Madonna went back to school to make her new record and has never felt more into the groove. Confessions II — out now — finds the Pop Queen letting go, embracing her roots and burning nervous energy in a way she hasn’t done for years, while also preaching the virtues of the dancefloor. Her producer Stuart Price explains how taking risks took her back to her early days: "The creation of this was a little bit like being in the school band again because there's nothing to hide."
A Joyful Return to Music
You've shared highs and lows throughout the course of life, you make music together and something great comes from it as well. "It became about that expression of joy when we were just finally doing music again together, it's almost medicinal," Price added.
The new music was born out of the joy Madonna felt on her Celebration tour in 2003-4. British hitmaker Price, who also worked on the original Confessions On A Dance Floor, was musical director for that tour, and helped Madonna find her groove again. "That experience was just about revisiting old songs and presenting them in different ways," he recalls. "But the unexpected outcome of it was watching the songs and the messages of her storytelling, from the whole span of her career, and how those messages were, either still resonating today, or a lot of them were actually even more relevant today."
Creating the Album
Price says Madonna felt "revitalised" by the experience: "That single event alone created this momentum to create a record. The tour finished we went straight into the studio, initially as an experiment, immediately the song Good For the Soul, came out in that first session, which was just literally a song about it, how it feels good to just create music."
They made Confessions II over a year, when the sun had gone down, with everything done in person: "We both observed that when you email a verse in here or get a beep from over there, you actually get a little bit disconnected from the process of making music. For us, this whole idea of being connected on a dancefloor with friends, experiencing, music together, the highs and lows, was a message that we really wanted to kind of embellish on this record."
Madonna's Vision and Vulnerability
Despite working with Madonna for over 20 years, Price is still learning new things about her: "Madonna is so good at assimilating all the music and the ideas that are ahead of her and conceptualising what that means to her. Her greatest success as an artist is where she's documenting who she is, where she's at, what she's seeing, sometimes it's not comfortable, sometimes it's not obvious, sometimes it's very obvious, but I think that success comes from where she's just very observational in her world."
"Madonna shows a vulnerability and an insight into her mind and into her experiences and, you know, the things that she's been through. And immediately with the lyrics she said, 'this is this is a very confessional record'."
Themes of Loss and Joy
Escaping to the dancefloor is a major theme, but the final third also tackles different more complex issues. There’s a song about her late brother (Fragile), a duet with her daughter Lourdes (The Test) aimed at healing their relationship, plus various references to past relationships and the rising anxiety of a negative world. "That is a really important angle to this record, which happens towards the end, I guess it's what we'd kind of call the emotional health part of the record," says Price. "It’s impossible to be in this time and just focus on escapism. There are experiences that we've all gone through, world events, and those challenges were really present on Madonna's mind."
"Throughout her career, there’s been accusations of her being controversial about stuff, but is she? Or is she simply holding up a mirror and saying, 'this is what's going on'. And so there are themes in her life that she went through on this record, themes of loss, themes of joy, and that really came out in the section."
A Blast in the Studio
More than anything else they had a blast making it and that can be heard: "I'm overjoyed to just to see Madonna being just like in her ultimate strength. Vocally she sounds so good. She just has this knack of elevating, of being visionary, of being very singular. I think in any artist's work, what we respond to is someone who is singular in their mission, what they're trying to do. It's a very attractive quality."
