Madonna was always anti-nostalgia. But looking back at Confessions II has revived his music Madonna

“MAdonna never shows up, she’s always moving forward,” Warner PR Liz Rosenberg told me in 2005, after several frustrating months after her accident. Madonna it also came out “like a bullet from a gun” with the glorious disco-driven Confessions on the Dance Floor, produced mainly with Stuart Price. Madonna has always struggled with violence: constant reinvention is essential to her artistic identity.

But without a doubt, Confessions was – until last week – his last good record. Attempts to push forward did not always work for Madonna, with several producers and models of the 2010s that they released were often inconsistent and confusing: the muscular funk of the 2008’s. Hard CandyBusy powerpop of 2015’s A Rebel Heart2019 best in the world Madam X. Leaving Warner Records in 2007 began to decline: Madonna had great success with Live Nation and Interscope, but the pressure to return the money meant disrupting her performance and getting used to another modern pop art: 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 concentrate and finish a song”.

Warner’s re-signing in 2021 has put him back on track, especially since the deal gives him worldwide rights to all of his back books. With Confessions II, which has just been released, Madonna finally stopped chasing trends and allowed herself to do what she had resisted for a long time: thinking about the past, driving the dance music that is in her DNA and finding creative freedom by looking back. Confessions II is the culmination of a project that began with the now shelved Universal biopic project about his life, as well as the 2023/4 Festival Tour, a not-so-successful thriller and a meditation on aging, love and loss. One key moment was Madonna’s haunting, soulful Justify My Love, singing to her young son as if in a distant dream. Doing this task seems to open a portal. “I feel like my brain is being brainwashed,” he said recently. Perhaps the fact that he almost died in 2023 due to a serious bacterial infection made him realize that the future is not always the way to go. Reuniting with Stuart Price, the original Confessions founder and music director for her Festival show, has helped her turn memories into gold.

Madonna creates her best music when she works one-on-one with a producer, letting her thoughts flow through, as Price says, “writing and scrapbooking”. He did this with Pat Leonard on 1989’s Like a Prayer, with William Orbit on Ray of Light (1998), and Mirwais and Music (2000). This deep exploration is evident on Confessions II. The famous song Danceteria began as a late night segment where Madonna tells stories about people she knew in the late 70s/early 80s New York club scene, such as Basquiat, Keith Haring, producer Maripol and close friend Debi Mazar. “Leave it to me,” he told Price. “I’ll go home and think about it.” The next day he returned to his Notting Hill studio with three pages of sound, took an old microphone that had been taped together, and tied the excitement of the day with a raw voice and an explosive melody.

What they are doing here is not polished or perfect. In an interview with Graham Norton recently, he spoke about feeling inadequate at the time: “I was very difficult, I was not a good person. But in dancing he lost his heart and finally found his village and his own country. “Dance is not just a place,” he says on One Step Away, “It is a ritual place where movement replaces language.” Following the track, the streets of Chicago house and Detroit techno are transformed through the thunder of the big room to create dance music that is cathartic and healing.

What gives the group its strength is the way Madonna jumps into containers that evoke real memories. Bizarre remembers “a movie director, very blue eyes” and a 1960s Shelby Cobra that was driven very fast, alluding to the wedding present he gave Sean Penn. Even after many years, the problems of a broken family are still painful. “Now that he’s gone I feel empty,” he sings. Some memories are bright and vivid, like the boy from the Lower East Side with the “face of Marlon Brando” (LES Girl), or the anger at his late stepmother in Betrayal: “You will not take my mother’s place … you betrayed me, you enslaved me.”

And perhaps the most poignant of all is Fragile, a song about his brother Christopher, who died while making this album. In 2008 Christopher published Life With My Sister Madonna, a devastating memoir that led to a years-long estrangement. But when he was dying of cancer, they got together. He sings on a track about failure and forgiveness, “I see you standing there / I see inside your soul and it feels good.” Her sense of acceptance recalls Mer Girl on Ray of Light, where, instead of escaping the grief of her dead mother, Madonna met her.

There are many reasons why older female professionals in particular may be resistant to nosediving: the idea that your best work is behind you; the idea of ​​being stuck in aspic like your child. But Celebration’s tour showed that looking back didn’t mean rehashing past glory; it can also be a painful, rewarding journey, as his idol David Bowie revisited his time in 1970s Berlin in 2013’s The Next Day. Facing grief and loss has made Madonna’s music deeper than it has been in 20 years, and more alive: “I’m a voice in your ears, I’m talking to you, calling you,” she says, on the first journey between life and death.