Songoftheday 3/22/21 - You only see what your eyes want to see, how can life be what you want it to be?
"Frozen" - Madonna
from the album Ray Of Light (1998)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #2 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 16
Today's song of the day is from Madonna, who had spent 1997 in the wake of her big-screen adaptation of the musical Evita, which landed her top big pop hits with the original "You Must Love Me" and her pop top ten version of "Don't Cry For Me Argentina". She also had a new baby, Lourdes, though the father, Carlos Leon, and Madonna ended their romantic relationship that year. Madonna, with some new spiritual guidance from the Jewish corollary movement Kabbalah, returned the following year with what would be her most critically acclaimed album, Ray Of Light. The lead single, "Frozen", arrived just at the end of that winter. Written by Madonna and Patrick Leonard, both of whom produced it with electronica artist William Orbit, who had a great influence on the sound of the album, and especially that track. With swirling rhythms and synth chords around cold lyrics dealing with leaving an unhealthy past behind (a sideeye to Leon, perhaps), she sounds mournful yet optimistic in her mature delivery, which was miles away from "Material Girl" as you can get. It seems the Evita experience helped Madonna control her vocals in a totally different way, and it worked for the end-of-millenium times. The music video, filmed in a stark desert, has Madonna shapeshifting into birds, dogs, and even copies of herself bedecked in henna tattoos...
"Frozen" became Madonna's sixth hit to reach #2 on Billboard magazine's official Hot 100 pop chart in April of 1998. The song climbed to #8 on their Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") radio chart, while getting to #9 on their older-skewing Adult Top-40 format list. The remixes of the track, done by Orbit, the Stereo MC's, and deep-house mixer Victor Calderone among others, helped "Frozen" top the Dance Club Play tally for two weeks. Internationally, the single went to #11 in the UK, Italy, Spain, Finland, Greece, and Hungary, and reached the top ten in Canada (#2), France (#2), Germany (#2), Sweden (#2), the Netherlands (#2), Austria (#2), Switzerland (#2), Belgium (#2W/#3F), Norway (#2), Denmark (#2), Ireland (#4), Australia (#5), and New Zealand (#5). The Ray Of Light album, released in February of 1998, came in at #2 on the Billboard 200 sales chart, going on to sell over 4 million copies. At the Grammy Awards in 1999, the Ray Of Light album won the trophy for Best Pop Album, and was nominated for Album Of The Year, which went to Lauryn Hill for her solo debut The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill.
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Here's an edit of Victor Calderone's tribal house mix of "Frozen", which contributed to the song spending two weeks on top of the dance chart...
Lastly, Madonna made the song a centerpiece of her Drowned World tour in 2001...
Up tomorrow: A rap icon posthumously ponders romance.
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