FEATURE:
Beneath the Sleeve
Madonna - Ray of Light
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THERE are three reasons…
why I am including Madonna’s Ray of Light in this Beneath the Sleeve. Well, four, actually. Not only is it one of the best albums ever; one that was very important in 1998. I was a teen then and absolutely love this album. My favourite Madonna album. Veronica Electronica was released on 25th July. Madonna always thought of this as a companion remix album to her seventh studio album, Ray of Light. However, unfortunately, Veronica Electronica was put on hold due to the ongoing success of Ray of Light and its singles. Now out in the world, Veronica Electronica features rare and previously unreleased remixes by several of Madonna's collaborators from the Ray of Light era, including Peter Rauhofer, William Orbit, Sasha, BT, and Victor Calderone. There are two other reasons for spotlighting Ray of Light. It is Madonna’s sixty-seventh birthday on 16th August, so this is a chance to celebrate that by focusing on a masterpiece of hers. Also, a couple of recent articles – around the release of Veronica Electronica – write why Ray of Light is guiding the sound of Pop in 2025. However it is perhaps at its most relevant now, some twenty-seven years after its release. Released on 22nd February, 1998, Ray of Light hit the number one spot in many countries, including the U.K. A different sound and direction from 1994’s Bedtime Stories, Madonna worked with producers William Orbit, Patrick Leonard and Marius de Vries. Iconic singles like Ray of Light, Frozen and The Power of Good-Bye are among Madonna’s best songs. With this new sense of spiritualism that moved away from perhaps the more sexual and liberated sound of her previous work, this was not Madonna entirely looking inward. Ray of Light’s title track is as euphoric and extravert as anything she ever release! I would advise people go and get this album on vinyl. I am going to explore some features. That give us insight and depth. Take us beneath the vinyl sleeve and into the grooves.
I am starting out with The Quietus and their thirtieth anniversary feature in 2018. Lucy O’Brien has written about Madonna and published a book about her (2007’s Madonna: Like an Icon). She shared her thoughts on Ray of Light three decades after it took Madonna’s legacy and brilliance to new heights. One of the most influential albums ever:
“The album came at a crucial time for Madonna. After the high octane success of the 1980s, her 1990s were testing and difficult. Slut-shamed over her Sex book and the Erotica album, Madonna engaged in angry attention-seeking exercises like saying “fuck” 13 times on Late Show with David Letterman. She had lost confidence, and the tentative R&B of 1994’s Bedtime Stories felt like marking time. Veering off into musical theatre with the Evita project took her into safe MOR territory, but, ironically, rather than turning her into a 1980s pop has-been, those strenuous theatrical songs sung with a full orchestra gave her voice depth and tone. By then Madonna was in her late 30s and re-evaluating life, casting around for answers in study of Yogic philosophy. The birth of her daughter Lourdes in 1996 knocked out some of that infamous ego, so that when she returned to the studio in 1997 for the Ray Of Light sessions she had discovered a more intense, personal voice than the so-called “Minnie Mouse on helium” of earlier years.
Ray Of Light was created in old school prog rock fashion – with mainly one producer, over a period of months, in an intensively collaborative process. “She produced me producing her,” said William Orbit. Recorded in a modest studio in an unfashionable part of LA, the album was intentionally un-industry. Early sessions with Babyface were shelved, and Madonna’s longtime producer arranger Pat Leonard was sidelined in favour of an awkward English eccentric whose hardware kept breaking down. Although Orbit’s perceived amateurism made her nervous, Madonna knew from his dancefloor remix of 1990’s ‘Justify My Love’ that he could create the futuristic tone she craved. With Bass-O-Matic’s Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Bass (named after a Pink Floyd album), and the rave anthem ‘In The Realm Of The Senses’, Orbit had already declared an interest. Kabbalah and new motherhood opened Madonna’s mind, but it was the alchemy between her and Orbit – his trippy underground vibe and her willingness to experiment, that triggered her transformation of consciousness. With Ray Of Light they created the sonic space and musical textures for the sparse poetry that’s embedded in her songwriting. Previous hit-driven albums, with the exception of moments on Like A Prayer and Erotica, hadn’t allowed room for that potential to emerge. For the first time she could express herself in-depth.
Madonna did her background reading – everything from JG Ballard to Anne Sexton to Shakespeare’s sonnets were inspirations here – and did lengthy songwriting sessions with Leonard and Rick Nowells (“her lyric writing was poetic and intelligent,” the latter says, “she knows how to channel a song”) before she set foot in the studio. Once there, little Lourdes was installed in a playroom, and Madonna focused on the tracks that would eventually piece together a story. “I traded fame for love/ Some things cannot be bought… Now I find/ I’ve changed my mind,” she sang on opening track ‘Drowned World/Subsitute for Love’. The apocalyptic dreamscape of JG Ballard’s Drowned Worlds sets the tone. From there she moves into ‘Swim’, a low-slung electro song where Madonna delves into the religious themes of her pop past as the Sin-eater, carrying “these sins on my back”. ‘Ray of Light’ then provides a giddy moment of reawakening, with Orbit pushing her to sing a semitone higher than her comfort zone in order to stretch out that sense of hedonist abandon. This is the song, with its accompanying Jonas Akerlund video – all speeding lights, winking urbanscapes and fast motion skies – that relaunched her career, that married techno beats to cranked-up oscillators and wall-of-sound pop, and begged the question, did Madonna neck a zesty pinger?”.
Prior to getting to those two new articles about Ray of Light’s influence today, I want to bring in an archive interview from 1998. SPIN shared this feature of their interview that was originally published in April. A couple of months after Ray of Light was released. It is interesting reading interviews with Madonna at that time and what she says about the album:
“As much as she’s perceived to be pop’s shrewdest businesswoman, Madonna has rarely taken he most direct route to the bank. Working deviance-phobic nerves with the queer boys and girls of her Sex Book was not exactly playing it safe. There has to be a surer way of getting paid than creating a decade and a half’s worth of gay nightlife soundtracks. She’s obviously made a few unpopular cinematic choices. So the only real option for the sole ’80s icon still thriving in the ’90s was to make the kind of record she puts on her boom box — a blend of haunted singer/songwriter introspection and beat-savvy electronic exotica that may not play in Topeka, if U2’s Pop is any indication.
In doing so, Madonna still pushes buttons. Just as she once sang that she wasn’t sorry for sharing her erotic fantasies, Madonna does not apologize for turning inward and employing the language she’s learned while journeying to the center of her still-firm chakras. On her new album, Ray Of Light, she sings about karma, quotes mystics, changes Sanskrit as she would in her yoga class, kisses emotionally stunted lovers good-bye, and croons a lullaby to daughter Lourdes as if her warble breathed butterfly kisses. Her brazen vulnerability is destined to be someone else’s touchy-feely-trendy hogwash: Madonna has not lost her ability to endear and annoy, and in its digitized, navel-gazing way, Ray Of Light is Madonna’s most radical, mask-free work.
The comparatively sexless tunes take their time to generate heat, but the sonic bacchanalia crafted by William Orbit (and, on four tracks, by Massive Attack associate Marius DeVries) is as propulsive as her newly bolstered vocal chops are controlled. Despite Ray Of Light’s aural hipness, Madonna asserts sincerity to the point of occasional — and affecting — awkwardness. When she sings to baby Lourdes, “You breathe new life into my broken heart,” she turns shamelessly sentimental syllable into the spine-tingly stuff of which sweet pop dreams are made.
“If it looks like I just got out of bed,” Madonna announces as she arrives at her neighborhood coffee shop without a bodyguard, assistant, or publicist, “I did.” She’s dressed in a nondescript black knit shirt, black pants, and chipped black nail polish. Brown roots inches long lead to a tangled mess of brassy blond. At the end of the interview, Madonna politely refuses the reporter’s request for a snap-shot. “Maybe next time when I don’t look like and old sea-hag,” she suggests. Throughout the interview, she remains candid, but rarely does the club-queen who would be king lapse into her infamous dis-intensive talk-show persona. She even tried to be kind about Yanni. Sometimes, I miss the old Madonna.
Why make another album?
Why breathe? Because I love it. Because I love making music. It’s what I do.
When I got this assignment, I wondered, “What can I possibly ask Madonna that hasn’t been asked?” And then I thought, “Music! I’ll ask her about music!” So, for starters, how was making Ray Of Light different than making your other records?
Well, my daughter came to visit me every day in the studio so there were lots of baby interruptions; that’s new. Mostly, though, I look at more musical chances. I let William [Orbit] play Mad professor. He comes from a very experimental, cutting-edge sort of place — he’s not a trained musician, and I’m used to working with classically trained musicians — but I knew that’s where I wanted to go,so I took a lot more risks Oftentimes the creative process was frustrating because I wasn’t used to it; it took a lot longer than usual to make this record. But I realize now that I need that time to get where I was going.
What’s the songwriting process like between you and your collaborators?
Well, it happens differently every time. In William’s case, he would often given me tapes of snippets he was working on — eight-bar phrases, 16-bar phrases, stripped-down versions of what you hear on the record. And I’d listen to them over and over and it would just inspire lyrics. I’d start writing a little bit and then I’d go back to William say, “Okay, let’s expand on this musical idea.” And as we’d expand on this music, I’d expand on the lyrics. That was true for most everything except for the album’s last track, “Mer Girl.” I decided I would write a song to the music as given to me, and when William asked me if I wanted to do something with it, I said, “I want it just like it is, I want you to put the tape up right now and I’m gonna sing to it.” And did it in one take. For “Frozen,” a song wrote with Pat Leonard, I was obsessed with the movie The Sheltering Sky and the whole Moroccan/orchestral/superromantic/man-carrying-the-woman-he-loves-across-the-desert vibe. So I told Pat that I wanted something with a tribal feel, something really lush and romantic. When he started playing some music, I just turned the DAT on and started freeassociating and came up with the melody.
How has you approach to vocals changed with this album? You seem to be going for a more European approach to singing, almost operatic, less colloquial.
I studied with a vocal coach for Evita and I realized there was a whole piece of my voice I wasn’t using. Before, I just believe I had a really limited range and was going to make the most of it. Then I started studying with a coach. God bless her. My secret dream is to sing Italian at songs, so at the end of my lesson my teacher would let me sing Italian operetta. Maybe that affected me unconsciously.
Ray Of Light is a very soulful record, but it sounds nothing like contemporary soul, à la Mary J. Blige. Have your feelings about black culture and black music changed?
I don’t think that a lot of soul searching is going on in soul music these days, so in that respect it’s pretty disappointed and uninspiring. There are definitely artists whom I respect and admire, but for the most part R&B is not what it used to be.
Why do you think that is?
There seems to be a certain kind of formula that is getting over right now. No disrespect to Puff Daddy — he’s a real pioneer in a lot of ways — but constantly recycle other people’s music is not very inspiring. You’re just hearing things you’ve already heard before. It makes you want to sing along but you’re not really going to another place with it. As I was driving over here, I was listening to the radio and there was this Stevie Wonder song. Where is somebody who writes like that now? It’s so sad. I guess Babyface comes closest, but I consider his stuff more pop. I can’t think of anybody who’s as deep and as layered as Stevie Wonder. Instead we get the cartoon version of life: being powerful, rich, and having beautiful woman. I don’t think they’re setting out to push the envelope or take music to another level. It’s about intention.
How do you pick who you’re going to collaborate with? I’m sure you could have anyone you want
Well I could, but I always go for the cook in the kitchen [laughs]. I like to work with people who take chances. Usually they’re undiscovered, because once people are successful they don’t like taking risks.
But you’ve worked with Patrick Leonard all along.
Yes, on songwriting, but no production. We write great songs together, but from the production point of view, the music that I listen to comes mostly from England and France, and there’s a certain European sensibility that I couldn’t have gotten from an American producer.
Why is that?
There’s a greater acceptance of cutting-edge things there. That goes for fashion, film, music. There is a real competitive thing going on in England about who can sell the most records, who can have the biggest box-office receipts. I’m much more inspired by the stuff coming out in Europe than i am out of America.
Like who?
Bjork, Everything but the Girl, Trickly and Martine.
What about Bjork attracts you?
She’s incredibly brave and she’s got a real mischievous quality about her. I find her very compelling, really daring.
How about Everything but the Girl?
There’s a plaintive quality to Tracey Thorn’s voice that I really respond to. And that song, “Missing”? I know they’ve played the shit out of it and I ‘m over it and everything, but it was such a brilliant song”.
The first of this year’s features that looks at the modern relevance of Ray of Light is from The Independent. Back in April, Madonna responded to a comment on her Instagram page. It concerned how many modern artists seem to be following in Madonna’s footsteps in terms of their sound and stage presentation:
“Did you see so-and-so copied you?” Madonna is asked, in this hypothetical but presumably factual exchange – one as likely to have taken place in 1992 as it is 2025. “God forbid a woman takes inspiration,” Madonna coolly replies. The dialogue, pasted on top of an image of the star strutting down a London street in shades, was accompanied by a further caption: “I see you, I love you. You’re doing great sweeties.”
Madonna has thawed over the decades, both when it comes to her own back catalogue (her 2023 greatest-hits tour would have been unthinkable a handful of years earlier) and her relationship to the many artists who’ve cast themselves in her image. But there’s still a glint of prickly, passive-aggressive menace to how Madonna views the pop world – a kind of “I know, adore and support the fact that you’re ripping me so brazenly off” – that feels uniquely, hilariously her. Case in point: the announcement, just a few weeks after her Instagram post, of a long-rumoured collection of remixes locked in the Madonna vault since the late Nineties, each of which feels like a sonic blueprint for the exact kind of music currently being produced by music’s most outré pop girlies, from FKA Twigs and Addison Rae to Arca, Caroline Polachek and Erika de Casier. Jade, Britain’s next big pop hope, even threw out a cover of Madonna’s stark ballad “Frozen” in March. God forbid a woman takes inspiration.
Veronica Electronica, which is released tomorrow, takes its name from an alter ego Madonna teased in 1998 during the promotion for Ray of Light – her sensual, nocturnal dance record that housed hits such as “Frozen”, as well as “Drowned World/Substitute for Love”, “Nothing Really Matters” and the still-dazzling title track, with its twisting, twirling techno melody and euphoric vocals. A remix album bearing the Veronica Electronica title was mooted for release a year later, until Madonna grew distracted by sessions for her 2000 record Music – an album that would build upon her work with Ray of Light’s key producer, the spacy genius William Orbit, as well as the French electronica pioneer Mirwais Ahmadzaï.
But whether it’s truly new or not, Veronica Electronica feels like an attempt to root the pop sounds of 2025, as if to remind modern listeners of the inky, plaintive dance music from whence they came. It is a truth universally acknowledged that everything in pop music sounds like Madonna, because Madonna is more or less all pop music, or at least the template for everything we recognise as female pop stardom today. But it’s been more pronounced than usual lately, with the year’s two best pop records – FKA Twigs’s Eusexua and Addison Rae’s Addison – both fusing traditional pop hooks with a chilly, introspective, ambient gloom, much like Madonna did on Ray of Light and Music.
On January’s Eusexua, a portmanteau of “euphoria” and “sexuality”, Twigs shifts out of the eerie midtempos of her earlier material and into full-blown experimental pop. There is an almost cyborgian eroticism to the record, her vocals warped into metallic purrs, the production bubbling and curdling underneath her toplines. “Girl Feels Good”, a slinky celebration of female sexuality co-produced by Ray of Light’s Marius de Vries, is a clear highlight, shifting from a sparse oddity into a busy lab experiment full of dramatic strings and glitchy synths. It could be lifted from turn-of-the-century Madonna – which Twigs herself has directly acknowledged, performing the track on her tour with choreography borrowed from the video of Madonna’s 2000 folktronica masterpiece “Don’t Tell Me”.
Six months on from Eusexua came Rae’s full-length debut Addison, which traded the Britney-aping power-pop of the former TikTok star’s early EPs in favour of lush trip-hop and sensuality. It’s partly out of necessity: Rae is not a powerhouse of a vocalist but a 24-carat whisper singer, Addison’s soundscape matching the limitations of its star’s pipes. But it helps evoke a gorgeous airiness across the record’s 12 tracks (its producers have stated Ray of Light was a key influence). Rae’s lyrics are often abstract and opaque, like dream logic, or what comes out when you pop a foreign language into Google Translate (“Tell me who I am, do I provoke you with my tone of innocence?”).
While Madonna is known for her steeliness – that sense that she’s almost infallible when it comes to criticism or emotional setbacks – Ray of Light was itself born of pain. She called the period prior to its recording her “rock bottom”, in which she faced relentless backlash over her sexually provocative output, questions about her marketability and relevance in an increasingly busy pop landscape, and a resulting crisis of confidence. “I think Madonna’s been of the opinion that it’s self-indulgent to admit sadness and loneliness,” her friend, the filmmaker Alek Keshishian, told Vanity Fair in 1998. “Before, it was always, ‘I have no regrets.’ This time it’s [quoting ‘Drowned World/Substitute for Love’] ‘...now I find I’ve changed my mind.’ That, to me, takes a great amount of courage.”
Ever a magpie, she sought to replicate sounds on the pop fringes – Bjork, Massive Attack, Everything But the Girl, Tricky – and blow them up to their most commercially viable. (As if something was in the water, Janet Jackson and Kylie Minogue both released their most sonically interesting albums to date – 1997’s The Velvet Rope and Impossible Princess, respectively – around the same time.) Ray of Light touches on grief, faith, depression and nascent motherhood – Madonna had given birth to her first child just over a year earlier. The record was a smash, selling 16 million copies worldwide and netting Madonna four Grammys. Orbit was himself transformed into pop’s go-to producer for a time, too, working his magic in the studio for No Doubt, Blur, Melanie C and – most satisfyingly – on All Saints’s “Pure Shores”, arguably the most serene piece of Y2K ear-candy put to record.
And now we’re here. Why the resurgence of this particular Madonna sound? Call it a kind of musical reset, perhaps, from the wordy, wink-wink-nudge-nudge of Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan or the maximalist, Eighties-tinged pop of Dua Lipa or the non-industrial segments of this year’s middling Lady Gaga comeback record. Or maybe it’s even a response to the newfound, post-Covid allure of sweaty, underground nightclubs and dancing with strangers. The “Ray of Light” video concludes with Madonna losing her mind, all by herself, on a crowded dancefloor – just one restless speck of humanity in a massive universe beyond any of our comprehension. Haven’t we all felt that way at least once in the past few years?
Whatever the reason, Veronica Electronica is here to remind us of who dove into this terrain first. Or if not first, at least the most successfully. And where’s the harm in that?”.
I will end with a brilliant article from BBC. They argued how Ray of Light is 2025’s hottest album. With Veronica Electronica released, it did get journalists considering the power and endurance of its sister album, Ray of Light. I do think that Ray of Light is one of the most important albums ever. One that many did not expect Madonna to release following Bedtime Stories. That album was a reaction to 1992’s Erotica and the criticism it got from many due to its sexual nature and ‘controversy’. Ray of Light marries her innate ability to write instant Pop classics. Motherhood and spirituality enforces many of the 1998 album’s best moments:
“Madonna's varied discography is a mother lode of musical inspiration. With her early albums such as 1984's Like a Virgin, 1986's True Blue and 1989's Like a Prayer, she helped to invent the concept of the instantly recognisable, clearly delineated pop "era". But, during the past year or so, a slightly more recent Madonna album has become a touchstone for a new generation of musicians – 1998's Ray of Light, a cutting-edge collection of swirling electronica, which she largely crafted with British producer William Orbit.
"It's the perfect blend of pop sensibility and electronic innovation: it manages to deliver both, which is rare," Welsh electronic musician and producer Kelly Lee Owens tells the BBC. Owens, who cites Ray of Light as a major influence on her 2024 album Dreamstate, believes Madonna's masterpiece feels like "something that was fated to be made" in that "it was created at exactly the right time and place and has now become timeless".
British singer-songwriter Mae Muller also drew from Ray of Light while working on her new EP My Island, which was released earlier this month. Muller says the album's euphoric title track helped to put her in "a magic place of nostalgic melancholy" that made her "want to dance", which is her "favourite place" musically.
The album's spin on 90s electronica – beautifully fluid and flecked with techno and trip-hop – is disarmingly contemporary once more
This year alone, music critics have detected Ray of Light's sonic legacy in acclaimed albums by British avant-pop alchemist FKA Twigs (Eusexua), Portuguese-born Danish R&B musician Erika de Casier (Lifetime) and US TikTok creator-turned-pop singer Addison Rae (Addison). The album's aqueous-sounding spin on 1990s electronica – beautifully fluid and flecked with techno and trip-hop – is disarmingly contemporary once more. In March, former Little Mix singer Jade Thirlwall (now known as JADE) released a suitably dramatic cover of Frozen, Ray of Light's chart-topping lead single. She said she was drawn to Madonna's haunting ballad because "it feels like a mix of genres" and "isn't your typical pop song". In a way, this cuts to the crux of Ray of Light's enduring appeal: because the album was such a cultural disruptor when it came out, it retains a rare cachet more than 27 years later.
IN THIS PHOTO: Addison Rae is among the contemporary artists whose work displays influences of the 1998 Madonna album/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
Now, Madonna herself is revisiting the Ray of Light era with an accompanying (if somewhat belated) remix album called Veronica Electronica. Just released, it collects seven club-centric reworkings of songs from the original LP alongside one previously unreleased demo: the resilient break-up song Gone Gone Gone. When Madonna announced Veronica Electronica's release in June, a post on her website explained that it was "originally envisioned by Madonna as a remix album in 1998", but the project was "ultimately sidelined by the original album's runaway success and parade of hit singles that dominated the spotlight for more than a year".
No self-respecting pop star undersells their achievements, but this isn't hyperbole. When Ray of Light was released in February 1998, it debuted at number one in 17 countries and at number two in the US. In the UK, it spawned no fewer than five top 10 singles: Frozen, the pulsating title track, the reflective ballad Drowned World/Substitute for Love, a touching double A-side of The Power of Good-Bye and Little Star, and the existential club anthem Nothing Really Matters. Ray of Light would go on to sell 16 million copies globally: an especially impressive total given that Madonna released the album when she was 39, a challenging age for female performers who refuse to narrow their ambitions”.
Ray of Light's intoxicating sonic cocktail wouldn't pack such a punch if the album didn't contain some of Madonna's most ruminative and revelatory songwriting. She celebrates the birth of her daughter Lourdes on the lovely Little Star, but also confronts the death of her mother on the astonishingly stark album closer Mer Girl. "And I smelled her burning flesh, her rotting bones, her decay," Madonna sings in hushed tones. "I ran and I ran, I'm still running away." Owens says the overall effect is "so emotionally raw and sonically intimate" that what Madonna is singing about, a devastating visit to her mother's grave, "feels almost tangible somehow".
IN THIS PHOTO: Ray of Light's influence can be heard on EUSEXIA by FKA twigs/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
Elsewhere, Madonna explores the essential emptiness of fame on Drowned World/Substitute for Love, social unrest on Swim, and her yearning for human connection on standout album tracks Skin and Sky Fits Heaven. Frank believes Ray of Light's spiritual streak is another reason why it chimes with so many contemporary artists. "A sense of the spiritual and introspective is all over pop music now," he says. "When you listen to Charli XCX's [2024 album] Brat or Ariana Grande's most recent album [last year's Eternal Sunshine], they're soundtracking their journey of spirituality and self-care – their search for meaning – on top of a foundation of electronica."
On one occasion, Madonna takes her quest for spiritual enlightenment a little too far. The album track Shanti/Ashtangi, which she sings in the ancient Indo-European language Sanskrit, sets lines from an Indian hymn, the Yoga Travali, to a rattling techno beat. It's doubtless well-intentioned, but also feels like crass cultural appropriation coming from a world-famous white woman.
In a way, though, Ray of Light's occasional flaw only adds to its appeal. "The album feels 100% authentic to Madonna, which is what people have always wanted from music, but maybe even more so today," Muller says. Owens agrees, saying that while "the electronic landscape Orbit created is timeless", Madonna's "vulnerability still resonates deeply" too. For this reason, Ray of Light's influence seems unlikely to wane. It's an album that redefined, and continues to shape, the kind of music that pop stars can make and achieve success with”.
I will finish here. No doubt a seismic album in terms of Pop history and the impact it is still having, Ray of Light is one that everyone needs to own. Though Pop artists today are not copying Madonna, it is clear they are compelled and moved by Ray of Light and want to show their love for it. When you hear the amazing music right through the album, then it is pretty…
EASY to see why.