"Oh Father" is a song recorded by American singer Madonna for her fourth studio album Like a Prayer (1989). It was released as the fourth single from the album on October 24, 1989, by Sire Records. The song was not released as a single in most European territories until December 27, 1995, when it appeared on the 1995 ballads compilation Something to Remember. Written and produced by Madonna and Patrick Leonard, "Oh Father" concerns the presence of male authoritative figures in Madonna's life, most prominently her father, Tony Ciccone. Madonna's relationship with her father had soured after her mother's death in 1963 and his remarriage three years later. While developing the Like a Prayer album, Madonna was in an emotional state of mind due to her personal problems, which is reflected in "Oh Father".
"Oh Father" is a baroque pop ballad. It was recorded at a studio in the Garment District of New York City. Leonard put together different types of chord progression and created the basic outline of a melody, which Madonna shaped and then wrote a lyric to fit the melody. She used a contrast of timbre while singing the song, which also featured instrumentation from strings, piano, violin and drums. "Oh Father" received positive reviews from critics and authors, but commercially was less successful than Madonna's previous singles. In most of the countries where it was released, the song failed to attain top-ten positions, except in Finland, where it peaked at number six. It ended Madonna's string of 16 consecutive top-five singles in the United States.
The music video of the song was Madonna's attempt to embrace and accept her mother's death. Directed by David Fincher and shot in black-and-white, it shows a little girl playing in the snow as her mother dies. A grown-up Madonna follows the child and sings the song as the child runs away from her abusive father. Described by reviewers as "autobiographical", the video was listed by Rolling Stone as one of "The 100 Top Music Videos". Scholars noted how Madonna's persona was split into the child and adult in the video, and one writer described a scene, involving the dead mother shown at her wake with her lips sewn shut, as one of the most disturbing scenes in the history of mainstream music videos; the scene was inspired by Madonna's memory of her mother from her funeral. "Oh Father" was performed only on the Blond Ambition World Tour in 1990, where Madonna portrayed a woman trying to find her religion and her battle for it.
Background
When Madonna was five years old, in 1963, her mother, Madonna Ciccone (whom Madonna was named after), died of breast cancer at the age of 30. Months before this, Madonna noticed changes in her mother's behavior and personality from the attentive homemaker she was, but did not understand the reasons. Mrs. Ciccone, at a loss to explain her dire medical condition, would often begin to cry when questioned by Madonna, at which point Madonna would respond by wrapping her arms around her mother tenderly. "I remember feeling stronger than she was," Madonna recalled. "I was so little and yet I felt like she was the child." Madonna later acknowledged that she had not grasped the concept of her mother dying. "There was so much left unsaid, so many untangled and unresolved emotions, of remorse, guilt, loss, anger, confusion. ... I saw my mother, looking very beautiful and lying as if she were asleep in an open casket. Then I noticed that my mother's mouth looked funny. It took me some time to realize that it had been sewn up. In that awful moment, I began to understand what I had lost forever. The final image of my mother, at once peaceful yet grotesque, haunts me today also."
Madonna eventually learned to take care of herself and her siblings, and she turned to her paternal grandmother in the hope of finding some solace and some form of her mother in her. The Ciccone siblings resented housekeepers and invariably rebelled against anyone brought into their home ostensibly to take the place of their beloved mother. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Madonna commented that she saw herself in her youth as a "lonely girl who was searching for something. I wasn't rebellious in a certain way. I cared about being good at something. I didn't shave my underarms and I didn't wear make-up like normal girls do. But I studied and I got good grades.... I wanted to be somebody." Terrified that her father, Tony Ciccone, could be taken from her as well, Madonna was often unable to sleep unless she was near him. Two years after her mother's death, her father married the family's housekeeper, Joan Gustafson. It was at this point that Madonna began to express unresolved feelings of anger towards her father that lasted for decades, and developed a rebellious attitude. She explained in interviews that "Like all young girls, I was in love with my father and I didn't want to lose him. I lost my mother, but then I was my mother... and my father was mine... When he married my stepmother, it was, 'OK, I don't need anybody.' I hated my father for a long, long time."
Writing and inspiration
When Madonna started work on her fourth studio album, Like a Prayer, she was already in an emotional state of mind, following her split with then-husband, Sean Penn, her thirtieth birthday, and unfavorable reviews for her acting endeavors. She had certain personal matters on her mind that she thought could be the musical direction of the album. While writing the songs for Like a Prayer, Madonna also acted in a Broadway production called Speed-the-Plow. In the play, she portrayed Karen, a secretary to a movie producer who bedded her on a bet with his friends. Karen later gets revenge, but is depicted as just as seedy and conniving as the men who had partaken in this bet and exploited her. Madonna was frustrated with the role and the negative reception, which she vented into her lyrics. The result was a set of three songs—"Till Death Do Us Part", "Promise to Try" and "Oh Father"—where she sought to purge herself from her personal paranoia and demons.
Written with producer Patrick Leonard, in "Oh Father" the singer wanted to revisit the pain and confusion that had characterized her relationship with her father. Generally accepted by critics and academics as a love letter to Tony Ciccone or as an indictment, Madonna never explained her inspiration behind "Oh Father", except saying that the song was about her father and a tribute to Simon & Garfunkel, her favorite band at that time. She wanted to leave it open for interpretation.
Although the singer has never mentioned physical abuse in her family, she had mentioned that her father was a disciplinarian and her stepmother was hard on her. Author Lucy O'Brien wrote in her book Madonna: Like an Icon that the song stemmed more from the emotional neglect that Madonna faced, with her father locked up in grief after Mrs. Ciccone died. When he married again, his new wife was wrapped up with her own children, so the older kids were often left to their own devices. O'Brien believed that for this reason, Madonna's girlhood would have been without much joy, and that "Oh Father" was a potent example of the singer using her imagination to escape from her troubled childhood, while blaming it on her father. Tony later said, "Maybe I'm not the greatest father in the world, but life wasn't easy for us, and Nonni [Madonna's nickname] knows all of this."
Recording and composition When Madonna went to record "Oh Father", her troubled role in Speed-the-Plow was on her mind, with the result being that she vented her emotions in the recording of the song. Bill Meyers, who did the string arrangement for most of the songs on Like a Prayer, including "Oh Father", recalled that Madonna worked on the song with Leonard in "this really dingy, awful little studio in the Garment District in New York. It was grotesquely dirty and cramped, and that's what came out of it."
According to him, Madonna was moved while singing the song, since the theme suggested incest and the controversial topic of closet beatings. However, her insecurities about her childhood showed up in anxieties during her vocal performance. Meyers said that if Madonna bended a note or sang flat in a certain spot, she would go on doing that consistently as she did not like to vary her voice or change the tone. Madonna recalled that Leonard thought of the melody for the song. After the mixing was over, Meyers complimented Madonna by saying that it was her "strongest" vocal performance.
For the baroque pop ballad, Madonna uses a contrast of timbre, her higher smoother voice with her lower one. The song begins with the sound of violins for about 20 seconds. After this, drums, string arrangement and piano ushers on top of the violins, as Madonna sings the chorus line "You can't hurt me now, I got away from you, I never thought I would." The violins and the drum beats drop after the chorus, but come back again during the next bridge. As Madonna sings the verse "Oh father I have sinned", the violins change their pitch to a higher one. After the second chorus, there is an instrumental break where she sings about the realization that her father did not want to hurt her but she still ran away. The song ends with the guitar and violins fading out with Madonna's voice. In an interview with Paul Zollo, Madonna commented that the "Father" can refer to Tony, God or all the "authorities in her life". In a 2014 interview with Billboard celebrating the 25th anniversary of Like a Prayer, Leonard explained the recording process of the song: "My favorite thing that we ever recorded, ever—or wrote—is 'Oh Father'... because we knew when we did it, that there was something about this that was in a way kind of the most *real* thing. [For] that song, the 'record' button was only pressed three times. That's it. So it's real. It's something that I really wanted to do and she was kind enough to say 'let's try this,' and it was not easy."
Critical reception
Critical response for "Oh Father" was generally positive. J. Randy Taraborrelli, author of Madonna: An Intimate Biography, commented that with the track, Madonna exposed herself by transforming her personal experience into art, making it clear to anyone how she felt about her relationship with Tony. Rooksby believed that the "psychobabble" phrases of feeling good about oneself in the song, would have made it extremely popular in the early Eighties. He added that "Oh Father" was the most compassionate and generous moment in Madonna's musical career and the track might have inspired the exploration of childhood in the music of contemporary artists like Kate Bush and Tori Amos, in particular Bush's song "The Fog" from her 1989 studio album, The Sensual World, and Amos' "Winter" from the 1992 effort, Little Earthquakes. Author Leslie C. Dunn wrote in her book Embodied Voices, that the autobiographical nature of the song brought forth a new side of Madonna. Sharing the same view, Freya Jarman-Ivens, one of the authors of Madonna's Drowned Worlds, declared "Oh Father" as a powerful statement regarding father-daughter relationships. Allen Metz, author of The Madonna Companion, described the song as a "stark ballad with a serious string arrangement". O'Brien felt that the strings were dramatic and pretentious. She described Madonna's singing as consisting of "Courtney Love-style rasp" and adding that Madonna "attacks the song with personal passion".