“Madonna never reflects, she’s always moving forward,” Warner PR Liz Rosenberg told me in 2005, when after a frustrating few months laid up after a riding accident, Madonna re-emerged “like a bullet from a gun” with the glorious disco-driven Confessions on a Dance Floor, produced largely alongside Stuart Price. Madonna has always been militantly anti-nostalgia: continual reinvention is crucial to her artistic identity.
But arguably, Confessions was – until last week – her last great record. Constantly trying to push forward has not always worked for Madonna, with the multiple producers and genres of her 2010s output often proving inconsistent and confusing: the muscular funk of 2008’s Hard Candy, the busy powerpop of 2015’s Rebel Heart, 2019’s globe-straddling Madame X. Leaving Warner Records in 2007 started the decline: Madonna had struck hugely lucrative deals with Live Nation and Interscope, but pressure to recoup that investment meant an element of compromise in her practice and adapting to another contemporary pop innovation: songwriting camps and production by committee. In 2015, Madonna complained to Rolling Stone about “working with people who can’t get off their phone, can’t stop tweeting, can’t focus and finish a song”.
Re-signing to Warner in 2021 has restored her leeway, particularly as that agreement gives her global rights to her entire back catalogue. With the newly released Confessions II, Madonna finally stopped chasing trends and allowed herself to do what she had long resisted: reflecting on her past, navigating the dance music that is in her DNA and finding creative freedom in looking back. Confessions II is the culmination of work that started with a now-shelved Universal biopic project about her life, and the 2023/4 Celebration Tour, a moving spectacular that was less a triumphalist greatest hits and more a meditation on ageing, love and loss. One key moment was Madonna’s languid, sensuous performance of Justify My Love, singing to her younger self as if in a faraway dream. Doing this work seems to have opened a portal. “I feel like my brain is tuned into memory,” she said recently. Perhaps the fact that she nearly died in 2023 from a severe bacterial infection made her realise there wasn’t always a future to move towards. Reuniting with Stuart Price, the original Confessions producer and musical director of her Celebration show, has enabled her to turn memories into gold.
Madonna creates her best songs when working one-to-one with a producer, letting her emotions flow through a process, as Price puts it, of “journaling and scrapbooking”. She did this with Pat Leonard on 1989’s Like a Prayer, with William Orbit on Ray of Light (1998), and Mirwais with Music (2000). This improvisatory exploration is evident on Confessions II. Standout track Danceteria began as a late-night session with Madonna telling stories about people she knew on the late 70s/early 80s New York club scene, like Basquiat, Keith Haring, the designer Maripol and best friend Debi Mazar. “Leave this with me,” she told Price. “I’ll go home and think about it.” The next day she returned to his Notting Hill studio with three pages of lyrics, picked up an old microphone held together with tape, and plugged into the full-tilt exuberance of those days with raw spoken word and an explosive chorus.
The persona she projects here is not polished or perfect. In a recent interview with Graham Norton, she spoke about feeling like a misfit back then: “I was very awkward, I wasn’t cool. Nobody wanted to dance with me.” But in dancing she lost self-consciousness and eventually found her community and her tribe. “The dancefloor is not just a place,” she intones on One Step Away, “It’s a ritualistic space where movement replaces language.” On track after track, trails of Chicago house and Detroit techno are refracted through thundering big-room chug to create a sense of dance music as cathartic and healing.
What gives the club bangers their power is the way Madonna weaves in the emotional freight of specific, charged memories. Bizarre recollects “movie star, deep blue eyes” and a 1960s Shelby Cobra car driven too fast, a reference to a wedding gift she gave Sean Penn. Even though it’s been years, the hurt of a broken marriage still stings. “Now you’re gone I feel so empty,” she sings. Some memories linger stark and bright, like the Lower East Side boy with the “Marlon Brando face” (LES Girl), or the resentment she feels towards her late stepmother in Betrayal: “You’ll never take my mother’s place … you betrayed me, you enslaved me.”
after newsletter promotion
And perhaps most poignant of all is Fragile, a song about her brother Christopher, who died while she was making this album. In 2008 Christopher published Life With My Sister Madonna, a scathing tell-all memoir that led to years of estrangement. But when he was dying of cancer, they reconciled. She sings on a track about fallibility and forgiveness, “I see you standing there/I see inside your soul and I feel whole.” Its sense of acceptance is reminiscent of Mer Girl on Ray of Light, where, instead of running away from grief about her dead mother, Madonna confronted it.
There are a lot of reasons that particularly older female artists might be resistant to nostalgia: the suggestion that your best work is behind you; the idea of being trapped in aspic as your younger self. But the Celebration tour showed that delving into the past didn’t have to mean retreading former glories; it could also be a poignant, productive process, akin to how her idol David Bowie revisited his time in 1970s Berlin on 2013’s The Next Day. Facing grief and loss has made Madonna’s music deeper than it’s been in 20 years, but also more alive: “I’m the voice in your ear, talking to you, inviting you,” she says, at the vanguard between life and death.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.theguardian.com ’
