-Taken from 'The Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits' by Fred Bronson.
Patrick Leonard had just finished the Jackson's Victory tour when his manager asked if he was interested in being musical director for Madonna's Virgin tour. At first he said no, but then he talked to Madonna on the phone, found her charming and agreed to do the two month tour.
By the time the tour was over, Madonna had asked Leonard and Stephen Bray to write songs with her and co-produce her next album, True Blue...
"Madonna agreed to write some lyrics for a song I was going to write for a film that Paramount was doing", Patrick explains. "My managers represented the guy who was directing the film; it was his first film. I saw a little piece of the movie and I had the script. I wrote a theme, and I said, 'What if I could get Madonna to write the lyrics for it'?"
The movie was called Fire With Fire. "It was a love story (set at) a girls' school and a boys' prison, somewhere in the mountains around Vancouver," Leonard remembers, although he never saw the completed film. Paramount passed on his music. "They just didn't think that this theme was any good. (They thought) I wasn't going to be capable of (scoring) the film."
Leonard told Madona that the people at Paramount didn't want the theme. "She said, 'This song would be great for Sean's new movie.' She wrote the lyrics - she just wrote them on the spot, which is what we always do. I don't think we've ever taken more than three hours to complete a song from start to finish. She sang it on the demo only once and left with the cassette. That day I went to work with Michael Jackson on some transcriptions for material he was writing for the Bad album. The phone rang at Michael's and it was Sean (Penn). He said 'I'm over at the director's house and Madonna just brought the song over. We love it and we'd like to talk to you about it."
Patrick finished his work with Michael and drove to the home of James Foley, director of At Close Range. When he arrived, Foley and Penn told him that Madonna had suggested he write the score for the film. She had also asked who was going to sing the song, since it was written for a man to sing. But there was no question in Leonard's mind that she was the only person who should sing "Live to Tell".
"We recut the song, but we used the (same) vocal. She only sang it once (for the demo) and that was the vocal we used because it was so innocent and so shy. She had a legal pad in her hand and...you can hear the paper. It's as raw as raw can be and that's part of what gave it all its charm."
"Live To Tell" was released prior to True Blue. When it went to number one, it was only the fifth single in eight years to top the Hot 100 and not be available on an album, according to Paul Grein's Chartbeat column in Billboard. As with "Live To Tell", all appeared on albums that were released after the singles were number one.) "Live To Tell" was also Madonna's second number one single from a motion picture, following "Crazy For You" from Vision Quest.
"Live To Tell" was a showstopper on Madonna's Who's That Girl tour, and at a benefit concert at Madison Square Garden to raise money for medical research for AIDS, she dedicated it the song to the memory of her friend, artist Michael Burgoyne.
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