It is said that artists are most prolific when they are unhappy in love.

Thankfully, Madonna bucks that trend in her relationship with Guy Ritchie, over six years that has yielded the Music and American Life albums, the Drowned World and Reinvention tours, a series of children’s books, and, sure, Swept Away. Even though we are approaching what may be her longest stretch without a true single, there is no reason to doubt that Madonna, forever fecund, is planning something fresh and exciting, in the worlds of music, literature, and/or cinema.		  
 
As those of us with former romances can attest, it’s not always easy to forget the loved ones of the past, for better or for worse. The lovelorn have always grappled with the ways to forget a significant other and have come up with a variety of questionable solutions.
These temporary fixes range from the drastic to the slight, relocating away from an ex to erratically cutting the paramour’s head out of old photographs.
But these exes are a part of who we are and ultimately inform decisions and behavior at least subconsciously culled from the relationship and applied henceforth.

Madonna has left many suitors, both of the serious and “fling” varieties, in her wake.
She was the rebound queen, marching forward despite some big ups and downs in her love life.
She never buried her head in the sand and quit producing because of heartache or tumultuous goings-on in her private life. No, she created art.

When Madonna looks back at her previous work, she is probably reminded of the circumstances surrounding its creation. No small part of those circumstances, I’m sure, was the memory of stormy affairs and dubious pairings in which she found herself.
Just like people who aren’t living legends - that is to say, people like me and you - look through photo albums featuring exes and are instantly transported back to a long-ago coupling, Madonna has the same feelings, writ large. Instead of a photo album, however, she has music albums. And actual “eras.” (How cool would that be if you had eras to define your life instead of lameass boyfriends and girlfriends?)

A young, scrappy Madonna found herself in the company of similarly hungry bedmates in the time leading up to her first album, Madonna.
She can’t look back at that time of discovery, eagerness, and desperation and not think of Dan Gilroy, who essentially got her into the music scene with the The Breakfast Club (the band, not the movie), when the firebrand was reaching the end of her rope with dancing; Steve Bray, her Detroit area buddy whom she recruited to New York for accompaniment, both musical and non-; and Jellybean Benitez and Mark Kamins, crafty East Village denizens who had their fingers on the collective pulse of the club scene, the very culture that would spawn an untested single-monikered singer with a dancefloor-friendly voice originally slickly marketed as African-American.
  She sang with an urgency that has since understandably mellowed with time. We all know the myths that have Madonna “pulling an Eva Peron,” bedding men to get to places of power.
In the early years especially, world domination and all that goes with it was on her mind, and if her boyfriends happened to get in the way, well, Goodnight and Thank You.		  

The two sides of Brat Packer Sean Penn are personified in the two albums that bookended Madonna’s turbulent relationship with the actor: the charming (manic) True Blue and the introspective (depressive) Like a Prayer.
As the distaff half of the so-called “Poison Penns,” Madonna threw herself into movies, theater, and touring, as well. By the end of that explosive coupling, tempers flared to extremes, abuse was alleged, Madonna found herself defending her New York friends to Penn’s Hollywood cronies, and more than one paparazzo found himself hospitalized.

The divorce on her resume is outshined by nuggets like Love Song and Keep It Together, tracks from what many critics argue to be her best album.
But just as memories of your ex-boyfriend are evoked as you whiff a familiar cologne on the subway, Madonna might look at the cover of Like a Prayer and be transported to a rocky, albeit artistically stimulating, time in her life.
Lyrically, she was in her prime and surveyed several skeletons lurking in the closet, from her motherless childhood to the aforementioned split.

Madonna’s obsession with Hollywood glamour of her Vogue period, immortalized in Dick Tracy, ImmaculateCollection, and, to a certain extent, Blond Ambition led her to Warren Beatty, counterbalanced to the public wackiness she demonstrated with iconoclastic comedienne Sandra Bernhard.

Beatty, the handsomely aging sex symbol and legendary ladykiller, was no stranger to the boudoir, and the couple did not do much for Madge but boost her profile in the glitterati ranks and provide one of the most famous utterances about Madonna and her lust for fame: during Truth or Dare: In Bed With Madonna, the documentary focusing on this time in her life, when Madonna was asked by a doctor if she wanted to tell him anything off the record, Beatty casually and exasperatingly interjected, “Why say anything if it’s not on camera?” The exchange spoke volumes about the couple and that particular time of her life.

Erotica was an era that most likely brings up some rough memories for Madonna.
She regularly took a beating in the press and at one point was supposedly juggling Tony Ward, Vanilla Ice, and her bodyguard Jim Albright. (Some would throw Rosie O’Donnell into the mix, too.) Each relationship posed a challenge for Madonna and yielded dark times, both privately and publicly. Ward had a crippling addiction problem, Vanilla Ice was a novelty rapper momentarily caught up in the American zeitgeist, and Albright may not have been the rock Madonna so desperately needed.
It’s no surprise that the Sex book was released during this period. Though a monster hit, Madonna has since said the book, the backlash, and the maelstrom of her private life were vastly troubling.

The more R&B-flavored stylings of Bedtime Stories echoed Madonna’s foray into the urban landscape of basketball players (Dennis Rodman and Charles Barkley, anyone?), Harlem video shoots, and using blue language on late-night talk shows.
It was not until Ray of Light that this transition period had a defining relationship with which to point as a signpost to where Madonna was romantically.

His name is Carlos Leon. He remains an important part of Madonna’s life as the physical trainer, who took one of the most fateful jogs of his life the day the two met in Central Park, is also the father of Lourdes, one of the major inspirations for Ray of Light.
 
No small part of Madonna’s new sense of stability and grace emanates from Carlos. In Lourdes, he provided Madonna with a conduit for unconditional love and everything Madonna said she sought from her absent mother.
While the dynamics of Madonna and Carlos’ relationship has mostly been kept under wraps, seeing as the Grammy-winning album stands up as one of Madonna’s finest works, it is easy to comprehend how this translates to a happier artist.

  
 

And let me throw a bone to Andy Bird, the ne’er-do-well rumored to be the inspiration for Beautiful Stranger. Thanks, Andy, for riling up Madge enough into concocting such a fun ditty. Extra thanks for then relinquishing her to what has been her most creative and inspiring relationship thus far!

You’re the devil in disguise. Next!


  
 

 

 
Madge-ic Life