The best-selling female artist of all time, Madonna, took fans into the creation of one of her most popular #1 songs, “Hung Up,” alongside co-writer Stuart Price during a recent episode of the Song Exploder podcast with host Hrishikesh Hirway.
LISTEN NOW: Madonna joins the Song Exploder podcast
The song, as well as the album it appeared on in 2005, Confessions on a Dance Floor, were co-produced by Stuart Price, an electronic musician, producer, and DJ from the UK. The track came to be when Madonna was working on searching for Disco-type music for the film she was working on with director Luc Besson, which happened to be exactly what Price had after an idea sparked during a late night drive home.
“It was 5am, and I was driving back down the M6 [motorway] from Liverpool to get down to London and trying not to fall asleep because I had been DJing for 3 nights straight,” Price shared of the moment the song was started. “I put the radio on, on comes ABBA at 5:30am. The songs called 'Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight).' ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme’ has like, this synth riff in it and it cuts through anything. You could hear that melody from miles away… And I thought, that’s a good idea for a sound pool.”
Stuart started using the piece he created from this inspiration during DJ sets and one day it became exactly what Madonna was looking for while creating music for a film.
“I remember, you came to the studio and you were struggling with all this work for the film — ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do! I don’t know how I’m going to get through it all!.’ You were like, ‘There’s this section that’s supposed to be like ABBA Studio 54 — do you have anything like that?’”
“I immediately heard the melody in my head… I just felt, intuitively, this is something! This is something!”
Hear more about the song, included on Madonna’s forthcoming Finally Enough Love: 50 Number Ones album, and the stories surrounding how it came to be on the Song Exploder podcast.
The Song Exploder podcast features musicians as they take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. Each episode features an artist discussing a song of theirs, breaking down the sounds and ideas that went into the writing and recording.
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