Madonna True Blue Poll. Pick Your Favourites & Discuss.

Even though True Blue isn’t considered her best album by many, the period it came out was perhaps her peak. Even given the fact that the Shanghai Surprise movie flopped at this time, she was still doing better than everyone else!

 

True Blue is a great sounding CD.

As long as you don’t pick up the 2001 remaster by mistake.

 

We’ve talked about Madonna deluxe editions of her prime albums for years. Not that it’s done us any good.

Does anyone know if there are any tracks from the TB recordings that didn’t make the album?

 

MADONNA - TRUE BLUE Sessions - YouTube

 

Nick Kamen had a big UK hit with one of those. Madonna did background vocals on it.



Nick was a model turned singer.. Let’s just say he was a good model.

 

Hahahaha!!

 

Live To Tell is often overlooked by the 'Greatest Hits' brigade. I am delighted to see it's hitting so high here, it's actually leading the poll as I post this. I bet embryonic discussions of her doing the Evita movie had it cited often regarding her range and emotional engagement.

 

I recall they used trim the video of Open Your Heart for TV due to the burlesque / cabaret bit and the voyeurism with a 'young boy' being a bit of an issue.

It ought have been cut for having that, "annoying little kid from The Tube", Felix Howard in it IMO.

 

This thread has got me looking back at this album again. I must listen to it a few more times to stir up some memories of this time and album. I remember when I got this cd in Nov. 1986 this album sounded so futuristic in an 80's way. High tech sounding at times an odd sounding album for what ever that means to anyone. Blue kind of left Mags first two albums in the long distance of a rearview mirror.
The truth is at the time 1986 I hated to see her departure from the sound of those first two albums.

 

Missed out on getting a Sainsbury's coloured vinyl last year.

 

I love this entire album! I bought it the day it was released, although I was very upset that the CD wasn't available at the time -- remember how you used to have to wait a month or two for the CD to be released? Therefore, I have it on both vinyl and CD. I play it approximately 5127% more often than I play MDNA.

 

Her third straight classic album. Bought it upon release in 1986. Kept all the 80s-defining momentum she'd established with her first two records.

Every song is either a hit or sounds like one.

 

I bought the vinyl when it came out. Got the cd in Nov. 1986 what a revelation at the time. The cd sound was incredible 1986.

 

A very strong album although I think it runs out of steam with the last couple of songs. Live to Tell is my favorite track but there are several other strong ones.

 

The CD came out 3 weeks later here. I remember as I was counting the days. I’d bought the LP to tide me over, but I thought the CD sounded so much better. They usually did back then.

 

I think I said this in the Madonna Album by Album thread but True Blue's singles plus Where's The Party which I feel like I heard on the radio despite it not being officially released as a single are all A/A+ songs and the rest of the album is D grade filler. Luckily there are 6 A grade songs so it makes up for the 3 that are forgettable filler.

Also, the best mix of Where's The Party is on the You Can Dance single edit promo CD.

 

I just played my original Australian vinyl pressing from 1986 and the CD....CD is much better.

 

I can't remember exactly how long it was here between the time I got the LP and when the CD came out, but it seemed like it was FOREVER. I was really done with LPs by the summer of 1986, and I didn't appreciate having to deal with the vinyl whenever I wanted to play the album. I was thrilled by how good the CD sounded, too.

The summer of '86 was all about True Blue and Janet Jackson's Control. For a couple of months, I don't think I played anything else. I had a fairly long commute to work that summer (about 45 minutes each direction), and I'd play cassettes I'd made of both albums every day, one going to work, the other coming home.

 

True Blue was definitely the album of 1986 for me. Though I had lots of others too. Different Light, Dancing On The Ceiling, Please, Invisible Touch, True Confessions and Break Every Rule were all bought on CD that summer.

 

Here's my review from the Madonna album-by-album thread here on the forum:

Madonna - True Blue

This was the first Madonna album I bought, on CD, a good while after it came out but - if memory serves - before You Can Dance was released. "Live To Tell" sold me on the album, and I still think it's one of the finest singles of the '80s - Kate Bush caliber stuff. The video is dynamite too, especially for one of those "film clip" videos of the era. She gives a better performance here than in most if not all of her movies, somewhat dressed down as a housewife, rendering the song (by turns heart wrenching and ominous) even more effective. As the lead single for True Blue in the late spring of ‘86 it was something of a mindblower - this was not what we’d come to expect from Madonna - and the moody ballad shockingly made it all the way to #1. I was not a big fan of ballads, and at first I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but I quickly grew to love “Live To Tell” and it ultimately forced me to completely reappraise her and her work. To me, it’s still one of the greatest ballads of the rock era, with its huge cinematic landscape dwarfing a frightened, vulnerable, fatalistic performance by Madonna. Work of this caliber doesn’t happen by accident.

Unfortunately, while I like all of the other hits on the record, nothing on it approaches "Live To Tell" (or indeed "Into The Groove" or probably even "Crazy For You", which I didn't care for all that much as a teen but have grown to love over the years). That having been said, the record is packed with hits, though it suffers from a few misfires as well. Madonna never quite produced that one perfect pop album in the ‘80s - a Thriller, Purple Rain or Faith - but True Blue comes tantalizingly close and sold a whopping 25 million copies, thanks to a trio of chart topping hits, plus a #3 and a #4 hit. If Like A Virgin had made her a superstar, True Blue demonstrated she was going to remain one. Madonna haters must have been apoplectic.

Back then, "Open Your Heart" might have been my second-favorite track, and it's still a great number (nice Harry Nilsson quote there, Madge!) even if it’s extremely ‘80s. Written for Cyndi Lauper (Remember when they were seen as rivals? Yeah, that train was about to come to a crashing halt.), it seemed like it was perfectly directed at husband Sean Penn. These days, I think the album-opener "Papa Don't Preach" might be my second-favorite cut, though. The lyric was controversial, and Madonna received heaps of criticism for being seen as delivering an anti-abortion message. I never read it that way, though. Instead, I saw it as another teenage white trash pop soap opera, in the spirit of Rod Stewart's indelible "Young Turks". I think it was a very savvy move on Madonna’s part, immediately connecting her to a broader teen audience beyond the often well-to-do Madonna clones. And you gotta love that string arrangement, particularly in the intro, and that great walking beat, which the video made effective use of in its opening shots of Madonna.

That video was a fantastic little working class drama in its own right, brilliantly shot in Staten Island and Manhattan, and starring Danny Aiello as her dad and actor Alex McArthur (who’d she’d seen in the lesbian-themed drama Desert Hearts . . . hmmm . . .) as her boyfriend. She gives yet another great performance here, and I’d love to know why she can apparently act in a video but (for the most part) can’t act worth **** in an actual film. Can she only do it for 5 seconds at a time?

Longtime Madonna associate Stephen Bray - who she’d been working with since her pre-fame days in obscure groups like The Breakfast Club - shared writing and production duties this go around with newcomer Patrick Leonard. Leonard was an unlikely partner, a keyboardist who’d grown up on a steady diet of Jethro Tull, Genesis, and Floyd, but he was perfect for True Blue, nudging Madonna in a far whiter, less R&B direction and further tweaking her sound away from early-’80s synth pop just as that genre was in chart collapse. It was a brilliant move, allowing her to collect a chunk of the audience she hadn’t connected with before without sounding ridiculous or changing styles too much. The record made Leonard a star producer and songwriter as well, and he’d go on to collaborate with Madonna off and on over the next decade.

Unfortunately True Blue can’t maintain its momentum coming out of those first two cuts. “White Heat” goes for more Hollywood retro with samples of Cagney from the film of the same name, but “Material Girl” this thing ain’t. The verse is forgettable and the chorus not much better, while the production makes this a very-annoying ‘80s affair. The subsequent “Live To Tell” is so good, the juxtaposition only serves to make “White Heat” look even lamer.

"Where's The Party" always seemed calculated to me, but I love the "make the party last all night" chant. It's too well-spirited for me to actively dislike, but it never catches fire the way “Into The Groove” did. Still, I was kinda surprised it wasn’t released as a single - radio used to play this album cut on Friday nights, which was unusual for pop radio in the ‘80s, so clearly there was interest and a market. I always thought it odd that something which seemed tailor made as a hit single never got released as one.

"True Blue" is a delightful retro, candy sweet girl group number which Madonna pulls off amazingly well - the bridge is especially well-done. In fact, listening to her catalog today, I'm struck by how well the bridges and transitions are pulled off in most of her work, especially the hits. It's extremely noticeable, and they’re often the highlights of the song. She may not be a great musical talent, but she either knew how to pick incredibly well-constructed pop songs or she wrote/tweaked them into shape amazingly well. Unfortunately for “True Blue”, the video was garbage - easily her worst from this era (looked like a cheap Go-Go's video). That was probably intentional, but it didn’t work.

"Open Your Heart" on the other hand had a very interesting video, Madonna working in some kind of a peep show, except what's really on display here are the sad men watching her. Apart from "Material Girl" I'd not thought very much of her dancing up until this point - it seemed more like exercise, or writhing around on the ground coupled with the occasional pose. On "Open Your Heart" though she's got some killer moves, especially with her arms. She'd also slimmed down a bit, and with that short, almost Annie Lennox-like white blonde hair looked very sleek, powerful and catlike but also - surprisingly - more vulnerable too.

"Open Your Heart" was controversial because of the kid who was in it - presumably her character's son or younger brother, waiting for her to get off work and clearly aping some of her dance moves. It’s an interesting observation regarding where kids' ideas about sexuality come from, and a far more sophisticated statement than videos tended to make. To my eye the most shocking thing about the video though were the numerous references to homosexuality - the butch lesbian watching Madonna dance from one of the cubicles, the ambiguously gay sailor duo pressed together and watching her from their shared cubicle, and of course the boy aping some of her stripper moves. None of these were especially subtle things, they appeared repeatedly throughout the video, and I'm surprised the morality police didn't focus more on them and freak completely out. Maybe they were just too clueless to notice, but I sure did. This was the first time I realized she had to be an ally, and a really savvy one at that. It was a blatantly queer message for a superstar at that level to be sending. We weren’t in Kansas anymore.

"La Isla Bonita" seemed like something of a comedown after that. It's pretty enough and has nice guitar work, a nice sense of longing, but I thought the idea of her as some Hispanic character dwelling in the barrio was kind of ridiculous. It just seemed like an opportunity to play dress up in the video, a curiously low-budget looking affair. They must have blown their cash on filming “Papa Don’t Preach”. Ultimately, when it came time for a Latin-tinged pop song, I thought Pet Shop Boys kinda blew this thing away with "Domino Dancing" - a far superior, far darker, far more intelligent song and a dynamite video (speaking of homoeroticism in video) which cast them authentically as tourists. Still, "La Isla Bonita" is pleasant enough and the public seemed to like it - Madge clearly does too since it continually crops up in her concerts, and she’s played around with Latin-themed songs on many of her subsequent records.

Unfortunately, True Blue stumbles as it nears the finish line. "Jimmy Jimmy" feels seriously underwritten and is duller than it should be, given all that energy. I think it's trying to be a '60s throwback like the title cut, but isn't anywhere near as successful. At least I can remember it, though. She debuted album closer "Love Makes The World Go Round" at Live Aid the year before. It didn't change much if at all between then and the release of the album, but like "Jimmy Jimmy" feels half-baked to me, too. I want to like it more than I do. Surprisingly, it was originally intended as the album’s first single - fortunately that didn’t come to pass, because I’m confident it would have stiffed.

True Blue is a great-sounding record. It's high-'80s and certainly has the '80s sound, but it's not ear bleedingly shrill and isn't quite as dry as some other titles from the era. An analog recording done in Dolby SR, it's about as quiet as any digital recording but maybe not quite as transparent - I can't hear thru the mix on this one quite like I could on Like A Virgin. Of course, it wouldn't surprise me given the time if everything was being run thru some sort of digital processor - a reverb or whatever - at some point along the recording chain. Some of those early digital units had issues, too. The bass is good but not great - you definitely don't get the really deep synth bumps and thuds I heard on Like A Virgin, or the richer bass environment of her debut. This album continues her drift away from early-'80's electronic music, and also from hardcore dance/club music. Maybe she thought "Into The Groove" was enough of that, or that club music was moving in a more pop direction. Her next record drifted even more towards rock/pop but - thanks to the miracle of the remix - started featuring more prominent club-oriented versions of certain songs. More about that when we get to Like A Prayer I suppose.

True Blue was probably my favorite Madonna album for many years, and it's hard to deny the hits here - they're all great stuff really. Her vocals are definitely improved over most of Like A Virgin - the helium hystrionics have (mostly) been banished and she’s singing in a huskier register. I think her phrasing has gotten better, too. The Warhol-like processed Herb Ritts photo that comprised the cover was striking too, and probably remains her second-best cover after that of her iconic debut. It gave her an air of class and glamor - old school Hollywood glamor - that apart from "Material Girl" she'd kind of lacked before. Her transformations from video to video for the album helped to reinforce that callout to old Hollywood glamor. Unfortunately even with "Live To Tell" on its side, I think the album is sunk a bit by having too many lesser tracks that feel frustratingly underwritten and overpolished. The production across the album strikes me as impressively refined but occasionally overly safe as well, which doesn't help its lesser compositions to stand out - they're professional but predictable, and because of that dull. The arrival of now extremely-dated ‘80s digital synths all over the record probably doesn’t help, either.

Still, none of that stopped True Blue from becoming her first global monster - this is the record where she cemented her status as an international superstar, right up there with Michael Jackson and Prince. It surprisingly wasn't quite as successful as Like A Virgin in the US, but far better positioned her for career longevity there as it showed she could keep up with the times successfully, evolve with her maturing audience, continue to produce top selling pop hits, churn out a stream of eye catching videos that bested all of her rivals', and mount massive global tours. And as '80s pop turned more serious and introspective toward the close of the decade, she surprised just about everybody by proving she could keep in step with those artistic and stylistic shifts as well, ultimately being the only one of the big three of the '80s to survive the next decade with her fortunes - artistic and commercial - (mostly) undiminished.

 

I remember this well.

I never thought to add my content from the albums thread here. Oh well.

 

I have a lot of love for True Blue, although for me, it's the first of her albums where the deeper cuts started to feel like filler. All five of the singles are exceptional, but "Jimmy Jimmy" and "Love Makes the World Go Round" feel half-baked in comparison. I do like "Where's the Party" quite a bit, though. I originally got the cassette shortly after it was released and have had at least one copy of it in my collection ever since; currently, I own an original Canadian pressing on vinyl, the original CD and the 2001 remaster (which, as has been noted by @Bobby Morrow, doesn't sound all that great).

It's been a while since I've played this album, but I will be giving it a spin or two this weekend.

 

I remember seeing Madonna perform Love Makes The World Go Round on Live Aid and thinking it wasn’t much cop. However, I thought the album version improved on it vastly. Like you say, it’s filler, but it’s catchy and lively and feels ‘part’of True Blue which flows better than practically any Madonna album I’ve heard.

 

That's a good point; it does flow better than most of her albums, which usually have at least one song that nearly brings the proceedings to a halt ("Love Song" sticks out like a sore thumb on the otherwise exceptional first side of Like a Prayer, while "Shoo-Bee-Doo" is a bit of a buzzkill on Like a Virgin). That said, Ray of Light and Confessions on a Dance Floor are pretty well sequenced.

 

When we did the album-by-album thread I did a comparison of the True Blue cuts on it vs. the source album. The Immaculate Collection editions all sounded much better, and it's not just the QSound processing - the EQ is much better on The Immaculate Collection. This came as a surprise, since Immaculate has a poor reputation.