Ahead of the release of her 15th studio album, Confessions II, the much-anticipated follow-up to 2005’s Confessions of a Dance Floor, Madonna is doing some confessing of her own.
The pop icon has bared all in a surprisingly unguarded and open interview, where she shared how important this new album has been, coming at a time of great loss, changes in her body and even tense relationships with her daughter, Lourdes Leon (Lola).
Speaking of the journey that went into creating Confessions II, Madonna revealed to Interview Magazine that working with her oldest child, now 29, helped heal their relationship, implying the pair had hit a rocky patch.
She said, "The song I wrote with my daughter, Lola. She approached me about writing a song together as a way to heal our relationship. It was a really important moment, and it solidified the idea that now is the time to make this record."
The past few years have been a period of great change for the Queen of Pop. As well as healing the bond with her daughter, she talked about everything that shaped the music.
"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. It’s hard for me to write a song about nothing.
"I have to tell a story. So I wrote about a lot of family trauma, and then we started making dance music."
Despite sounding like it would be quite an intense album, Madonna shared that the whole experience is about finding the light and joy on the dance floor again. Acknowledging that she’d been through some "heavy” experiences, she said, "It can be, but I always push through and I’m a survivor."
The experience of the new music is all about "A place where you don’t need words to express how you feel, where you just connect to the music and have an out-of-body experience or enter a fever dream."
While many things change for the Queen of Pop, some things stay the same - including her well-known love of working out.
However, even Madonna has had to contend with the impact time and a career of dancing has done to her body.
While sharing that her new album is "killer" to work out to, just like its predecessor, and revealing that she "curated the record based on how much it made me move", Madonna also shared that she now has no cartilage in one of her knees.
"I have a bad knee now," she shared, "I have no cartilage in it, thanks to dancing for so long in high heels, running on pavement, and doing Ashtanga yoga."
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Now 67 - and with a bad knee to boot - it seems Madonna still has the energy of people half her age though. Indeed, she added, "[The album is] an hour and five minutes. And that’s how long my workout is", but those workouts have had to change after damaging her knee.
"Up until a year ago, I was jumping on trampolines and doing dance cardio and doing a lot of what a doctor would call ‘loading on my joints’. Can’t do that anymore.
So now I do Peloton bikes and the Versa Climber and high-intensity circuit training. I ride my bike outside a lot. I dance."
And by the sounds of it, plenty of us will be joining her dancing to the new album.
