When Madonna went to record "Oh Father", her troubled role in "Speed-the-Plow" was on her mind, with the result being that she vented her emotions in the recording of the song. Bill Meyers, who did the string arrangement for most of the songs on "Like a Prayer", including "Oh Father", recalled that Madonna worked on the song with Leonard in "this really dingy, awful little studio in the Garment District in New York. It was grotesquely dirty and cramped, and that's what came out of it."