True Blue’s subject matter is not a wholesale water-down job, mind you, as its songs are still provocative and, particularly in one case, proved controversial.

Relative to its erotically-charged precursor Like A Virgin, True Blue tempers the sex vixen aesthetic in exchange for a more calculated focus on Madonna’s evolving songcraft. Wishful thinking on the part of my innocent and impressionable imagination, I suppose. Not to mention that she and my mother both attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, which further reinforced my admittedly dubious connection with her. At the time, I figured the fact that our families hailed from the same metro area must mean that only a few degrees of separation existed between her and me. Played it multiple times a day, every day, for three months straight.Įven though it seems completely ridiculous now, I recall feeling a loose sort of kinship with Madonna for our shared familial roots in the Great Lakes State (she was raised in Pontiac, twenty miles north of Livonia, which is twenty miles west of Detroit). I bought it while on vacation at my grandparents’ home in Livonia, Michigan, and I wore the cassette out that summer on my Sony Walkman.

Though my memory of thirty-five years ago is bound to be a bit hazy, as I was only eight years old at the time, I’m pretty sure that True Blue was the first album I ever purchased with my “own” not-so-hard-earned cash, or more accurately, the monthly allowance my parents gave me at the time. Nearly twenty months after Madonna released her smash success of a second studio album Like A Virgin, on the final day of June in 1986, Madonna released its highly anticipated follow-up, True Blue. Happy 35th Anniversary to Madonna’s third studio album True Blue, originally released June 30, 1986.

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