play, she portrayed Karen, a secretary to a movie producer who bedded her on a bet with his friends. Karen later gets revenge, but is depicted as just as seedy and conniving as the men who had partaken in this bet and exploited her. Madonna was frustrated with the role and the negative reception, which she vented into her lyrics. The result was a set of three songs—"Till Death Do Us Part", "Promise to Try" and "Oh Father"—where she sought to purge herself from her personal paranoia and demons. Written with producer Patrick Leonard, in "Oh Father" the singer wanted to revisit the pain and confusion that had characterized her relationship with her father. Generally accepted by critics and academics as a love letter to Tony Ciccone or as an indictment, Madonna never divulged her inspiration behind "Oh Father", except saying that the song was about her father and a tribute to Simon & Garfunkel, her favorite band at that time. She added, " is what the listener thinks it is, all open to interpretation. I just wrote the song, it's up to others to interpret them to mean what they want them to mean."

Although the singer has never mentioned physical abuse in her family, she had mentioned that her father was a disciplinarian and her stepmother was hard on her. Author Lucy O'Brien wrote in her book Madonna: Like an Icon that the song stemmed more from the emotional neglect that Madonna faced, with her father locked up in grief after Mrs. Ciccone died. When he married again, his new wife was wrapped up with her own children, so the older kids were often left to their own devices. O'Brien believed that for this reason, Madonna's girlhood would have been without much joy, and that "Oh Father" was a potent example of the singer using her imagination to escape from her troubled childhood, while blaming it on her father. Tony later said, "Maybe I'm not the greatest father in the world, but life wasn't easy for us, and Nonni knows all of this."