A one minute violin solo
In 1992 Madonna surprisingly released This Used To Be My Playground, the credit song to her baseball movie A Leage Of Their Own. The song was actually produced during the Erotica sessions with Shep Pettibone and Tony Shimkin. The song is lovely and went to #1 in America. The violin solo in the middle really gives that nostalgic feel, but according to Tony Shimkin the song almost ended up without it.
“We went to meet with Madonna in Chicago while she was on set for A League of their own, and discussed an original song for the movie”, Tony Shimkin recalls. “I wrote the string parts and the violin section solo.
When we recorded it with Al Schmidt at Ocean Way studio in LA we had a 30 piece orchestra and Jerremy Lubbock did the string arrangements, we never included the demo that had the solo string part in it when we had him chart everything out for the orchestra.
On the day we were recording we thought we were done and realized we forgot the solo. I quickly sang the part to the copyist who then charted it out for the violin players and they got it recorded with 1 minute to spare on the clock, when you have a thirty piece orchestra it can be super expensive to roll into a second hour of their time!
