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Can We Talk About Secret Garden


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Once again, Weebs is alone on a Friday night. One of the downsides of being married to a musician - the band always comes first. Despite my demands.

I’ve finished a page of my article, but I don’t want to think about it anymore tonight.

So, Secret Garden. Probably my favorite song from Erotica. Hold on, let me check my spreadsheet…

Yes, it’s currently ranked at number one in the Erotica column.

It’s another song from the abstract section of her mind. I remember reading an article in The Face in, aaaaaah ‘93ish? I remember the interviewer was getting very personal about her having children. And even asked her, what I thought, was an inappropriate question, that she surprisingly answered truthfully. I’m not going to say what the question was. ‘Look it up’! (I think it was the same article when the interviewer got on her case for misquoting Walt Whitman in ‘Sanctuary’. Which she did, but it’s also her prerogative to use poetic license if she wants. We’ve all been misquoting Neil Armstrong for the last 46 years!)

Before Madonna had children, she was very outspoken about her desire to have them. It seemed to be a passion for her at some point. I always felt sorry for her because she looked as if she was very anxious about it. And, in the meantime, also getting older. When I hear this song a million different images float through my mind. Again, like I said about Candy Perfume Girl a few weeks ago, I believe this is an authentic, feminine emotional song.

It’s filled with hope and regret. She takes herself on a maternal, spiritual plane. She plays two roles in this song. One is the sad ‘to be’ mother and the other is an unborn child. Madonna was in and out of relationships at this time of her life, knowing that she when she finally did have children, it would have to be with the right man, at the right time. A very hard decision for a woman to make.

I would suppose that Madonna believed that she didn’t want to bring her own child into the world while in a torn relationship. “A lover without scorn…”. This song is her appeal and her promise to herself. She’s going ‘to keep on looking’ for the right time and the right place.

“You plant the seed and I’ll watch it grow….”. An extremely moving line in the song. “I wonder when I’ll start to show”. Madonna is telling us something very personal and you can feel her sadness on a profound level. Notice how she’s speaking these ‘confessions’.

“There’s a chance that I will grow…” This is the saddest line in the song, because this is the perspective of the unborn child.

Somewhere in her fountain blue, lies her Secret Garden. Her hope and desire will never die and her biological clock will finally catch up to her. ….and she "still believes”.

I couldn’t think of better song for her to dedicate to her vagina. There’s more to a vagina than most people think. It's an emotional, sensual, sensitive place to be, and sometimes, it can hurt.

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Love this song. The line that has always stood out to me the most is, "Cause after all is said and done, I'm still alive. And the boots have come and trampled on me, and I'm still alive..."

It's like she's addressing the ups and downs of her life/career. After all the shit the press has put her through, she rolls with the punches and continues on with her life.

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Fontainbleau is a city outside of Paris (south) with a famous forest and a castle where king François the 1st and Napoleon the 1st lived.

In a french interview for NRJ radio dor Something to remember, a journalist intrigued by having the city quoted in the so,g asked her about it and she revealed it's because she had a french lover who was from that city and the song is about him.

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This is a tune that lyrically has so many layers and deep hidden meanings one must be crazy to say it's about this or that. That's the beauty of Madonna's music and Secret Garden is one of her songs attesting that.

The beginning of the subtextual concepts may as well have started with Papa Don't Preach. Arguably the first time ever in a pop song where baby is actually the baby growing inside of a woman.

Like A Prayer is another one. Is it about sex ( oral sex in this case ) or God ( the Holy Spirit ) or a love conquest?

Promise To Try would have been a meaningless, crazy song. Makes perfect sense it is about her dead mother.

Deeper And Deeper is about a gay man coming out. Secret is actually another song about God. Inside Of Me can easily be mistaken for a love letter to an ex lover. Once again it's another jem dedicated to her mother.

I remember during an interview with NME in the mid 90's she explained You'll See has a subtext as a lot of her music. In 2000 during a Rolling Stone interview she said she doesn't like to give details about the inspiration behind a song as the listener should decide that for themselves. I think it goes with the art of creating music.

Secret Garden is one of those songs anybody can easily call artistic.

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Guest eroticerotic

this song is on my 420 list. I think it's brilliant, the production, it transports me. Something about it is cute, and sad, yet beautiful. It's such a great song.

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Love this track so much partly because it was so much more experimental and raw than most of Madonna's previous work from the eighties. She started alienating more of the mainstream teeny bopper audience who helped her became a legendary pop artist!

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Love this song. The line that has always stood out to me the most is, "Cause after all is said and done, I'm still alive. And the boots have come and trampled on me, and I'm still alive..."

It's like she's addressing the ups and downs of her life/career. After all the shit the press has put her through, she rolls with the punches and continues on with her life.

That's my favorite line from the song too. It has incredible lyrics.

Fontainbleau is a city outside of Paris (south) with a famous forest and a castle where king François the 1st and Napoleon the 1st lived.

In a french interview for NRJ radio dor Something to remember, a journalist intrigued by having the city quoted in the so,g asked her about it and she revealed it's because she had a french lover who was from that city and the song is about him.

This is interesting new info! I thought it referred to the Fountainbleau hotel in Miami, since I believe she spent a lot of time there during that era.

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I love the music to this song, because it was like her version of jazz. The lyrics are perfect for this music. It brings me into a garden to explore. I love it, and it is a perfect album closer, especially for Erotica, which starts out to be "sexual", and winds up being abstract and art, and somewhere not expected. I also love the voices she uses in this song, and actually the whole album. It's very experimental and I love how different it is.

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This is a tune that lyrically has so many layers and deep hidden meanings one must be crazy to say it's about this or that.

Exactly. The description I gave was my interpretation. If everyone received the same meaning to a song or a painting - it's no longer art. However, a communicable understanding is also allowed. Yes, Promise To Try is about her mother - it's comprehensible, and it's still art.

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Love this track so much partly because it was so much more experimental and raw than most of Madonna's previous work from the eighties. She started alienating more of the mainstream teeny bopper audience who helped her became a legendary pop artist!

Agreed.

This song is not lucid by any means. The French lover stirred her mind into many directions.

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Once again, Weebs is alone on a Friday night. One of the downsides of being married to a musician - the band always comes first. Despite my demands.

I’ve finished a page of my article, but I don’t want to think about it anymore tonight.

So, Secret Garden. Probably my favorite song from Erotica. Hold on, let me check my spreadsheet…

Yes, it’s currently ranked at number one in the Erotica column.

It’s another song from the abstract section of her mind. I remember reading an article in The Face in, aaaaaah ‘93ish? I remember the interviewer was getting very personal about her having children. And even asked her, what I thought, was an inappropriate question, that she surprisingly answered truthfully. I’m not going to say what the question was. ‘Look it up’! (I think it was the same article when the interviewer got on her case for misquoting Walt Whitman in ‘Sanctuary’. Which she did, but it’s also her prerogative to use poetic license if she wants. We’ve all been misquoting Neil Armstrong for the last 46 years!)

Before Madonna had children, she was very outspoken about her desire to have them. It seemed to be a passion for her at some point. I always felt sorry for her because she looked as if she was very anxious about it. And, in the meantime, also getting older. When I hear this song a million different images float through my mind. Again, like I said about Candy Perfume Girl a few weeks ago, I believe this is an authentic, feminine emotional song.

It’s filled with hope and regret. She takes herself on a maternal, spiritual plane. She plays two roles in this song. One is the sad ‘to be’ mother and the other is an unborn child. Madonna was in and out of relationships at this time of her life, knowing that she when she finally did have children, it would have to be with the right man, at the right time. A very hard decision for a woman to make.

I would suppose that Madonna believed that she didn’t want to bring her own child into the world while in a torn relationship. “A lover without scorn…”. This song is her appeal and her promise to herself. She’s going ‘to keep on looking’ for the right time and the right place.

“You plant the seed and I’ll watch it grow….”. An extremely moving line in the song. “I wonder when I’ll start to show”. Madonna is telling us something very personal and you can feel her sadness on a profound level. Notice how she’s speaking these ‘confessions’.

“There’s a chance that I will grow…” This is the saddest line in the song, because this is the perspective of the unborn child.

Somewhere in her fountain blue, lies her Secret Garden. Her hope and desire will never die and her biological clock will finally catch up to her. ….and she "still believes”.

I couldn’t think of better song for her to dedicate to her vagina. There’s more to a vagina than most people think. It's an emotional, sensual, sensitive place to be, and sometimes, it can hurt.

What a fabulous interpretation! I never even remotely thought about Secret Garden as something of a maternal (or pregnancy) longing... though it makes sense. Well, maybe because Im not a woman :lol:

This song is just beyond.. so many images and feelings go through me every time I hear it..The "elephantine wailing" horns conjure far off places and mystery; the jazzy sound is very noir, bringing me to some imaginary smoky bar in a tower somewhere..

I always thought of the song as a manifesto of someone not giving up, of refusing to lose hope, of someone eagerly awaiting of being who she can be or really is, and thus beginning "to show".. The song is one of those strangely uplifting yet melancholic songs. I love it so much.

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What a fabulous interpretation! I never even remotely thought about Secret Garden as something of a maternal (or pregnancy) longing... though it makes sense. Well, maybe because Im not a woman :lol:

This song is just beyond.. so many images and feelings go through me every time I hear it..The "elephantine wailing" horns conjure far off places and mystery; the jazzy sound is very noir, bringing me to some imaginary smoky bar in a tower somewhere..

I always thought of the song as a manifesto of someone not giving up, of refusing to lose hope, of someone eagerly awaiting of being who she can be or really is, and thus beginning "to show".. The song is one of those strangely uplifting yet melancholic songs. I love it so much.

You're nice. Thank you.

The line "I wonder when I'll start to show. I wonder if I'll ever know...", is definitely about pregnancy.

I have no doubt about that in my mind whatsoever.

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