Composition
"It's my ultimate statement about what it's like to be in the middle of this Press stuff with everybody on my back, my world about to cave in. Whenever I feel like that – and it does get to me sometimes – I say 'Wait a minute, I'm supposed to be having a good time here, so where's the party?' It doesn't have to be this way. I can still enjoy life."
"I used to fantasize that we grew up in the same neighbourhood and that he (Jimmy Dean) moved away and became a big star"
Musically True Blue was a different direction for Madonna. Her previous efforts had her singing in a high pitched voice. With this album, Madonna toned it down for a more bubblegum-pop voice. The songs on the album reflect this and a number of instruments were used in the songs to bring out the different moods which the lyrics emphasized. "Papa Don't Preach" features acoustic, electric, and rhythm guitars, keyboards, and string arrangements. The song samples Beethoven's Appassionata sonata. A continuous percussion filled structure was used in "Open Your Heart". "White Heat"'s sampling of the film's quotation was included with speech and gunshots. It is an uptempo dance song with synth bass and double-tracked vocals supported by male voices in the chorus. On ballads like "Live to Tell" there are background instrumentation from a keyboard, a synthesizer, a funk guitar and a mix of synthesized and real drumming. "Where's the Party" is a standard Madonna dance track with arrangements of bass drums, synthesizer, clattering rhythms and a remixed approach to the whole composition. The title track featured instrumentation from a rhythm guitar, a synthesizer, keyboards, and drums for the bassline, with a backing track that employed a chord progression commonly used in doo-wop Cuban drums and Spanish guitar, maracas and harmonicas are used in "La Isla Bonita". "Jimmy Jimmy" has an early sixties pop influence and the lyrics were a tribute to pop star James Dean.
Lyrically True Blue reflects Madonna's ideas about love. "Where's the Party" tells about a working girl enjoying her day on the dance-floor after work. "Jimmy Jimmy" talks about Madonna's admiration for the neighbourhood bad boy. Other songs like the Spanish "La Isla Bonita" and "Love Makes the World Go Round" has lyrics dealing with escapism from normal life with the later talking about anti-war and anti-poverty and uses Latin drums and samba influenced rhythms. The lyrics of "White Heat" deals with firmness and Madonna included Clint Eastwood's infamous "make my day" quote in the song. "Papa Don't Preach", dealt with lyrics talking about a young woman who tells her father that she is pregnant out of wedlock, but is going to keep her baby. "Live to Tell" portraits the complexity of deceit and mistrust. The song also is about childhood scars and had an extreme emotional pitch, achieving it in a divine sense. The title track had Madonna talking about romance and 50s inspired girl group pop. The lyrics of "True Blue" are constructed in a verse-chorus form, with the theme been Madonna's feelings for Sean Penn; even using the 1929 archaic love word "dear" in the line "Just think back and remember, dear". Madonna expressed her sexual desires in the lyrics of the song "Open Your Heart" and described the beauty of a Latin paradise in "La Isla Bonita".
Read more about this topic: True Blue (Madonna album)
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was poured a little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of my mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. It is the noise of my contemporaries.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)