The Origin of Madonna’s Sanctuary

In October 2004 Madonna fans celebrated the tenth anniversary of the album Bedtime Stories. On the wave of that celebration today we take a look at the creative process behind one of the songs from that album.
Anne Preven, lead singer/co-songwriter of the LA band Ednaswap is the songwriter of the original song that would later become Sanctuary on Madonna‘s Bedtime Stories.

Preven who also penned songs for Natalia Imbruglia accepted to let Madonna use her song and she had meetings with her to see how the Queen of Pop wanted to reconstruct the melody and the lyrics to adjust them to her own persona and give some advise.

“At the time, I thought she ruined the song,” Praven told Bam magazine. “I even called and arranged a meeting with her and went in [she laughs] and I was like, ‘Look, you’re missing something. You took out the verse, you can’t take out the verse. At least have that, and put back the harmony.’ She looked at me, you know, like, ‘Yeah. Uh-huh.’ But, I thought I should have control because it was my song, and it was the first time somebody had done a song of mine, and I was just kind of stupid.”.

“I’m a control freak, and I have a certain vision of the way I want a song to turn out, so it’s hard to let go. I made specific suggestions, like, ‘Put the verse back in here,’ and ‘Add some harmonies there.’ She had re-written the lyrics, clipped them and spun them over to the same melody, so it was like this intense house-y kind of thing. I put my two cents in, and she respected that. She didn’t change it back, but she listened. Once I heard her whole album, though, I understood what she was going for, so it worked out in the end.”

Madonna also added to the song a line from a Walt Whitman poem: “Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or her I shall follow”.

Source: Bam Magazine