Behind Madonna’s Ray of Light

Taken from the homonymous album that revolutionized mainstream music trends to the core, for good, Ray Of Light undeniably belongs to Madonna’s most iconic outputs to date, displaying in a little less than 6 minutes how underground electronica, pumping techno sounds and cues from 60’s rock psychedelia can harmoniously mate and collide with each other and deliver a superb example of sonic delight.

We at DrownedMadonna asked our friend and music freak Francis* to like to shed some light about the interesting genesis and dynamics through which this pop masterpiece came to be.

As people already know, Ray Of Light is one of the very few songs Madonna did not conceive and pen from scratch while working on the LP, but her input on improving and finalizing the original tape she was offered turned out equally huge and remarkable. To trace the starting point all the seeds developed from, we have to step back to 1996, when English DJ/producer William Orbit and his collaborator Mat Ducasse crafted at Guerilla Studios in Crouch End, North London, a mostly instrumental cut called Ambition under the pseudonym Invisible. Despite never seeing the light of day on any album/compilation before, Ambition received its first worldwide spin ever four years later, in February 2000, during Orbit’s Essential Mix broadcasted on BBC Radio 1, and it instantly caught Madonna’s fans ear. This unissued instrumental sampling a guitar riff from Straight Shooter (1966) by The Mamas & The Papas, in fact, represents the template an eventual track borrowed most of its music elements from, namely the very first version of Ray Of Light Guerilla Records’ former artist and ALF group member Christine Ann Leach provided the topline for and recorded as a ruff demo. According to an interesting Q Magazine 2002 report by Johnny Black (as well as thanks to a discrete amount of reliable sources and generous tidbits and files shared on SoundCloud by William himself lately), we can safely tell the pair met in Crouch End in a fateful night of ’96, when Christine gave a listen to some material Orbit was trying to elaborate at the time. She picked one backing track in particular and began singing part of the lyrics from her uncle Clive Maldoon’s and Dave Curtiss’ Sepheryn (1971) over the beat, changing the original chorus melody, adapting those lines to higher keys and enhancing the tune with acrobatic ad libs. That’s the night Zephyr In The Sky came about.

Curtiss Maldoon - Sepheryn (Ray of Light)

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In its early incarnation and with its provisional title, Zephyr In The Sky got also performed/tested live by Christine and William during a few sets the producer held at Astoria, the Phoenix Festival and Brixton Academy in the same year, but since then the song ended up lying in the vaults, waiting for a luckier chance to shine, until Guy Oseary from Maverick called Orbit up in March 1997, saying La Ciccone was interested in hooking up with him.

William sent the songstress the infamous DAT containing 13 tracks (mainly instrumental loops and musical ideas to revise) and Zephyr In The Sky was indeed on it. The pieces were all there, they just needed to be taken to a whole new level and sublimated, as it happened once they both entered the recording studio in LA a few months later. The Christine Leach demo Madonna heard, basically, had the first verse from Sepheryn repeated twice, which led her to entirely write a brand new second one following the same chords progression (´Faster than the speeding light she’s flying´, and so on), gaining a deserved recognition for that on the track’s official credits. Madonna also overhauled the vocal arrangement with Orbit, in order to push her singing skills further and reach unexplored peaks.

With a much more club friendly production and a dreamier feel throughout, the song (finally titled Ray Of Light) therefore found the right place to revive, and what initially sounded like a perfectible draft evolved into the most groundbreaking epitome of late 90’s electronic dance/pop euphoria, energized by a perky swirl of synthesizers and keyboards lasting a little over 10 minutes in its yet to be heard unedited version played in its full glory just once, to close Madonna’s Ice Ball secret gig at Roxy in 1998, and then purposely cut it down to 5:21 to fit the album format.

The rest is history we all know.

* Trivia lover, dance/pop music freak and insanely passionate about how Madonna’s and other artists’ music comes about, Francis is a Madonna fan since 1999, blown away by the Queen on a late February afternoon, when she hit the good ol’ MTV in the shape of a diaphanous geisha for her Nothing Really Matters video. From then on, he meticolously caught up on the superstar’s huge back catalogue, with a special focus on the collaborators and fun facts hiding behind most of her songs creation, in order to share reliable tidbits and accurate infos with the fanbase.