Song Exploder - Madonna - Hung Up

Episode Date: August 24, 2022

Madonna is the best-selling female recording artist of all time. She has twelve albums that have gone multi-platinum. She’s won seven Grammys, and has had fifty songs reach number 1 on the Billboard Dance chart. That’s more number 1s than anyone in any category, ever. In this episode, she talks about one of those number 1s: “Hung Up,” from her 2005 album Confessions on a Dance Floor. The song and that album were co-produced by Stuart Price, an electronic musician, producer, and DJ from the UK. “Hung Up” began in part because Madonna was working on a film with director Luc Besson (whose films include The Fifth Element and Taken). But the song also grew out of Stuart’s DJ sets. Madonna has a new career-spanning album out, called Finally Enough Love: 50 Number Ones, and in honor of its release, Madonna and Stuart Price told me the story of how their collaboration and partnership led to one of Madonna’s biggest hits. For more, visit songexploder.net/madonna.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. This episode contains explicit language. Madonna's the best-selling female recording artist of all time. She has 12 albums that have gone multi-platinum. She's won seven Grammys, and she's had 50 songs reach number one on the Billboard Dance Chart. That's more number ones than anyone in any category ever. In today's episode, she's going to talk about one.

one of those number ones, hung up from her 2005 album, Confessions on a Dance Floor. The song and that album were co-produced by Stuart Price, an electronic musician, producer, and DJ from the UK. Madonna has a new career-spanning album out called Finally Enough Love, 50 number ones. And in honor of its release, Madonna and Stuart Price told me the story of how their collaboration and partnership led to one of Madonna's biggest hits. My name is Madonna Louise Gicone. And I'm Stuart Price, the co-producer and co-writer have hung up.

I met Stuart because I was looking for a musical director. A musical director, in this case, would be someone to come work with Madonna to shape her songs into what they would be for a performance. They'd conduct the band and arrange the music to fit with the overall vision for the tour. And Stuart was recommended for the job. But he's like, oh, he's a DJ. He's not going to know. Like, I need somebody who's, like, really musical and really knows how to play musical instruments.

and I was extremely resistant, but it turns out that Stuart is an excellent musician also. But the time that we would spend together touring, I mean, we were rehearsing all day long as I remember it. And so there's this nine or ten hours a day, and the rehearsals were like three months long or something. And when you rehearse and you do rehearsals and sound checks, you start playing chords,

and then somebody starts playing a drumbeat, and then I start singing, and then suddenly I'm writing a song. I mean, making music becomes a habit and things evolve naturally. So before we even, I think, got in the studio, we'd built that shorthand first. Exactly. And the origin of a hung-up came out of Stuart's brain first. Around this time, so that 2005, we'd just finished touring. And over the course of the tour, the music had sort of been getting more clubby, more remixy.

and during that period I would be DJing as well. So it's 5am. I'm driving back down the M6 from Liverpool to get back to London and trying not to fall asleep because I'd been DJing for three nights straight. So I better put the radio on. On comes Abba at 5.30 a.m.

The song's called Gimmy, Gimmy, Gimmy, Gimmy, a man after midnight. Gimmy, Gimmy, has this synth riff in it. It like cuts through anything. You can hear that melody from miles away. And I thought, oh, that's a good idea for a sample. And so about three hours before the gig the next weekend, I thought, oh, I better try and slap something together with that. So I sample it off the vinyl, played it in through the DJ mixer,

had a filter on it, and it begins with a clock tick, in part because when you're DJing, you're like manually beat matching everything, and the clock is easy to mix in a set. But it also turns out that it works on this other level for the song as well, which supports the lyric of what Madonna came up with. Time goes bad, so slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly. Madonna was going to do a film with Luke Besson where you were all these different roles in it and this like time traveling.

Yeah, Luke Besson brought this script to me and he said, I want you to be in it and I want you to write all the music. for it and it takes place in all these different eras, the 20s, the 40s, the 60s. I had recorded all these French cabaret songs and all the other period songs were really coming to me easily. And when we got to this moment in time, disco and dance music, the only thing I could think about was Studio 54. I remember you came to the studio and you were struggling with all this work for the film

and there's so much to do, I don't know how we can get through it all, and there's a section. And you said, it's supposed to be like Abba at Studio 54. You've got anything like that? All of a sudden, I remembered there was just this little seed of an idea that I'd taken out to DJ with, and I played it. And I was looking at you for feedback thinking, gosh, is this any good, or is this just an absolute turkey? I immediately heard the melody in my head, like, every little. thing that you say or do. I heard that.

Like, I just knew it. Like, I just felt intuitively, this is something, this is going to be something. And you started singing immediately into the mic. The first vocal that we did is the final vocal on the track. Yep. We came up with the verses a little bit later, but it's amazing that that's just it ended up being the final thing. But a lot of times it happens like that.

The first vocal you do, the demo vocal, is always the one you end up using. You try to perfect it. You do it a thousand times, and then you go, oh, fuck, nothing's better than the demo vocal, and you go back to it. All the music that Stuart and I worked on, for the most part, happened in his attic recording studio in London. It was sort of a completely illegally built studio in the flat that I had. You had to climb up a ladder to get to it, and it was all white, and it had a couch, a white couch in it that I would often have nervous breakdowns on. The white couch there was sort of, under a pitch roof.

So I remember you sort of had to sit there kind of a little bit awkwardly with the microphone in your hand and then you would sort of lean forward and we would do the vocals that way. The other thing about the way we worked and so not my world and my life anymore is it was just me and Stuart.

There were no other technicians. There were no other people. Stewart did everything. He played all the instruments. He operated everything. He programmed everything. He was the digital. DJ, and I was just the whiny pop star that showed up.

And there was no drinking, there was no smoking, there was no eating. And there were no phones. Yeah. There was just us in the music. But that's why we got so much work done. We literally only worked, which is how it should be. Having the sample, that in itself doesn't make a song. A song has a verse.

A song has a bridge. It was going to be a little bit stuck. But then I just thought, well, okay, that's the real ABBA doing the sample. Today I'm going to be fake ABBA, and I started sort of trying to write a verse and come up with some new chords. You know, play some drums, play some keyboard. And to create some sort of cohesiveness to this, I'll multitrack myself playing all these parts. And then I'll cram it all back through the DJ mixer again like I did with the original sample. And then the structure was really quick to put together

because, I mean, Madonna has this great natural instinct for what should happen now. She knew exactly where the verse should land, how soon it should be in. Hung up is kind of a love song. I'm saying every little thing that you say or do, I'm hung up on you, but I'm also, I'm over it. I'm over the bullshit.

Like, you're not there. You're never there for me. So I'm hanging up on you. Tick, tick, tak, tak. It's a quarter to do. And I'm done, I'm hanging up on you. Overnight you would take a mix and go home, and I think you would just listen to it and then come back the next day

and we'd have the next part, which is where time goes by so slowly came from. Time goes by so slowly. With hung up there's an urgency to it. That tone there is actually just a filter, just modulating really, really fast. To me it felt like a city skate. It felt like you were sort of driving through a city and there was some sort of buzz of the lights or electricity. We weren't really working with many people around

to say, oh, let's do some backing vocals now. Yeah. But we needed different textures of voices. And so using a pitch shifter, just by lowering Madonna's vocal down, not a whole octave, it just goes halfway, it drops down a fifth or something. It just created this effect

where it feels more like male in its sound. I couple that pitch vocal with a vocoder as well. And so there's this contrast of this upbeat lead vocal with these sort of sad backing vocals. The whole story is about falling in love and then falling out of love, which is basically what life is about. The upside of love and then, you know, the rejection or the destruction or the end. Hung up embodies both sides of the story.

The song got sidetracked by another film he was making, and I got sidetracked by my record. So we both agreed that it wasn't the right time to make the movie, but he was happy to give me all the songs that I had worked on. But Abba, they didn't allow people to sample their music. So I was like, oh man, this is not cool because this song is so dope. So what are we going to do about it? And then you wrote them a handwritten letter.

You were really honest in the letter about how special their music had been to you. And then I decided to pay them a visit, honestly expecting them to turn me down. But then I thought, well, you never know if I'm really charming. I could appeal to them. I can play them the track. And I think they appreciated the effort. And I just think it came from a place of honesty and sort of consideration. I think that connected with them.

And they let us use it. Thank goodness. When we started working on the record, we were just, bursting with ideas and ready to go. And dance music was a culture that you were immersed in. It was a culture I was immersed in. But at that time, in the States, you know, dance music was like a forbidden word.

It wasn't popular on American radio around then, 2005. And so I think because you're sort of feeling that, well, it's not going to get on the radio anyway, we may as well make a record that we just love and we just think is fun and we don't care that no one's going to like it. It's a story of my life. This song has a lot of good memories attached to it. I remember I went to Australia and you said...

Play the song when you're spinning. It was like an experiment. And so I called you from the club when I was playing it and just kind of dialed the phone and held it there for like seven minutes because that's how long it was at that time. And everybody went mad and it was so exciting and glorious to hear that enthusiasm from the crowd. And then I was just playing it for everybody. I remember I was living in London and I had this driver that I, that worked for me probably for two weeks.

I had to sit in the front seat with him because I felt like I had to like show him how to like drive the car. And it was a little bit disconcerting because London's really crazy to drive in. But like to distract him because I could, he was sweating bullets. So I put the CD in the car. I said, check this out. What do you think of this? And he's like, oh my God, this is so good. This is really good.

He almost crashed into like a stop sign, and I fired him the next week, but he was so blown away by the song. He couldn't even drive the car in a straight line. So I thought that was a good sign. I've been really fortunate over the years to have great collaborators to work with and Stuart being one of them.

I guess I'm kind of old-fashioned that way. I like to find people to work with and develop a relationship. with them and it's all about chemistry and you have to be a little mad and a little bit crazy and super musical and not think in a limited way and have an incredible sense of humor which Stuart has do you have this thing about you as well that you do is that you're able to bring the best out of people that you work with I certainly became better at what I do through working with you it doesn't happen a lot but every once in a while people

People collide, you know what I mean? Creative minds collide and end up making magic together. And now here's Hung Up by Madonna in its entirety. Or visit songexploder.net slash Madonna. You'll find links to stream or download this song. And you can watch the music video. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full ink.

And this is the first one that'll be out under my own name. name Rishikesh her way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabond, Fenlily, and and the producer Phil Weinrobe.

I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs were out now.

You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co. Or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. Song Exploder and the show's theme music were created by me. I produced this episode with Craig Ely, with artwork by Carlos Lerma, music clearance by Kathleen Smith, and production. production assistants from Chloe Parker, Nick Song, and Mary Dolan.

Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at Radiotopia.fm. You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Rishi Hereway, and you can follow the show at Song Exploder. You can also get a Song Exploder t-shirt at songexploder.net slash shirt. I'm Rishi-Keshirway. Thanks for listening.