On April 26 2003, Madonna’s American Life single spent the first of two weeks at #1 on the Soundscan Canadian Singles chart.
American Life was the last physical Madonna two-track single issued by Warner Music Canada, while production of CD maxi-singles would continue domestically until the 2006 release of Jump.
For the weeks of April 25, and May 2, 1998, Madonna’s Frozen was the #1 dance single on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart.
On April 24 2007, Liz Rosenberg posted an article on Madonna.com remembering Madonna’s very first single that started it all:
It may seem like only yesterday but 25 years ago on April 24, 1982, Sire Records honcho Seymour Stein released a single called Everybody on Warner Bros. Records by an unknown singer from Rochester, Michigan by the name of Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone. To say the world would never be the same is an understatement. The song went on to become a huge dancefloor hit and was heard all over the radio in the Summer of 1982. That little girl from Michigan would go on to become one of the most famous entertainers and cultural icons in history – selling close to 200 million records and remaining a star of enormous magnitude and influence for the next 25 years. She’s just getting started. Long Live the Queen and Happy Anniversary to Madonna.
The announcement came as a surprise to many fans who had always understood the release date of Everybody to be October 6, 1982. While the erroneous April date was likely just a simple mistake on Liz’s part, the lack of any official retraction/correction to the post has led to much confusion about the single’s release date in the years since, with the press often assuming the April date to be factual given its reputable source. However, the sequencing of the catalogue numbers for both the promotional and commercial releases of Everybody, as well as its charting chronology, offer clear evidence that its originally reported release date of October 6, 1982 is in fact the accurate one.
On April 23 2015, Tori Amos came to Madonna’s defense when questioned about the ageist undertones on social media – and by the media at large – in reaction to her “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2015 Brit Awards:
Madonna is an entertainer. There are very few people who could’ve gotten up off that floor. It wasn’t because of her that she fell, but it was because of her that the performance carried on. Some of the vilification comes from women as much as men. She’s making choices and she’s able to do things physically that a lot of people 25 years younger can’t; she got up and refused to allow that to shame her. I think people want her to be shamed into a role that they find acceptable for her age. It makes me sad that we can’t embrace Madonna and say, Wow, this is an artist who’s expressing herself in a certain way.”
— Tori Amos
Tori often incorporates one or two cover songs by other artists into her live shows, but there are only a handful of artists whom she has covered multiple songs, and Madonna is one of them. She has performed both Live To Tell and Like A Prayer at numerous concerts, with the most recent Madonna composition to join her live repertoire being Frozen, which made its debut in Amsterdam in 2014.
(Many thanks to YouTube user LittleQueenbee77 for the great live footage of this performance!)
On April 22 1989, Madonna’s Like A Prayer album and single reached #1 simultaneously in the USA.
The album stayed at the top of the charts for 6 weeks, while the single stayed at the top of the Hot 100 for 3 weeks.
On April 14 2009, Steven Meisel was featured in Vogue magazine, and the article described him as the man that taught Madonna about re-invention.
In the article, Madonna shared some nice thoughts on Meisel:
Even Madonna agrees that there is, indeed, “a great sense of mystery” about Meisel – so much so that after all these years she feels she still doesn’t really know him very well. “I know that I love him,” she says. “You get sucked into his aura. He knows things.”
She learned this from one of their first collaborations, which was for the cover of Like A Virgin. “Before I worked with Steven,” says Madonna, “I just showed up in the clothes I was wearing, stood in front of the lights, and got my picture taken. With Steven, a team of people descended on me, started to undress me. Someone grabbed my hair, another grabbed my face, another started helping me try on various bits of clothes, and they all seemed to be speaking a language I didn’t understand – the language of Steven Meisel.”
To hear Madonna talk about working with Meisel is like being let in on a long-held secret. She goes on, “Steven had a vision. He had done his research. He had very specific references. I really respected the care that he took with his work, how seriously he approached it, but at the same time he has a great sense of irony. He made me feel like I was part of something important. He treated each photo shoot like it was a small film and insisted that we create a character each time we worked but then would make fun of the archetypes we created. He was the first person to introduce me to the idea of reinvention.”
On April 13 1995, Bedtime Story was released by Maverick/Sire as the third single from the album Bedtime Stories in North America. The song was written by Björk, Nellee Hooper & Marius DeVries and produced by Madonna & Nellee Hooper. In both the U.S. and Canada the single and CD maxi-single were backed by the album opener, Survival.
The commercial maxi-single featured remixes by Junior Vasquez and Orbital. Additional promo-only remixes by Mark Picchiotti & Teri Bristol were also later serviced promotionally to clubs.
Bedtime Story was released in the UK in February following a poor reception to the album’s second single, Take A Bow.
It was the opposite situation in North America, where the third single was delayed for several months due to the prolonged chart-topping reign of Bow. Bedtime Story‘s more experimental, minimalist sound failed to gain traction on U.S. radio but did earn Madonna another #1 hit on the Hot Dance/Club chart.
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