Madonna has teamed up with Stuart Price on the follow-up to Confessions On A Dance Floor, and Confessions II is out on July 3rd.
Madonna discussed her new album with Graham Norton for a BBC special.(Image: Ricardo Gomes/So Television/BBC/PA Wire)
Madonna’s upcoming fifteenth studio album will be another hour of non-stop music aimed at making people dance.
And for someone as world famous as Madonnabeing on the dance floor or throwing shapes in a DJ booth is where she insists she still feels most free at age 67. It takes her back to a time when she was just another anonymous person in a nightclub dancing to escape their normal lives.
Looking back to the seventies, when she was an aspiring young dancer in Michigan, Madonna and her fans owe a debt of gratitude to her first ballet teacher, who took her to gay club Manjos in Detroit.
“He’s like, ‘I’ve got to show you something, it’s going to blow your mind,'” she recalls of the life-changing moment. “I’m like, ‘okay.’ And then I walked into this club and the doors opened and there were these two really handsome men without their shirts on, wearing roller skates and bow ties and shorts, and they were getting a drink on a tray, and I was like, ‘Wow, we’re not in Kansas anymore.’ myself. And I was like, ‘Wow, so great, everyone is so free.’
“Cut to my song, I Feel So Free, which I just released, and I feel a huge sense of freedom when I dance.”
Looking back on that night and others who clubbed New York as a youngster before finding fame, she says BBC: “I didn’t have cool outfits and everyone had cool hair, earrings in their ears.
“I just took all my dance clothes and reinvented them, so hunger was the best sauce. I was very awkward and I didn’t fit in. But I didn’t care, because when I start dancing, I really don’t care what you think. I’m in my body. I’m definitely not in my head. It’s the worst place to be!”
Confessions II is the follow-up to the hugely successful Confessions On A Dance Floor, with superstar producer Stuart Price teaming up with Madonna to create more anthems. The pair have already dropped tracks including I Feel Free and Freedom during a surprise set at Los Angeles club The Abbey.
Price says, “Madonna always has a story and always has, so she’s a great storyteller. She’s very poetic in the way she writes. The studio just becomes a space to tell the stories.”
One Step Away is a moment on the record that Price says happened in “kind of a flash of light” after they danced around to the track before it had lyrics and Madonna asked him to turn on a microphone, only for her to deliver the lyrics in one stream of consciousness.
“It’s a bit like I’m being possessed, it is strange. The ideas come when I don’t try too hard. It just happens,” she acknowledges
For someone who has written songs about her sex life, religion and her parents, it can be difficult to find new subjects close to her heart. But Madonna has combined her love of the dance floor with the love of her life for her first album in seven years.
Asked if the new album contains her most personal songs, Madonna says: “I wouldn’t say that, but you know, they’re very specific, they’re very… there was a lot going on in my life at the time I was writing.
“At first I was deeply affected by the death of my brother Christopher.”
Christopher Ciccone died aged 63 in October 2024 from cancer and Madonna’s new track called Fragile is her response to this.
“It was another song that just came,” she says, revealing that it was written and created in one day. “I actually got in the studio and I talked to my brother who was in a lot of pain on the phone and he wasn’t in a good place and I knew it was close to the end. Then I went upstairs and wrote a song so it all connected with what was going on in my life.
“It’s mind-blowing. It’s like a kind of therapy, you know, letting go of someone you love. The best way to do it is to write about it…it’s like an exorcism.”
Asked by Graham Norton if her father has heard the track yet, she adds: “No. I’ll see him soon and he will. I don’t want to, like, push them over the edge! But it’s not disturbing, it’s beautiful.”
The family connections to Confessions II don’t end there. Another track sees her duet with daughter Lourdes Leon for The Test. For this song, however, instead of taking control, Madonna insists it was a 50-50 project, even down to the lyrics.
“She approached me and she has been very reluctant to work with me or be my daughter and take advantage of her privilege.
“She’s been very standoff and worked at her own pace, and you know, I respect that deeply, and she’s a great songwriter.
“She has a much, much better voice than I do, but then one day she came to me and she said, ‘You know what I realized, I’m holding on to something, and maybe it’s some kind of anger.’
“Because she ultimately didn’t ask for this, she had been through her youth and struggled with those feelings for a long time. And then she came to me and she said ‘Let’s write a song together. I think it’s going to be a very, very healing experience. And you say exactly what you want to say and I’ll say exactly what I want to say’.”
“I was like, ‘Okay, you’re on, let’s do it’. I was so happy. We sound great together.”
There are many other female artists who want to work with her, including Sabrina Carpenter and Kylie Minogue, who appear on Confessions II.
While Kylie’s song isn’t 100% confirmed, she served Graham and Madonna drinks during their hour-long set BBC interview, which seemed to be their way of announcing a collaboration. They praised each other’s music but declined to talk specifically about their project together. With Sabrina, the iconic singer came to the fore and even reached out to make the collaboration happen on the track Bring Your Love.
Madonna says: “I sent her a DM. I said I was making a new record and I’d love to collaborate with you on something. It ended up being Bring Your Love and it worked out perfectly. She was already scheduled to open for Coachella, so she invited me to perform with her. It all happened in a very safe way.”
In total, there are 16 tracks on the album, which is a continuous mix of music “because that’s what happens in a club,” explains Madonna. It could even have been longer, but she only wanted to use songs she felt kept the energy on the LP high.
“We have eight songs that we really love that didn’t make the record. You could only put so many songs on the record, 16 seems almost indulgent.
“It’s a great record to train to, like ‘does it make me want to get up and move?’ Just drive me, just inspire me? Does this give me an incentive, does it make me want to sweat? Yes!
“And if it didn’t, I was like ‘off the record.’ It was actually a perfect way to pick things. Those are the keepers.”
The only other thing fans want to know is when they can hear Madonna perform these new songs live, with her final tour ending in May 2024. But those hoping to sweat it out with Madonna on stage can wait, unless they’re at the World Cup final, where she’ll be doing a mini-set at halftime.
She tells Graham that she will start doing “promo tours” in the coming months, which is unlikely to feature a full-length show, but then the next big live event won’t be until 2027, which she teases by saying “then in the summer something bigger”, which she hints could be in the UK.
Host Graham says he thinks he knows what it could be, and the obvious answer seems to be a headline slot at Glastonbury Festival? Last night, Madonna’s publicist said Mirror any tour plans were “all speculation” at this time.
But even if you have to wait until next summer to see her, at least now there are only a few days before millions of Madonna fans can dance to her new album in the sunshine. Somewhere out there, Madonna will probably do the same.
* Confessions II will be released on July 3rd on Warner Music. Madonna & Graham can be seen on the BBC iPlayer.
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