What’s it like to be fired by Madonna? Don’t ask Toby Gab. He doesn’t know. But he does know what it’s like to almost be fired by her, and it sounds intense.
In a new interview with MailOnline, the Grammy-winning songwriter and producer opened up about the time he was almost certain she was going to can him while they were working together on her 2015 album Rebel Heart.
“Madonna is an incredible performer and her stage shows are unbelievable. She’s iconic. But vocally I felt maybe we could expand it a little bit,” Gab recalled. “I mean, I’ve worked with some incredible vocalists. And I felt maybe Madonna can get just a little better with the performance.”
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“I kept telling her, do it again and try to feel it more and try it again and again–maybe just put more passion into it and so on.”
Gab, who co-wrote several songs with Madonna for the album, including the lead single “Living For Love,” said he’d heard that when she wants to fire someone, she excuses herself to the ladies room then has her assistant give them their walking papers.
He explained, “There were rumors going around that if you cross her the wrong way, if you do something she doesn’t like, or you say something she doesn’t like, then she will ‘go to the bathroom’ and then her assistant will come out and say, ‘Here’s your ticket home and the taxi is waiting downstairs. You have five minutes to vacate the premises. She does not want to see you when she comes back.'”
Gad then recalled the moment when he was pretty sure that was about to happen to him, explaining: “At some point she was like, ‘F*ck you, Toby. I’m not singing this again!’ And I instinctively said ‘F*ck you, Madonna, you are singing this again!’ And then there was silence in the room.”
“I was waiting for her to go to the bathroom.”
😬 😬 😬
But much to his surprise, Madonna stayed put. She didn’t excuse herself from the recording studio and he wasn’t told his services as a songwriter would no longer be needed. Instead, they ended up co-writing 11 songs over the course of several weeks.
“Somehow we bonded over this and we spent another five weeks together in total,” he explained.
In the end, Gad described working with the Queen of Pop as “intimidating” but worth it.
“You don’t know whether she is going to turn up or not and then her assistant comes in and starts tidying things up and brings in incense candles and lights them everywhere,” he said.
“Then the bathroom gets locked off and you have to use the one downstairs, so it’s the whole royal preparation. Eventually lights get dimmed and then she walks in.”
Rebel Heart was Madonna’s thirteenth studio album and spawned four singles–“Living For Love,” “Ghosttown,” “Bitch, I’m Madonna,” and “Hold Tight”–as well as 82-date world tour that earned $169.8 million with a total of 1,045,479 tickets sold.
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slimjim
The tour was great. The album was pretty terrible. One thing I hated the most was the way her voice was processed. It’s among her worst sounding albums vocally.
Invader7
Well. She’s like a lot of of those other “artists”. Full of themselves ,boorish and egotistical. So typical. If they weren’t famous no one would put up with their crap !!