Donna De Lory

Donna De Lory entered the spotlight with her self-titled debut album in 1993, yet she had already built a reputation as a backing vocalist alongside Carole King, Carly Simon, Belinda Carlisle, and above all Madonna. Her follow-up single “Just a Dream,” penned by Madonna, who contributed harmony vocals, reached the Top Ten on the dance charts. De Lory soon teamed with cellist Cameron Stone to create the duo Bliss; its name derived from a Joseph Campbell remark, and the pair’s work reflected an embrace of spiritual development and inner awareness. Subsequent projects by De Lory moved between adult contemporary pop, world music, and mantra-based devotional singing. Shaped by the loss of her father, producer and session musician Al De Lory, her eighth album, The Unchanging, arrived in 2013 as a contemplative set of adult pop colored by worldbeat textures. She continued to link contemporary pop with chanting on the 2018 release Here in Heaven.

Born in Calabasas, California, during the mid-1960s, De Lory was raised in a household steeped in music. Her great-grandfather had served as a professor of music while also performing as a violinist and singer. Her grandfather performed on upright bass and cello with the Warner Bros. Studio Orchestra. Her mother worked as a singer and dancer, while her father, Al De Lory, contributed keyboards to sessions for Phil Spector and the Beach Boys, notably Pet Sounds, and later produced recordings for Glen Campbell and the Lettermen. Donna’s brother, Alan “A.D.” De Lory, likewise pursued a path as a singer and songwriter.

At eight, Donna De Lory recorded for Walt Disney children’s albums, her voice featured on “It’s a Small World,” the track heard on the Disneyland and Disney World attractions. She also lent vocals to commercials for prominent fast-food, toy, and photography companies. After her mother succumbed to breast cancer, she relocated with her father to Nashville at sixteen, yet she returned to Southern California three years later to launch a professional music career.

De Lory’s breakthrough arrived after Madonna’s manager, Patrick Leonard, encountered a demo of her composition “Open Your Heart” and engaged her to sing and dance on the 1987 Who’s That Girl tour. She also recorded and toured as a backing vocalist for Belinda Carlisle in 1988 and collaborated with Selena, Julian Lennon, Carly Simon, Carole King, Kim Carnes, and Ray Parker, Jr. She next appeared on Madonna’s 1990 Blonde Ambition tour and in the 1991 documentary Truth or Dare, shot during those dates. Her association with Madonna extended into the following decade when she joined The Girlie Show world tour in 1993.

During this period De Lory issued the singles “Praying for Love” and “Just a Dream” from her MCA Records debut. “Praying for Love” topped the charts in Japan, while “Just a Dream” became a U.S. Top Ten dance hit shortly before the full album surfaced in 1993. She left MCA the next year and eventually formed Bliss with Cameron Stone. In 1996 she toured France with Mylène Farmer. Bliss’s debut album, Love Never Dies, appeared on the duo’s own Dirty Bird imprint and was first sold exclusively at concerts; after its 2000 reissue on Secret Road it was retitled Bliss and credited solely to De Lory. A track from the set, “On and On,” received a Junior Vasquez remix that entered the Billboard Dance Club Songs chart.

De Lory rejoined Madonna for the 2001 Drowned World tour and, in 2002, released the live recording Live & Acoustic along with the studio album Songs 95, which contained ten compositions written in 1995. The following year she presented In the Glow, a collection rooted in yoga devotional chants, and contributed to Mac Quayle’s electro-pop rendition of the Tears for Fears song “The Hurting.” She delved further into Sanskrit mantras and chants on 2004’s The Lover & the Beloved and participated in Madonna’s Re-Invention world tour that same year. Two years later she sang on the Confessions tour and issued another solo album blending devotional and pop elements, Sky Is Open, followed by the similarly oriented Sanctuary in 2009.

Her eighth studio album, The Unchanging, paid tribute to her father and included a guest appearance by fellow Madonna backup dancer Niki Harris. She followed it with Universal Light: Remixes from the Unchanging in 2015, then Live from the Kula Space in 2016, before again uniting contemporary pop with chants on Here in Heaven in 2018.