Madonna - Confessions II OUT NOW (3 Viewers)

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Not taking the bait this time. I'm in love with the vibe propulsion of Love Sensation, Bring Your Love, I Feel So Free, and the promise of Danceteria is already flooding my floor and my senses, but this is a door slam of generic if not what-was-she-thinking proportions. I hope she doesn't air it out for the FIFA show.
 
I mean, nobody can say she isn’t working this project hard - I hope she’s enjoying herself - do you think that’s the right word when it comes to Madonna, or is it more driven and proving a point for her?
 
The project is the first time she's fired so precise and on target in 2 decades, you can see she's aware just how good this is going as she's commanding the stage as if belatedly realising she's the only one who can do it. It's highly elevated befitting of her status in a way that chanting "l u v u wanna" was a barrel scraping compromise.
 
I mean she flashed her box in Paris yesterday didn’t she. Come on girls do you believe in cooch cause I got something to say about it (and it’s a short blue 👗 )
 
Straight from the @cwej book of stats
I was out for work drinks and one of the secretaries brought her teenage daughter who said she loved Madonna’s song with Sabrina even though she didn’t like Sabrina

First come the gays then the girls

It’s happening!!
 
straightorbroken said:
The project is the first time she's fired so precise and on target in 2 decades, you can see she's aware just how good this is going as she's commanding the stage as if belatedly realising she's the only one who can do it. It's highly elevated befitting of her status in a way that chanting "l u v u wanna" was a barrel scraping compromise.
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To be fair I think Madame X is to CII what American Life was to COADF. The flop artistic pivot was required. However, in the case of the original COADF we didn’t have a decade of missteps (with the odd decent song and fantastic tour performance aside). Then again who knows - justice for MDNA may be a thing to the TikTak generation of intelligent AIs in 2050 when we’re all gone.
 
lolly said:
Some of these Madonna and Kylie pictures all over social media today are making me feel genuinely tearful
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It's a lot for a gay heart to take. The Celebration Tour performance was almost like a gate opening. Some of the feelings are bittersweet in that it took them this long to connect, probably partly because of the masculine toxicity of the industry in the 80s and 90s. Then you factor in their respective health issues over the last few years and it's even more poignant. But anyway, Motherquake 11 on the Richter scale etc. etc. Let's keep it fun I guess. :love:
 
Paywalled Stuart Price interview from The Times:

That’s where Madonna sits,” Stuart Price says with a grin as I lower myself on to a chic, white, wool-covered sofa in his studio in Notting Hill, west London. “And it’s actually Madonna’s sofa.” The British producer used to have a “lovely mid-century modern couch” in this airy attic, where he and the Queen of Pop made her new album, Confessions II. But “Madonna came in, we worked for a few weeks and she went: ‘Yeah, I’m gonna need to bring my own couch.’”

Which is entirely normal behaviour when you are the bestselling female singer in history. Although it’s rather a different story to that of the first Confessionsalbum, Confessions on a Dance Floor, which Madonna made in 2005 with Price, who at the time was a “solitary” underground DJ. They made that record in his old bedsit down the road in Maida Vale, where Madge was happy to sit cross-legged on the floor surrounded by broken chairs and music equipment. She was, however, equally blunt about his domestic shortcomings back then. “I’d say: ‘Stuart, your house is a mess, there’s no food in the cupboard.’ Then I’d call someone from my house to bring food over for him,” Madonna said at the time.

The first Confessions represents one of the happiest and most successful times of Madonna’s life. Combining her emotional candour with Price’s sleek, melodic grooves*,* it became her bestselling album of this century, shifting more than ten million copies and winning the pair the Grammy for best dance/electronic album. It helped to make Price one of the most in-demand producers in the world; he has worked with Kylie Minogue, Pet Shop Boys, New Order and the Killers, won another Grammy for remixing the Coldplay single Talk and is worth an estimated £6 million.

Two decades on, the duo are hoping to repeat the trick. Seating situation aside, it seems to have gone well. Price, 48, was the musical director for Madonna’s Celebration tour in 2023-24, but other than that they had barely spoken in 15 years — she was in New York and he was in London, where he lives with his wife, Angela Becker, a talent manager, and their two teenage daughters. “But we immediately picked up where we left off,” he says. “When your tastes are aligned there’s a lot less talking and a lot more doing.” On the first day they finished two songs, including Good for the Soul.

“I reached out to Stuart because I thought the world is in a very dark place and people need to dance,” Madonna, 67, told Interview magazine this week. A cynic might say she also needed a hit after her last album, Madame X, sold a disappointing half a million copies. She and Price have a genuine bond, though; she has moved back to London and they are seeing a lot of each other again.

Is it surreal to work so closely with one of the most famous people in the world? “It’s actually like being in a school band,” he says. “Madonna will say, ‘I think I have something,’ and what comes out is not calculated, it’s just unquestionably her.” He shows me the microphone she uses. “Look, it’s taped up where it’s fallen apart.” Do they ever disagree? “You always tackle a problem with a solution. When you have faith in your writing partner, the whole thing becomes pleasant.”

They have pulled it off again by the sound of the six tracks I heard at a playback this month. It was held at the Lost nightclub in central London, where hip young things took our phones at the door and Price was interviewed on stage by the drag queen DJ Jodie Harsh. There were bangers galore, but the standout was Danceteria, a pumping homage to the revered nightclub in New York where Madonna partied in the early Eighties with RuPaul, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Cyndi Lauper.

Danceteria features a quasi rap à la Debbie Harry in Rapture, recorded in one stream-of-consciousness take, in which Madonna describes a night at the club. She namechecks friends from the era: Martin Burgoyne, the British artist who died of an Aids-related disease in 1986; Debi Mazar, the make-up artist for Madonna’s first music video, Everybody; Haoui Montaug, the doorman, who also had Aids and died by suicide in 1991. “Then I see Mark Kamins… he’s a DJ. Hide the cocaine,” she purrs of the man who helped her to land a record deal. “Everyone here is a work of art/ Everybody get up and dance.”

“That was one of the most fabulous times of my life,” Madonna said. She is not the only megastar to have been fuelled by personal history: David Bowie sang about his time in Berlin in Where Are We Now? and Paul McCartney harks back to his youth on his new album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane. Madonna was spurred on to create a nostalgic album after Universal abandoned her long-planned biopic, refusing to give her the budget she wanted to do justice to her “huge” life. She also revisited her past in her Celebration tour, when she recreated the moment she was turned away from the Paradise Garage, another seminal Manhattan hotspot. “It’s that theme of rejection which she’s experienced throughout her life and has always fought against,” Price says.

He knows what that feels like, having started out as a shy outsider in the Nineties dance scene, releasing Eighties-tinted electropop under aliases including Les Rythmes Digitales and Jacques Lu Cont. “All that stuff was me voicing my reaction to not being accepted,” Price says. “I wasn’t cool enough to do drum and bass or be the Chemical Brothers.” He finally broke through in 1999 with his Darkdancer album. “Someone told me recently that Phil Oakey [of the Human League] has a framed copy of it in his studio. That means a lot to me, and it’s funny because I asked him to sing on it and he wasn’t interested.”

Even when Price was asked to play keyboards for Madonna’s tour band in 2001 he still felt like a “misfit”. The rest of the band were “incredible musicians with an array of gear and I had that [he points to a small keyboard in the corner of the studio], which only makes one sound at a time”. Simplicity, Price says, was the key to Madonna’s music. “I’m from dance music — there’s nothing wrong with staying on one note for six minutes as long as it’s a really good note. So I said to her: ‘I don’t think I’m the right person to do this.’ She reconfigured the whole set-up on the basis of that comment. Instead of going back to my parents’ house in Reading, I ended up staying and she made me musical director of the Drowned world tour [in 2001]. So our relationship is ultimately based on honesty.”

Which helps to explain why the Confessions albums are so emotionally raw. The first was made when Madonna was having problems with her husband at the time, Guy Ritchie, and the second coincided with the deaths of her estranged brother Christopher and her stepmother, Joan Ciccone, in 2024. Madonna said that at the beginning of recording, “My brother was very, very, very ill, and my stepmother, with whom I’d had a very traumatic relationship throughout my entire childhood, had just died”.

Her brother is referenced in two songs, Fragile and Forgive Yourself. “The best way to deal with the rollercoaster is to write about it,” Price says. Christopher died while they were making Fragile and Madonna tweaked the lyrics to acknowledge that. “If you’re an artist who lays it all on the line, it’s irresponsible for you to ignore what is going on in your life,” Price says. “Madonna doesn’t have an off switch.”

Another track, The Test, is about a rapprochement with her eldest child, Lourdes Leon, aka Lola, with whom she had fallen out. “She approached me about writing a song together as a way to heal our relationship,” Madonna told Interview. Leon, 29, appears with Benedict Cumberbatch and Kate Moss in the video for the new album, Confessions II — The Film.

My Sins Are My Savior addresses various controversies that have dogged Madonna, from being accused of blasphemy by the Vatican after featuring burning crosses in her video for Like a Prayer to allegations of appropriating vogue and Latin dance styles and Kabbalah and Islamic imagery. Madonna has lambasted “narrow-minded people” who “judge first before investigating — society, basically”.

“The misunderstanding is that [controversy] was used as some kind of marketing ploy,” Price says. “What Madonna offers is a mirror, in a really honest, brutal way. But I think we all love the truth.” That’s what “confessions” refers to. It’s easier to be honest when artists are working together instead of remotely, as is often the way these days. “Madonna wanted to make everything in the room together,” Price says.

That meant a face-to-face encounter between her and Sabrina Carpenter, who duets on another song on the album, Bring Your Love. Carpenter, 27, “has made no secret [of the fact] Madonna was an idol of hers, and they had an immediate physical chemistry in the studio. They were as creative as they were playful”. Mistress later joined apprentice on stage at the latter’s punchy set at Coachella festival.

To promote Confessions II Madonna and Price are appearing at nightclubs around the world, where he plays their new tracks on the decks and she sings live. The events, including one in Paris this week with Charli XCX, are “a lot of fun”, he says. And this isn’t the end of his collaboration with Madonna. “It’s been an incredibly productive period, so there is more to come.”

The sofa, it seems, is here to stay.

Confessions II is out on Jul 3 through Warner
 
I wonder if the song Phil Oakey was offered to sing on was Sometimes - Nik Kershaw is the better vocalist of course, but Oakey's flat deadpan would have been just as effective.
 
^^ this one:

FannyFaudrey said:
Paywalled Stuart Price interview from The Times:

That’s where Madonna sits,” Stuart Price says with a grin as I lower myself on to a chic, white, wool-covered sofa in his studio in Notting Hill, west London. “And it’s actually Madonna’s sofa.” The British producer used to have a “lovely mid-century modern couch” in this airy attic, where he and the Queen of Pop made her new album, Confessions II. But “Madonna came in, we worked for a few weeks and she went: ‘Yeah, I’m gonna need to bring my own couch.’”

Which is entirely normal behaviour when you are the bestselling female singer in history. Although it’s rather a different story to that of the first Confessionsalbum, Confessions on a Dance Floor, which Madonna made in 2005 with Price, who at the time was a “solitary” underground DJ. They made that record in his old bedsit down the road in Maida Vale, where Madge was happy to sit cross-legged on the floor surrounded by broken chairs and music equipment. She was, however, equally blunt about his domestic shortcomings back then. “I’d say: ‘Stuart, your house is a mess, there’s no food in the cupboard.’ Then I’d call someone from my house to bring food over for him,” Madonna said at the time.

The first Confessions represents one of the happiest and most successful times of Madonna’s life. Combining her emotional candour with Price’s sleek, melodic grooves*,* it became her bestselling album of this century, shifting more than ten million copies and winning the pair the Grammy for best dance/electronic album. It helped to make Price one of the most in-demand producers in the world; he has worked with Kylie Minogue, Pet Shop Boys, New Order and the Killers, won another Grammy for remixing the Coldplay single Talk and is worth an estimated £6 million.

Two decades on, the duo are hoping to repeat the trick. Seating situation aside, it seems to have gone well. Price, 48, was the musical director for Madonna’s Celebration tour in 2023-24, but other than that they had barely spoken in 15 years — she was in New York and he was in London, where he lives with his wife, Angela Becker, a talent manager, and their two teenage daughters. “But we immediately picked up where we left off,” he says. “When your tastes are aligned there’s a lot less talking and a lot more doing.” On the first day they finished two songs, including Good for the Soul.

“I reached out to Stuart because I thought the world is in a very dark place and people need to dance,” Madonna, 67, told Interview magazine this week. A cynic might say she also needed a hit after her last album, Madame X, sold a disappointing half a million copies. She and Price have a genuine bond, though; she has moved back to London and they are seeing a lot of each other again.

Is it surreal to work so closely with one of the most famous people in the world? “It’s actually like being in a school band,” he says. “Madonna will say, ‘I think I have something,’ and what comes out is not calculated, it’s just unquestionably her.” He shows me the microphone she uses. “Look, it’s taped up where it’s fallen apart.” Do they ever disagree? “You always tackle a problem with a solution. When you have faith in your writing partner, the whole thing becomes pleasant.”

They have pulled it off again by the sound of the six tracks I heard at a playback this month. It was held at the Lost nightclub in central London, where hip young things took our phones at the door and Price was interviewed on stage by the drag queen DJ Jodie Harsh. There were bangers galore, but the standout was Danceteria, a pumping homage to the revered nightclub in New York where Madonna partied in the early Eighties with RuPaul, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Cyndi Lauper.

Danceteria features a quasi rap à la Debbie Harry in Rapture, recorded in one stream-of-consciousness take, in which Madonna describes a night at the club. She namechecks friends from the era: Martin Burgoyne, the British artist who died of an Aids-related disease in 1986; Debi Mazar, the make-up artist for Madonna’s first music video, Everybody; Haoui Montaug, the doorman, who also had Aids and died by suicide in 1991. “Then I see Mark Kamins… he’s a DJ. Hide the cocaine,” she purrs of the man who helped her to land a record deal. “Everyone here is a work of art/ Everybody get up and dance.”

“That was one of the most fabulous times of my life,” Madonna said. She is not the only megastar to have been fuelled by personal history: David Bowie sang about his time in Berlin in Where Are We Now? and Paul McCartney harks back to his youth on his new album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane. Madonna was spurred on to create a nostalgic album after Universal abandoned her long-planned biopic, refusing to give her the budget she wanted to do justice to her “huge” life. She also revisited her past in her Celebration tour, when she recreated the moment she was turned away from the Paradise Garage, another seminal Manhattan hotspot. “It’s that theme of rejection which she’s experienced throughout her life and has always fought against,” Price says.

He knows what that feels like, having started out as a shy outsider in the Nineties dance scene, releasing Eighties-tinted electropop under aliases including Les Rythmes Digitales and Jacques Lu Cont. “All that stuff was me voicing my reaction to not being accepted,” Price says. “I wasn’t cool enough to do drum and bass or be the Chemical Brothers.” He finally broke through in 1999 with his Darkdancer album. “Someone told me recently that Phil Oakey [of the Human League] has a framed copy of it in his studio. That means a lot to me, and it’s funny because I asked him to sing on it and he wasn’t interested.”

Even when Price was asked to play keyboards for Madonna’s tour band in 2001 he still felt like a “misfit”. The rest of the band were “incredible musicians with an array of gear and I had that [he points to a small keyboard in the corner of the studio], which only makes one sound at a time”. Simplicity, Price says, was the key to Madonna’s music. “I’m from dance music — there’s nothing wrong with staying on one note for six minutes as long as it’s a really good note. So I said to her: ‘I don’t think I’m the right person to do this.’ She reconfigured the whole set-up on the basis of that comment. Instead of going back to my parents’ house in Reading, I ended up staying and she made me musical director of the Drowned world tour [in 2001]. So our relationship is ultimately based on honesty.”

Which helps to explain why the Confessions albums are so emotionally raw. The first was made when Madonna was having problems with her husband at the time, Guy Ritchie, and the second coincided with the deaths of her estranged brother Christopher and her stepmother, Joan Ciccone, in 2024. Madonna said that at the beginning of recording, “My brother was very, very, very ill, and my stepmother, with whom I’d had a very traumatic relationship throughout my entire childhood, had just died”.

Her brother is referenced in two songs, Fragile and Forgive Yourself. “The best way to deal with the rollercoaster is to write about it,” Price says. Christopher died while they were making Fragile and Madonna tweaked the lyrics to acknowledge that. “If you’re an artist who lays it all on the line, it’s irresponsible for you to ignore what is going on in your life,” Price says. “Madonna doesn’t have an off switch.”

Another track, The Test, is about a rapprochement with her eldest child, Lourdes Leon, aka Lola, with whom she had fallen out. “She approached me about writing a song together as a way to heal our relationship,” Madonna told Interview. Leon, 29, appears with Benedict Cumberbatch and Kate Moss in the video for the new album, Confessions II — The Film.

My Sins Are My Savior addresses various controversies that have dogged Madonna, from being accused of blasphemy by the Vatican after featuring burning crosses in her video for Like a Prayer to allegations of appropriating vogue and Latin dance styles and Kabbalah and Islamic imagery. Madonna has lambasted “narrow-minded people” who “judge first before investigating — society, basically”.

“The misunderstanding is that [controversy] was used as some kind of marketing ploy,” Price says. “What Madonna offers is a mirror, in a really honest, brutal way. But I think we all love the truth.” That’s what “confessions” refers to. It’s easier to be honest when artists are working together instead of remotely, as is often the way these days. “Madonna wanted to make everything in the room together,” Price says.

That meant a face-to-face encounter between her and Sabrina Carpenter, who duets on another song on the album, Bring Your Love. Carpenter, 27, “has made no secret [of the fact] Madonna was an idol of hers, and they had an immediate physical chemistry in the studio. They were as creative as they were playful”. Mistress later joined apprentice on stage at the latter’s punchy set at Coachella festival.

To promote Confessions II Madonna and Price are appearing at nightclubs around the world, where he plays their new tracks on the decks and she sings live. The events, including one in Paris this week with Charli XCX, are “a lot of fun”, he says. And this isn’t the end of his collaboration with Madonna. “It’s been an incredibly productive period, so there is more to come.”

The sofa, it seems, is here to stay.

Confessions II is out on Jul 3 through Warner
Click to expand...
 
she really is looking absolutely stun. the body is tea. apparently her daily gym routine is 65 mins and I don't think she's TEXTING DURING
 
Standard workout time and they needn't be longer.

I never picked up on the dress being same, or at least similar, material to the Ray of Light jacket material. Honestly, I am loving this campaign so much (well apart from the FIFA and potentially the Hot Sauce song too - a game and album of 2 halves).



Not watching any Graham previews as it's 4.5 hours until it goes live.
 
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