During a 2000 interview with Ned Rorem at the 92nd Street Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association, Stephen Sondheim told a story about Madonna's recording session for the songs Sondheim wrote for Dick Tracy. Rorem asked, somewhat facetiously, "What's Madonna really like?" and Sondheim replied, seriously, "Well, I only had the one experience with her. But I can tell you something interesting: when we recorded the songs, she did something I've never known another singer to do. She would not sing--this is when she was singing her solos; when she was doing the duets with Mandy she would be out in the studio--but when she sang her solos, she sang them in the control room. She wanted to be attached, almost umbilically, by wire, to the engineer. And so, you have to think, she's got a microphone in a control room: you [the other people there] can't make any noise whatsoever. The whole point of course of a studio is that it's a controlled silence, so the orchestra and the singer can perform without any aural distractions, or scratches, or whatever. But she insisted on singing in the control room, with the lights dimmed to almost--certainly less than half, so the whole thing was kind of a womb-like feeling, and she was standing right next to the engineer, the microphone was up in front of her. I was sitting there--ordinarily I sit there with a pad and take notes on things I want the singer to do on the second take. But I realized that the sound of the pencil on the paper, no matter how lightly I wrote, would probably kill the recording. So I had to keep thinking, 'all right, I gotta remember, that's a D-flat, not a D ... it's "the", not "a," okay, D-flat, the/a, okay, I want a faster tempo, the, D-flat, the, faster tempo, don't pause, D-flat, the...' And then I found out she would only do two takes. See, unlike Barbra Streisand, with whom I've also worked--Barbra Streisand likes to do 103 takes, and then select note 1 from take 6, and note... Madonna doesn't want to, she won't even bother, she wants to do it, and--I don't think she even claims that it's about spontaneity, she just gets irritated and bored, even choosing between two different takes' sections, I could see her getting increasingly irritated, and she has no patience. Barbra has nothing but patience. Very interesting."

Film

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