Released on the heels of 1992’s criminally under-appreciated Erotica and its accompanying coffee-table book, Sex, Madonna’s Bedtime Stories served as both a course correction and an image rehabilitation for the artist. If the album, which outsold and out-charted its predecessor, isn’t widely remembered today as the comeback story that it was, it’s only because its success was eclipsed by 1998’s much-vaunted Ray of Light.
Bookended as it is, then, by Madonna’s imperial phase and eventual renaissance, Bedtime Stories is often overlooked altogether, but it arguably finds her at her most vulnerable—and most human. She candidly explores self-love (“Secret”), self-reproach (“Love Tried to Welcome Me”), and…
