Bedtime Stories

A lot of people were surprised when you wrote Bedtime Story for Madonna. What did you think of what she did with that song ?

I don’t know, I sort of did it as a favour to [the producer] Nellee Hooper who is a friend of mine and I think she at first wanted us to write for her together as a team and I just didn’t think that was right. I thought she was a bit of a ’left hemisphere’ kind of person - she’s very run by logic and she’s a bit calculated. But, I thought she could be a bit of a right hemisphere person. So it was kind of interesting and exciting - I thought the most exciting way to approach this thing would be to... say, for example, another singer like Thom Yorke would write a lyric for me and he would almost write the words that I’ve never written but that he thinks I should sing. So the lyric [I wrote] was "Let’s get unconscious, honey" so she was just more... er... and she did her own version and wrote the lyrics wrong. I can’t remember right now, but it was a really interesting mistake. It was something like "Let’s say goodbye to logic and reason" and she got it wrong so that it actually meant the opposite. l’ll have to show you. I was like, "O-kay..."

Attitude - 12.05.2007