Like a Virgin

Sire refused to let Madonna produce her second album herself, so she chose the producer: Nile Rodgers, who had produced David Bowie's Let's Dance. She picked every song, wrote five herself, four of them with Stephen Bray, and took the rest from other writers, among them Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly's title song and Peter Brown and Robert Rans's Material Girl. Rodgers had doubts about the title song at first and later changed his mind. At the Power Station in New York in April 1984 he played guitar with his Chic colleagues Bernard Edwards on bass and Tony Thompson on drums and Jason Corsaro engineered, recording digitally. When her manager Freddy DeMann asked for more bass, Madonna wrote Bass Up on the tape box and changed nothing.

Reviews were mixed, with Rodgers's production praised and Madonna's vocals criticized. It still became her first number one album on the Billboard 200 and the first album by a woman to sell over five million copies in the United States, and it has sold more than 21 million worldwide. A 1985 international reissue added Into the Groove. In 2023 the Library of Congress selected it for the National Recording Registry.