Musical Interlude: Live to Tell

Longtime readers know I’ve been letting go of my emotional relationship with Madonna. She is in some ways not what she was, and exactly what she always was.

But there is the back catalog. Owing to her own antics that overshadowed everything else, she is not recognized for the quality of her pop music. Her best work is on ballads; this is where you can hear her true and real emotion. You’re hearing a woman named Madonna with real feelings, not a hardened prostitute.

Live to Tell is her greatest ballad, and one of the greatest pop ballads of the 20th century. Patrick Leonard—by far her best collaborator—wrote the music; Madonna wrote the lyrics.

As a boy in 1986 I hid in my bedroom quietly, listening to this song over and over on my JC Penney Walk-Man knockoff. It has always haunted me.

My gut has always told me Madonna was severely traumatized as a girl, not only by the death of her mother when Madonna was five from ovarian cancer. Other dark things happened to her. As a teen, I knew this, and it’s what transfixed me. A radio star understood what my life was really like when no one else did.

There are two versions that are substantially better than the original we’re all familiar with. One is Patrick Leonard’s 2007 performance of the music on piano. You have never heard this melody this way; it’s something higher.

The second is Madonna’s live performance during the 2006 Confessions tour. After her training for Evita in the mid-90s, her vocal technique improved significantly; she became a good live concert singer. This vocal performance live takes it to a level she could not achieve 20 years earlier.

‘The truth is never far behind; you’ve kept it hidden well’