Music Now
Madonna collaborator Stuart Price breaks down the making of Madonna's instant classic, from her emotional duet with her daughter Lola to the songs you haven't heard (yet)
Madonna was as ambitious as she’s ever been in the studio sessions for July 3’s Confessions II, which is saying a lot. For the sequel to 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor, she reunited with that album’s producer, Stuart Price, and crafted a relentless DJ set of an album that also includes some of her most emotionally bare songs: a duet with her daughter Lola (“The Test”) and wrenching songs about her late stepmother (“Betrayal”) and her late brother, Christopher Ciccone (“Fragile”). She brings her full pop firepower, too, on songs from the Sabrina Carpenter duet “Bring Your Love” to the Eighties reminiscence of “Danceteria.” It all helped win Madonna Artist of the Year at this year’s VMAs, where she opened the show with a guest-star-packed performance, her first on the awards show in 23 years.
In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, Price breaks down the making of Confessions II, and goes deep on the stories behind “The Test,” “Fragile,” and “I Feel So Free,” his decades-long creative partnership with Madonna, and much more. To hear the whole episode, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above. Here are some highlights from the discussion:
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Madonna and Price wrote “Good for the Soul” on their first day back in the studio, and it set the tone for everything that followed. “We came to London to my studio here, and we just said, ‘Let’s do a week and see what happens,'” says Price. “And it was just from the very first day, we just immediately had a new song. I think it was ‘Good for the Soul.’ And I don’t think either of us really acknowledged what a great thing that was. We just acted in the moment and made the music that felt right.” The song, he says, “really emerged as a simple song about how touch feels good, about how connection feels good, about how letting your hair down just feels good. And that really just opened up a new chapter of songwriting, I think, which was gonna be based a lot more on Madonna’s psyche at this moment in time. … I actually feel like her most powerful art is created when she just has that direct frankness about life.”
Calling the album Confessions II was a natural progression from the duo’s renewed collaboration. “I think the most notable thing is just how natural the continuation was,” he says. “I think that the sense of time just was a complete non-factor. I just loved how she was writing, how she sounded, how the songs were coming together, how much fun it was to do. It was pretty clear from early on, maybe in the second week of working, that actually the Confessions sound, amongst other things, is really a sound of our collaboration. A lot of music making is so non-verbal. … You’re not discussing what you’re gonna do before you do it. You just do it. And having that kind of non-verbal shorthand together allows you to move kind of quickly through ideas.”
Madonna was determined not to look backwards. “Confessions One is 2005, and I think looking back only gets you so far,” says Price. “So really you have to come up with a new spin on what that is, and I think that this is a record that defiantly looks forward. If Confessions One is really about dancing as freedom, Confessions II is much more about confrontation and acceptance. … It suggests the idea of vulnerability as strength. … Confession is associated with shame. But Confessions II for us, it reframes that idea as actually power and strength and the courage to … the, you know, daring to share as well.”
The album’s house-music DNA came from mixtapes Price made for Madonna on the road, and a mixtape with Lil Louis’ “French Kiss” on it sparked “I Feel So Free.” On the Celebration Tour, Price says, “I would just make her mixtapes for parties or for her to work out to. And in those were the sort of references that we started using. A lot of them were based around just house records that I love, house artists that I love… It’s Kevin Saunderson, it’s DJ Pierre, it’s Frankie Knuckles, it’s Mr. Fingers…. We went to New York… Madonna had come in from home and she’d been listening to a mixtape there that had ‘French Kiss’ on it. … And so she brought that in and she was like, ‘I really love this vocal in it,'” Price says. That got combined with a track “that had this kinda hypnotic feel to it, that was built back in London before we’d gone to New York,” Price says. “And so in New York what happened was we combined those two pieces of music together, which is really just typical of the way that Madonna kind of ideates, which is just colliding ideas together, things that she loves, things that create a feel in the studio. And then she said, ‘Just put the mic on. Let me just start recording.'” “And so she got into this headspace of how dance music makes her feel, the sort of safety in numbers and representing what sanctuary the dance floor kinda is, that’s where those ideas started to come about.”
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“Betrayal” grew out of an Erik Satie piece that was nearly used for Madonna’s daughter Mercy’s piano spotlight on the Celebration Tour, and became one of the album’s songs about loss. “Before ‘Bad Girl’ on the Celebration Tour, there was a moment where Madonna’s daughter Mercy played piano,” Price says. ”That was an incredible moment of the show. Satie had been one idea of something to play there, but … it wasn’t the right feel for that moment,” Price says. “But the love of that piece had always stayed around. … That piece became a starting point for a song. And so just by chopping it up a little, rearranging it, and then … in that style of ‘Hung Up’ as well, like, it’s not good enough just to rest on a sample. How can you extend it?… Throughout this album, she went through a lot. She said this music is good for the soul, right? She felt that it was healing to make music in a room where she’s not second-guessing. But also she had things going on in her life that involved loss as well, and that happened with ‘Betrayal.’ She had a family member that she lost, and she turned that into the seed of a lyrical idea… One of Madonna’s great gifts is that she’s able to be very specific and at the same time very universal.”
Madonna and Price wrote “Fragile” the week her brother Christopher’s illness took a turn for the worse. “‘Fragile’ as an idea, I think, was also in the week where she had another loss,” Price says. “And again, this is this thing I think for writers, for artists, that the job part of it, the showing up for it is a real commitment to yourself. Like, no matter what’s going on, I’m gonna go into that studio. You know, there are some days that you just don’t feel like it and it’s very important to show up, because that reason that you didn’t feel like it may actually be the number one reason why you should go into the studio that day…. That week when we were working, her brother had been very sick, and things got worse, and we were writing a song at the time…. Originally, ‘Fragile,’ I think lyrically was kind of speaking a little bit to the self. … But then it was just the way the stars lined up, I think, that what was going on that week became a much more current and appropriate subject.”
Madonna’s duet with her daughter Lola, “The Test,” still gives Price chills. “Lola had said to her mother, like, ‘I’d like to do a song together,'” Price says. “Lola and Madonna took a completely different perspective on that, which is that they looked at it as a healing opportunity, as a moment to be together and just be very … honest about things. … Lola prepared some lyrics to come in, Madonna prepared some lyrics to come in, but it wasn’t until the microphone was on and we recorded it that those lyrics were really heard, and that was … of everything on the record, probably, you know, it gives me some chills thinking about it, because it’s one of the most beautiful things I think I’ve seen. And I have children of my own, like, thinking about the power of those bonds and of those connections, … and seeing it from a third party was a very emotional thing.” Lola, he adds, “is a completely exceptional artist in her own right.”
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The VMAs required a “tour-level” amount of preparation, and each live performance of this album’s music was approached just as deliberately. For the free Pride concert in Times Square in June, Price says, “you are inside this little jewel box perched up high on top of the square, and it has these really thick bank vault-like steel doors with LED screens on the front.” Then came “the metaphor of these kind of vault doors just opening and this new music just suddenly spills out onto the streets of Times Square, which is so important to Madonna in her life and her relationship with that city.” For the VMAs, he explains, “that was a performance where we ambitiously put almost tour-level preparation into the work and compressed that all into a two-week time schedule.” MTV, he adds, was “very supportive and accommodating in allowing her to really create and to not restrict.”
Madonna recorded eight or so songs that didn’t make Confessions II. Will they come out? “Well, you just never know, do you? The best thing about good songs is they never die. They just find a way to present themselves at the right time,” Price says. “And yes, I’m being cryptic, but that’s because I think that we still love this continuum idea that Confessions is really an extended moment of time that has different elements to the performance of it.”
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