Superstar DJ Tracy Young is Zooming from a Kansas City Margaritaville resort, but she’s hardly wasting away in Margaritaville. In fact, her career is in currently in full swing. Five years ago, at nearly age 50, she made Grammy history, or herstory, when she won Best Remixed Recording for her Pride Radio mix of her “I Rise” by her longtime friend and collaborator, Madonna. “That was the first time a woman had even been nominated [in that category]. And that blew me away, because with all the female presence in the DJ/production world, I just was like, ‘There’s a problem here,’” she states.
But much like Madonna herself, by that point, Young had already reinvented herself multiple times. She’d started as a radio station music director and at Interscope Records before she was hired to the work the turntables at Ingrid Casares’s Miami hot spot Liquid in the mid-‘90s, a gig that introduced her to Casares’s pal, Madonna. And now, in another full-circle moment, Young is reinventing herself yet again — this time as a live entertainer who commands the crowds at massive, very un-nightclub-like venues like the Hollywood Bowl — on the road DJing on the farewell tour by another female pop trailblazer of the ‘80s and queen of career reinvention, Cyndi Lauper. (FYI: While the media once infuriatingly attempted to concoct a rivalry between the two MTV stars, Young, who has known Lauper for more than 20 years, points out, “I know for a fact that Cyndi has no problem with Madonna.”)
And Young is also working with Niki Haris and Donna De Lory, the iconic Madonna backup singers who for many years were such a key part of Madonna’s act that they practically formed a Destiny’s Child-style trio. And there’s another “serendipitous” connection here, because it was actually De Lory’s demo vocal of a song originally co-written for Cyndi Lauper by De Lory’s then-boyfriend, “Open Your Heart,” that led to De Lory getting hired by Madonna in the first place and forming her lifelong friendship with Haris. “I always say that’s how we started becoming women together,” Haris muses. “We were so young when we first started, and by the time we ended, we were all knocking on 50.”
Yes, it’s all connected. And — just like Young, Lauper, and their former famous boss — Haris and De Lory have kept grinding and reinventing themselves, separately and together, in genres ranging from new age and world music to gospel and jazz. However, it was teaming with Young, initially on a remake of the disco classic “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life,” that reintroduced Haris and De Lory to the dance music world. Haris and De Lory are joining Young via Zoom today, and it’s such a lovefest that their wide-ranging conversation, as seen in full in the video above (during which Haris and De Lory reminisce about the groundbreaking Blonde Ambition tour, filming Truth or Dare, their momentous VMAs performances of “Express Yourself” and “Vogue,” and their favorite stage outfits, and even occasionally break into song), that at one point they literally forget they’re doing an interview and they begin consulting their calendars, coordinating when the three of them can meet up at one of Lauper’s tour stops.
“These are three women supporting each other. That’s what we’re really doing, more than making music. We’re also making some incredible moments together,” Haris says of their obvious bond. “The universe was trying to tell us something, because [De Lory and I] were starting to get calls to do these dance shows. … And [Young] kept the ball rolling for us. It added a whole other spunk and energy into what Donna and I were already doing. So, it saved our lives. I was like, ‘Do we do another broken-down-instrumentally jazzy thing? I know we have so much more music in us.’ And yeah, [Young] reminded us of that.”
“I was a fan [of Haris and De Lory], not even knowing that I would meet them and end up working with them,” Young points out. “They gave Madonna that voice, what we know to be the ‘Madonna voice.’ The three of them were angelic. They sounded angelic together, and put Madonna in that mix. Magic.”
Young, who has done 14 Madonna remixes to date, didn’t begin working with Madonna until 2000 (starting with “Music”), and she’s still not quite sure why her circulating demo cassettes first caught Madonna’s attention in Miami back in the ‘90s. “It’s probably that I’m awesome!” she jokes, adding more seriously, “I am sure [it was partially because] I was female. I’m sure that had something to do with it, because at that time, there were no girls that you would see in the DJ booth, ever.”
Self-declared awesomeness aside, Young actually wasn’t all that confident when Madonna first approached her about doing a remix, for 1998’s Ray of Light Gothic-pop track “Frozen” — and she actually turned Madonna down. “I felt like at the time, if I had taken a remix and not been prepared, I would never get the opportunity again. So, I thought it was worth that risk to not do it. It all worked out, but I remember being like, ‘I just ruined my life!’” Young chucklingly confesses. “But I just didn’t feel ready. I didn’t know enough. And so, by the time ‘Music’ came, I was like, ‘Yeah, let’s go! Let’s do it.’”
Interestingly, despite since making a name for herself as a remixer in a male-dominated field, when she first started, Young went by the unisex alias of “The Young Collective,” rather than the full name that years later would be engraved on a Grammy statuette. “I didn’t want my gender to be a factor. I wanted them to judge the music,” she explains. “I mean, I knew it was going to be a gender thing. I knew that was going to be, like, ‘Oh, she’s fucking Madonna!’ [Those untrue rumors] happened anyway. … It’s always something: ‘She slept her way to the top. She’s sleeping with Madonna. That’s why she got this and that.’ So, I just felt at that time, ‘I don’t want to put my name on this. I want to see if people really like it.’”
Haris and De Lory also ruefully recall all the salacious gossip that followed Madonna back in the day, long before Young came onto the scene. “I heard it from people I was working with in the industry, when I was doing sessions and everything,” says De Lory. “All the stories that men had about Madonna, because she was a very sexual person and it came through in her dancing and her work and everything. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but they told the stories that said there was something ‘wrong’ with that.”
“She told us, ‘I don’t think I’m the best singer. I’m here to provoke conversation. I’m here to push buttons.’ This is what she’s about,” adds Haris. “And she can’t help it but be sexy. She’s Italian and fine. What else is she going to do? She would’ve been fine if she would’ve been a housewife in Michigan. Madonna is going to be fine and sexy. That’s what it is.”
[Men] were threatened,” De Lory elaborates. “They didn’t like her. Too powerful. She had so much power. But honestly, working with her after being in the business doing sessions and working with so many men, engineers, producers, everything, I felt so empowered to be on that stage. It gave me so much strength to know I could continue on in the business and hold that space for myself. That was the most incredible part of the whole thing for me, was the confidence and the influence and the power that she had, that she was the boss.”
“This is more reason why it’s so important to tell our stories and make sure we keep them out there,” Haris says, as the conversation continues about how both Madonna and Lauper have crusaded for the rights of not only women, but for people of color and the LGBTQ+ community, for decades. “Because we watch the pendulum try to swing back to that kind of thinking again, that people are starting to be disenfranchised, disowned, deported because they’re different or they look different, or rights are being taken away because they love different. So, that’s why these stories are important.”
Meanwhile, Young, who is a lesbian, became her own boss (she now runs an imprint label, FEROSH Records), and her true identity became better known after Madonna’s veteran publicist, Liz Rosenberg, pitched Young for a Billboard feature. Then “Tracy Young,” not “The Young Collective,” really made headlines when she was the DJ at Madonna’s wedding to second husband Guy Ritchie. (Young refuses to dish about the reception, saying, “People got married and they were in love; it’s not my wedding to talk about,” but she reveals that she played “some real dope music, a lot of house music” and got the party started with Daft Punk’s “One More Time.”)
And Young is now getting the party started as Lauper’s pre-show DJ, warming up audiences with curated sets that are specific to each city, and she says this gig, which coincided with her reconnecting with Haris and De Lory, could not have come at a more needed time. Shortly after her career peak at the 2020 Grammys, COVID hit, and then her mother (a pianist who was “a huge, huge inspiration”) and stepfather both died, just one month apart. Young subsequently hit rock bottom, struggling with addiction and feeling creatively stalled. And this time, it was the DJ’s life that was saved, thanks to Lauper’s kind offer.
“A year had gone by, and I hadn’t done any music. … Cyndi called me, and it got me motivated again. I was like, ‘God, I’ve got to start putting out music again,’” recalls Young, who’s now sober and in the best shape of her life. “It had been a year and a half of my mom being gone. I literally sat on the couch, ate, gained a lot of weight, did nothing but cry my eyes out. It was so unlike my behavior; anybody that knows me knows that I’m full of energy and always cracking jokes and being silly. But I just was not myself, and I could not snap out of it. So, when I say Cyndi saved my life, that’s what I mean, because she gave me something. She threw me back into it and said, ‘Girl, this is what you’re meant to do. Come on.’”
Young now plans to make more music with Haris and De Lory — the three just dropped “I Know You, I Live You” on FEROSH, with another collaboration, “WATR,” coming out Oct. 3 — and De Le Lory says, “It has been just flowing, and I know we will get together and write more. We’ve got to come to Miami!” De Lory and Haris, who respectively sang with Madonna until 2007 and 2016, haven’t ruled out working with their former boss again; De Lory says, “If that came about in the future, I feel like we would welcome it with open arms,” and Haris adds, “What we know for sure is that if Madonna and Donna and Niki ever get together and sing again, it’s going to be magic again, because that’s what it is.” But they too are looking forwards, not backwards. “The bottom line is that if all else fails, we know that the magic [with Madonna] has already occurred,” Haris asserts.
And that’s where the reinvention comes in, although Young clarifies, “I think that’s just being artists and evolving. I don’t think it’s really reinventing, because we all move. Like, I started as a DJ, but then I went to remixing. When you love what you do and you love music as much as the three of us do, you embrace what’s coming next. And so, I don’t see it as much as ‘reinventing’ as much as it is just being open to new experiences and learning. … I’m deep in this [Lauper] tour, and part of the tour is she tells all these stories, and she’s an amazing storyteller, and she says that there are many chapters of your life. And when you think you’ve closed the chapter, one will open again.”
And now, as Young looks to the future — whether it’s this week’s final leg of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” tour, meeting up with De Lory and Haris again in person, or TBD projects further down the road, she knows that she has learned from the very best. “I’m very grateful I worked with both,” she says of her time with Lauper and Madonna. “Because they’re aligned in that way where I want to push the needle forward.”
