“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”.
