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, writing and/or inspiration:
“Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
“Poets should be lawgivers; that is, the boldest lyric inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead, the civil code, and the day’s work. But now the two things seem irreconcilably parted.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)