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Madonna Talks Rebel Heart Tour, Why She Wants to Have Tea With the Pope
"The logistical avalanche of putting it together was unlike anything I've ever done," says Arianne Phillips, the head costume designer, who notes the tour uses 500 pairs of shoes and 450 costumes. "Every day of rehearsals felt like an impossibility." To prepare for the show, the 20 backup dancers spent three months putting in 14-hour days, six days a week. The 57-year-old Madonna was right beside them. "No matter what we asked her to do, like riding a nun like a surfboard, she'd try without flinching," says Megan Lawson, the tour's head choreographer.
The day after the Philadelphia show, Madonna phoned up Rolling Stone to talk about the tour...
At what point in the creation of Rebel Heart did you start brainstorming ideas for this tour?
Finishing my record was filled with panic and pressure because of all the leaks, so I wasn't really thinking about my live show until I released the record and started making videos and doing my promo show. So honestly, I didn't really try to sit down and get my head around it until last March. That's unusual for me because I usually start thinking way, way, way in advance.
When you did start plotting out the tour, what were your goals?
I feel like when the audience walks into a show, they walk into a magical world, and they're transported for two hours to another time and place, and they plug into the matrix of my creative brain, which, generally, explores and expresses all of the things that I'm interested in, and/or inspired by. So that's always my goal. And of course, it changes and shifts from record to record, from tour cycle to tour cycle. The moods I'm in, the themes I want to express, all of that.
How about you just tell me your process for picking which older songs to put into the set list. That couldn't be easy.
That is really, really hard. Basically, I go through the catalog, which is a pretty long list of songs. And once I got an idea for the themes I want to explore, I break the show down into four sections, and then I try and find ways to interweave my old songs with the new, and generally that has to do with themes. So we try a lot of stuff out, and it doesn't work.
Then we try things that I never would have thought of and it does work. It's a very, very long process. That's, for me, the biggest challenge, to marry the old with the new. Because obviously those songs I wrote a long time ago, and I have to reinvent them to a certain extent so that they speak to me now versus the woman that I was 30 years ago.
I've always admired that about your concerts. It would be so easy to simply do your 15 biggest hits and stick to the original arrangements, but you've never once taken that easy route.
No. And I just couldn't do it, anyway. I just couldn't do it.
Can you explain why?
Because I've changed, and sonics have changed. The sound of a synth or an 808 [drum machine] ... everything has just changed so much. If you put the exact song next to something new, it just sounds so small and mono. You know what I mean? They just can't live together.
Do you get something creatively out of doing a live show that you don't get out of making movies or recording an album?
Well, there's nothing like a live show, obviously. Living on the edge, being out, never knowing what's going to happen, it's a dangerous place to be. You make mistakes, you've got to with those mistakes. You know, each audience is different. I love when the audience is alive and plays with me, like it was in Brooklyn. People get my sense of humor and I can riff off of them, both musically and just conversationally.
For me, when you're onstage, there's no cheating. There's just no cheating. When you're in the studio you can do another take, you can fix things, you can re-tune your vocals. When you're making a film you can go into the edit suite, you can fix things in post-production. I mean, it's not live. A concert is just a whole different world.
Do you see yourself still doing tours in 10 or 15 years?
I don't even think that far in advance, but if I did travel around and perform and connect to audiences, I'm sure it would look and feel different than, say, the extravagant sort of musicals that I put on right now.
Do you think you could enjoy a more stripped-down show that's just you and a small band, minus all the production?
I quite like the idea of just sitting on a stool with a bottle of wine, a guitar and working my stand-up comedy into the whole scenario. I like talking to audiences, telling stories. I think I could make an interesting show, to tell you the truth. I quite like the idea of doing something simple.
Are you happy with the direction this Pope is taking the church?
I'll state the obvious and say that he seems like he's a much more open-minded individual, who seems to be moving outside of the dogma of the Catholic Church that has been set in stone since the days of Constantine. So I think it's good.
It's good to look out into the big, wide world and see that we have changed, and at the end of the day the message of Jesus is to love your neighbor as yourself, and so that means not judging. And to do that, you have to be more open-minded and accepting of people who have lifestyles that you perceive as unconventional. So I think it's good, yeah. And I also believe that he's the kind of Pope you could sit down and have a cup of tea with, and/or that you could make a joke about something and he would laugh about it.
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A cruel reality that as you hone and perfect your craft, your body will fail you and cause you to be unable to endlessly improve. Funny how we panic about our faves hitting 30 and how they're approaching the end of their mainstream radio pop careers.
