The Birth of ‘Confessions II’: Producer Stuart Price Breaks Down Madonna’s Instant Classic

2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor got its start on the road, after producer Stuart Price worked with Madonna‘s musical director on two tours: 2001’s Drowned World Tour and 2004’s Re-Invention Tour. Fittingly enough, Price and Madonna renewed their collaboration with yet another outing, 2023–24’s Celebration Tour, before making this year’s sequel album, Confessions II. After Price helped Madonna shape the music for that tour, Madonna eventually reached out to him to go back in the studio, as he explains in his interview on our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast.

In the interview, Price digs deep into the making of one of the year’s best albums, from the mixtapes and house influences that shaped its sound to Madonna’s fearless incorporation of events in her personal life in the songwriting, and also touches on the pair’s live collaborations. You can read a lightly condensed version of the interview below, or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or just press play above).

Did you begin talking about making new music during the Celebration Tour?
No. The Celebration Tour was the first time that we’d worked together for a while, but working on shows, working live was really the genesis of how our creative partnership started [in the first place].

Initially, for the Drowned World Tour, that was the first time that we’d met. That was the first time that we’d really sensed what each other was like creatively. And tours have so many elements to them. They have the creative element. They also have the endurance and survival element, because you’re really problem-solving in venues day to day. You show up at one place, and there are challenges with the sound or something in the environment. Learning how we’re gonna be able to perform this very specific show — all those details that you’re putting into a show, then you suddenly go into a different arena. A lot of those parameters change. 

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But at the end of [2004’s] Re-Invention Tour, Madonna said, “We’ve just spent this tour reinventing so much of my music. Why don’t we just make some new music?” And so that’s how we segued into writing new songs, and we continued with just that flow that we’d developed there.

To take a step back: You’ve said that on the Drowned World Tour you showed up with just a monosynth and felt out of place among the musicians, and that she ended up retooling the tour around what you brought. What did that mean?
What that meant is that one of Madonna’s incredible qualities is her instinctiveness, and it’s her trust in herself to say, “I’ve spotted a new way to do this, and I’m gonna do it.”

I think how that really showed up on Drowned World was just that she had a configuration of musicians who were all just incredible. But she heard something in the minimalism of someone who was working on very limited equipment. I didn’t have much with me. My perception was that simplicity was the key to a lot of the music that she was making at that time, which was the Music era. I think “Music” famously just has a G [chord] for most of the song, and all the melodic and harmonic depth from that song comes from what she’s singing over the top and her lyrical ideas.

I think she appreciated that I had a simpler approach to it, and she said, “OK, let’s rebuild this tour around that. Let’s start from that as the foundation” — which just meant restructuring everything and finding different musicians and different ways to mix and present that show.

By the Re-Invention Tour, you were live-mixing the band as a DJ — fading the band in and out, filtering it. That’s a pretty unique and exciting thing to be doing in a live show.
Yeah. Well, we thought that there was this great contradiction, and that you have one sound onstage, your monitor mix, and then you have this other front-of-house mix as well. And the contradiction there is that when we’re spending so much time to be focused on the production elements and the vocal effects and the arrangements, we were asking the question: Why isn’t that a one-to-one translation to what’s gonna be happening out front?

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And so we came up with a different technique, which was let’s keep everyone involved, let’s have all the expertise around. Let’s bring all these channels, all these musicians, everything live, everything from the track that’s coming in, let’s bring it into my DJ mixer on stage… In DJ sets you can take the volume up and down, you can roll the bass off, you can put it back in, you can suck the whole thing through a phaser or a filter, and we just thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to do that with a band?” So we had our band onstage, and as we were playing, the drummer could hear his cymbals swirling down through the filter, and Madonna’s vocals being sidechained off the kick drum, and the live vocoding and stuff like that. That became a really exciting way to work because it broke down that wall between live performance and production. But what Madonna really loved was there was this direct connection between live music, DJ music, and whatever happened onstage. 

In May of 2024 the Celebration Tour ended, and Madonna went off thinking she was working on her biopic. At some point she shifted gears to this album. What was the very beginning of this?
Well, I think when you’ve gone through a world tour of creating stuff together, problem-solving together, surviving together, it switches on that part of your brain that is creating on a daily basis. And then when a tour suddenly ends, that part of your brain doesn’t just switch off, right? You’re in this mode of creation now. We’d had such a good time working together on the tour that it naturally extended over into, “Let’s try some new ideas.”

And there really at that point was no conception of what that would be. So we came to London to my studio here, and we just said, “Let’s do a week and see what happens.” And 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. And so I think it was just clear that that musical shorthand was there, and we carried on from there.

If it was “Good for the Soul,” what do you remember about the evolution of that song in the moment?
I think what emerged in the writing of “Good for the Soul” was this DNA of songwriting, of subject matter. “Good for the Soul” was really a song and a kind of statement, I think, for Madonna — we have elements of extraterrestrial ideas in there, right? Traveling through space and time. And that refers to how we live our lives at the moment, which is we’re constantly traversing land masses digitally…. And so “Good for the Soul” 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 opened up a new chapter of songwriting, I think, which was gonna be based a lot more on Madonna’s psyche being at this moment in time. Which has always been one of her strongest powers — she’s an incredible mirror for who she is at that point in her life.

When you look at her career, she’s always coming from a place of honesty and truth of what she’s feeling at that point, of what she’s seeing around, or perceived injustices that she feels in the world. And I feel like her most powerful art is created when she just has that very direct frankness about life.

On that first day, did you come in with some bits that she started to write over, or just a blank slate?
So one thing that we’d started doing on the tour was making mixtapes. And some of these mixtapes, there were two purposes. One, I was DJing a lot of the shows. So now typically when I DJ, I’m not very well prepared for it. I find that there’s a disconnect between being off in your studio making music for what you think is gonna go down well at the venue versus actually walking on stage and going, “Oh my gosh, that’s completely wrong.” All of the music that I’ve ever made with Madonna has been stuff that I’ve tested out, that I’ve gone to a club and put it on just to see how it feels, because you can never really tell. So on the tour, these mixtapes came about from re-edits I was doing of songs to go and DJ.

And then the second thing was I would just make her mixtapes for parties or for her to work out to. And in those were the references that we started using. A lot of them were based around just house records that I love, house artists that I love. It was something that felt good to do and felt good to play to crowds as well.

So they started infusing into our background. But then when it came to actually being in the studio, we carried that feeling forward. So if she was gonna show up at the studio, I’d just start playing around, have some chords, have some drum machines, have some samples, have some ideas that we could just see what connected in that moment.

You’ve talked previously about some of the house artists who were on your mind.
Well, it’s Kevin Saunderson, it’s DJ Pierre, it’s Frankie Knuckles, it’s Mr. Fingers. It was music that, I think, works on two levels. It’s really creative, it’s really innovative music, but it also just has incredible feeling and meaning to it. And those were the two parameters that you need for great dance music.

Electronic music is just so vast. But I think in this realm of what we were doing, we really wanted both of those things. We wanted songs that had personal meaning, but hopefully also a unifying connection to them. I think a lot of the power of songwriting comes when you’re making music that’s relatable to someone else, even if they interpret it a completely different way. A sad song for me doesn’t necessarily have to feel sad to you. It may elicit great joy in you, in fact, because it connects you back to something that’s happened in your life that you just want to revisit. And vice versa.

If “Good for the Soul” was first, do you remember what was next?
I think that following that we had a song which ultimately didn’t make the record. After that first week of doing those songs, we went to New York and we recorded in Spanish Harlem at a place called Bentley Studios, and that was where the opening track from the album, “I Feel So Free,” came from.

We were working in this different studio to where we’d normally been, but 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 really loved Lil Louis’ vocal on it. But there was a different track that we’d been working on that had this hypnotic feel to it that was built back in London before we’d gone to New York, built out of just creating hypnotic grooves on all the old analog stuff that is in the studio here.

And so in New York what happened was we combined those two pieces of music, which is really just typical of the way that Madonna 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 just got into this head space of how dance music makes her feel, and the safety in numbers and representing what sanctuary the dance floor is, that’s where those ideas started to come about.

At what point did it become clear that this was Confessions II, per se?
I think it was pretty clear from early on, maybe in the second week of working, that 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. So I think, to a certain extent, that the sound of Confessions is directly the sound of that collaboration.

But Confessions One is 2005, and I think looking back only gets you so far. So 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 sort of suggests the idea of vulnerability as strength. Confession is looked at as some kind of sin and it’s associated with shame. But Confessions II for us, it reframes that idea as power and strength and the courage — daring to share as well.

It carries on the idea that the remix is the album — you do all the stuff that you might do on a remix and just put it on the album. It must be a very freeing and fun way to make a record together.
Yeah. Well, who put in the lines between writing, production, remixing, DJing? Why can’t all these things exist on a continuum? We’ve always looked at music as being that way, right through to the live performance.

And that’s why, for example, as we’ve gone through the making of this record and then the performing of this record, showing up and doing these Club Confessions nights. Early on, the first Club Confessions night we did, the record wasn’t yet handed in, so we were showing up and against advice just rebelliously playing the new music and putting it out there because we knew that in that moment what happens is that you gain this feedback through connection with people in a club.

“One Step Away” was a song that every day we’d put it on in the studio and just love dancing to it. But then we played it out at the Abbey, and we felt like as we were doing it, we wanna loop that section more, we wanna extend that out, we wanna make that bigger. And in that sense, that places all this music on that continuum. So instead of looking at it as that was the writing and then that was a production, we just always wondered, why does it have to be that way? We’ve never approached any music that we’ve created that way, and that’s just not how art exists in the world, right? Art plays different roles in everyone’s existence. So why put the little parts in a separate box? And we still look at it that way now as we look forward.

You must be preparing at least for more live performances, if not for the tour that she seems to be acknowledging is happening at some point.
Yeah, over the summer, I think the first thing that we did was Club Confessions. That was at the Abbey in Los Angeles. That idea then got extended through other shows, including the album launch in London, WorldPride in Amsterdam, but also the Times Square show. It’s funny using it as a metaphor because the way that that production works in Times Square is that 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 that during the day, they’re part of the video screen.

But when you’re preparing to do a performance there, you’re inside this little box, and it’s almost, hermetically sealed because there’s a faint blur of New York traffic background, but you’re not really aware. So we’re in there getting ready for the show, and then I think just the metaphor of these vault doors 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.

So I think it’s a great metaphor for that, and also to that nature that we’ve taken towards these live representations of the music, which is they’re more improvised. They combine the element of Madonna who’s so great in the moment, but also with the preparation and technical perfection of her performance.

And so looking forward, I think we love how that felt. But as for what we’re doing, I don’t know.

At the VMAs, was there a live band?
No. That was a performance where we ambitiously put almost a tour level of preparation into the work and compressed that all into a two-week schedule. I think probably in recognition of Madonna’s connection to the VMAs, right? She’s there right at the beginning of that. And MTV are very supportive and accommodating in allowing her to really create and to not restrict and make something that she didn’t compromise on. But it was an elaborate production. It was a lot of painstaking work to get it right, but it was fantastic watching it coming off, and it was fantastic watching Madonna also recognized within that audience.

Tell me about the song “Everything.” That’s one of my favorites.
Oh, cool. “Everything” shares a thread with “Good for the Soul” because the impetus behind that song is that it’s a frustration with how our phones and technology dominate so much of our being, and they trap us. There’s that great Larry David quote, where he says that his daughter tells him that the solution to everything is take a shower. Like, “You don’t feel good? Take a shower. You feel really excited? Go take a shower.” And I love that.

I think it’s so true, but I think where that connects to the song “Everything” is — just go outside. It’s amazing, the interaction that you have when you step outside of your home or whatever, whether that’s just going into the office, going into a store, going into a studio. The interaction, it puts your brain into this different place where you’re reminded of what it’s like to interact one-on-one with people, and it can make you feel really good about things.

Whereas excessive digital existence can make you feel… Whilst you can feel very informed, and you can learn lots of fantastic things, you can also feel somehow reduced and minimized, and I think that leads to less positive brain patterns. And so we were trying to address that on the song, how frustrating it is that all the answers really await you outside in the world, and it’s just a case of getting up and going out there and do it.

But really musically, how does that represent itself? In a track that’s probably a lot more intense. It’s certainly one of the higher-tempo tracks on the record. It has harmonically some interesting stuff going on where everything is always ascending. It’s almost like the [famous auditory illusion that creates a rising sonic effect] Shepard tone or something. 

Everything has, if you look sequentially, the notes are always rising in that song through the chord harmonies, every single, the tonic, the third, the fifth, the seventh, to create that sense of ascension and escape and relief. And so every element in the song works that way. 

When the drop comes in, there’s this really filthy synth bass. Do you remember crafting that sound?
If that’s the bassline itself, that came about when we worked with [Italian electronic duo] Parisi. So we did a session towards the end of the making of the album. One of the questions we were asking on this record was — Confessions One, I think, because of “Hung Up,” it has this contributor to the record, which was ABBA, and how that sample was used to create that song and to extend those ideas and to find something new.

That does feel nostalgic. That doesn’t feel like finding ways forward. So how do we achieve that idea, but without just resorting to samples? One of the ways we solved that was to bring in people from this era, people that we thought were really great in this era, and work with them in that mindset.

So Parisi came in and we worked on “Everything.” We also worked on “Bring Your Love” with them. And we’d had a bassline in “Everything” that was doing that role. But the question is, well, if we’re taking this mindset of using current people to create these things, what does that sound like by someone doing it today? And Parisi was just fantastic at nailing that.

There’s also a very cool bridge in that song, or a little coda, when it breaks down to voice and guitar. Very unexpected.
Yeah, so that also happened really late. The genesis of that is ultimately Madonna saying very curtly, “This needs an injection, this needs a shock.” I’d looked around and gone, “Wow, we really haven’t used a ton of guitar in this record. Let’s just see what happens if we inject it.” “Fragile” has some acoustic guitar, but there’s not that much on it. And so dropping down to that riff there and coming up with something was just a complete contradiction to everything else that had happened in the song up to that point, was where that comes from.

My style of playing guitar is really — I’m a keyboardist, I’m a bass player, and a terrible singer. So the way I build guitar parts is playing them one layer at a time. I loved how Stevie Wonder always built his chord structures from a Minimoog. It’s monophonic, so for polyphonic chords, he played them one at a time and layered them up, and I love that idea, but it’s also really compatible for me to play guitar a little bit more accurately.

I tend to hear music more in a traditional choral arrangement, and so it’s easier to find how the harmonic content’s gonna work that way, and so that’s one of those guitars that’s built that way. I think on Confessions One, “Let It Will Be” has a guitar built in that style as well. It’s just a fun, slightly unorthodox way to work in recording.

Building guitar chords by playing one note and then stacking another note separately. That’s amazing.
Another cool thing is there’s a box that I built for the studio where it’s like a perpetual recording box. Maybe 2014 or something — this is way before Confessions II — but I’d go into the studio every day, and I’d turn on the keyboard and play something, and I’d go, “Oh, that’s cool. Let me record it.” And then by the time I switched on the computer and armed a track and got the inputs right, I would never have it in the same way. And so I just thought, “What I need to do is build something that will just capture everything that I do in the studio so that I won’t have to ever press record.”

I won’t ever need to say, “OK, now we’re recording,” ’cause I think the “now we’re recording” idea destroys a lot of the head space that you’re in at that time. So how this box works is it’s actually just built on a Raspberry Pi where it hooks into my interfaces, and whenever it detects that you’ve played something, it catalogs it and records it.

And then I just have this browser pool of songs, and so they’re all dated. So if we were ever in the studio and Madonna would say, “Yeah, I feel like two months ago you played something once, and that was good,” I could actually go back to two months ago and just grab it and pull it in. By recording that way and removing the element of, “OK, now we’re recording, so be serious,” we kept everything playful and fun. If she jammed an idea on the mic or if I had something that I was just jamming over the top, it was always there. We could just go in and pull it, and I think that was a different approach to recording, which was really fun. And since then I’ve never really worked in the traditional “press record” sense.

There are some extraordinary emotional moments on this album. One of them is “Betrayal,” which has an Erik Satie sample in it. How did that song come together?
So before “Bad Girl” on the Celebration Tour, there was a moment where Madonna’s daughter Mercy played piano. 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.

But the love of that piece had always stayed around. You asked earlier about how do songs start in the studio — that piece became a starting point for a song. And so just by chopping up a little, rearranging it, and then in that style of “Hung Up” as well, it’s not good enough just to rest on a sample. How can you extend it? How can you take that piece and move it into a section that’s distinctly different from the original, was how that backing track was built.

Throughout this album, she went through a lot, I think. There was the ecstatic excitement of making music — 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, and we’re just going forward and every day finding something new. 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 [Madonna’s stepmother] that she lost, and she turned that into the seed of a lyrical idea.

But always, I think one of Madonna’s great gifts is that she’s able to be very specific and at the same time very universal and never too on the point of what something is about, and it lends an amazing quality to her lyric writing.

There are at least three songs that delve into incredibly confessional, emotional, personal areas. As a collaborator, how do you handle that? Do you have to be more hands-off and take a step back?
Well, I think if you can laugh together, you can cry together. They’re related emotions. Running away from anything which is meaningful to someone is a bad idea because it means it’s just not gonna get out.

What’s that great saying — crying is a shower for the soul? And there’s something very powerful that happens in that revealing of truth, and I think that comes into this idea of vulnerability as a strength. It is something that when you show that part of yourself, it’s incredibly liberating, right? Why do we like dance floors? ‘Cause they’re liberating. So also liberating yourself of things that you have going on is a powerful feeling as well.

So there were tears shed in the studio, it sounds like.
I don’t think I could paint an image of, pass me the tissues. It’s just more that there’s a bond that’s formed by writing together, working together for a long period of time. There’s a trust that’s built from doing that. But that also allows you to experience creativity across a wide spectrum. And Madonna just is the most singular, incredible artist. She is on a complete unique level of artistry, and I think that requires collaboration and partnership in a way that runs with it and supports it.

And we all have things that we go through together in life, so if it’s relatable to something that you’ve experienced yourself as well, then you can write songs together because you share things that you’ve been through and are talking about.

Madonna said that she wrote at least part of “Fragile” on her own, in her own studio. Or were you there that day when she started it?
Yeah, no, that song was all done in the studio. “Fragile” as an idea, I think, was also in the week where she had another loss. It’s obviously when her brother was very sick.

And again, for writers, for artists, the job part of it, the showing up for it is a real commitment to yourself. No matter what’s going on, I’m gonna go into that studio. There are some days that you just don’t feel like going into the studio, and it’s very important to show up because that reason that you didn’t feel like going into the studio may be the number one reason why you should go into the studio that day.

And so that week when we were working, things got worse, and we were writing a song at the time. And originally, “Fragile,” I think lyrically was kind of speaking a little bit to the self because that’s a very powerful lyric when it’s turned around to talk about 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. And so “Fragile” happened pretty quick. It was certainly like all the songs on this record, written in a day, right? But then produced in a month.

And also the scope of the album as a whole piece, which is this interwoven journey of music and how that comes together. So at some point you’re looking at 16 songs, and then at another point you’re stepping back and just looking at it as one piece.

And again, that just blurs the lines between what things are supposed to be. For all the songs, we were very instinctive and decisive about the songwriting. But then the production and particularly how it was all gonna weave together was taken over a longer period of time.

“The Test” — what do you remember about Madonna and her daughter Lola coming together to write and record that in the studio?
The recording of “The Test” was really magical for many reasons, but in particular, I think that Lola had said to her mother, “I’d like to do a song together.”

I think that in life when we’re surrounded by musicians, and we’re friends or we’re family members, the notion of collaborating is a wall that sometimes it’s difficult to break through because you’re either fearful of not being able to live up to what you wanna do, or it’s kind of deemed that it’s gonna change things. And 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. And so that’s how the story of “The Test” came about — we got together in the studio.

It’s funny because in hindsight, I’m sort of putting less focus on the track creation, and I think that that’s a really important part of it. However, it’s always secondary to what the song is, to what the artist wants to say. You just have this whole level of preparation in your mind for the track, which is that it’s there to inspire and it’s there to support, and it’s there to maybe make the body move or make the mind think, but it’s nothing without this really powerful piece of personality that’s gonna come from the lyric and the song.

And so yeah, the three of us were in the studio, and Lola prepared some lyrics to come in, Madonna prepared some lyrics, but it wasn’t until the microphone was on and we recorded it that those lyrics were really heard. Of everything on the record, probably — it gives me some chills thinking about it because it’s one of the most beautiful things I think I’ve seen.

I have children of my own. Thinking about the power of those bonds, and seeing it from a third party, was a very emotional thing, which I think you hear in the end result. There’s words that they use in those lyrics that are really mind-blowing to listen to.

Lola’s great on it. She really is a great singer.
Yeah. Well, Lola is a completely exceptional artist in her own right, and the way that her mind works, the way that she immerses her love of the music that she likes into the work that she does as well, right? She’s also a multi-hyphenate. Lola exists across all these different disciplines of the modern era, and that’s an interesting contrast to — you can have a singular focus and just chase something really hard, and then everything else kind of splinters off that.

For example, any live work that we do, Madonna says it all starts with the music. There is no VMAs if we don’t have the music first, right? There is no Times Square if we don’t have the music first. So there’s a singular focus on creating that music because that music will then dictate all the decisions that are gonna be made about video, about lighting, about choreography.

It’s not to say that once you’re then in rehearsals you don’t modify stuff. Of course that happens, but she looks at the music as the seed of that, and I think Lola has an approach where all these things are kind of happening at the same time, and they all inform each other. Like the fashion informs the music, music informs the art. They’re interrelated but with different approaches.

There are 20 years or so between the album collaborations. You’re both the same people but in different places. On a day-to-day basis, what was similar and what was different about the two of you sitting down and making an album together again?
I think the most notable thing is just how natural the continuation was. I think that the sense of time just was a complete non-factor. The “aha” moment of, oh, this is natural to do, happened so early on, and I think some of that is a result of just, again, coming off the road and the brain was open for it.

But I think a lot of that says a lot about the underlying creative partnership, which is just that we just loved making music together. The success of that moment happens once you start recording music. I just loved how she was writing, how she sounded, how the songs were coming together, how much fun it was to do, and how open it was to do as well.

So I think that part is exactly the same. The other part that’s the same is the working in a home studio, just having a couch to use as the place to sit and contemplate, and there was not any kind of pressure to work in any way other than what felt right. And so that enabled us really early on to just write lots of songs and get the album to where it was.

Things that have changed are — it’s really that evolution of life that means that the mirror effect, right? Which was where Madonna’s always been this amazing mirror for what’s going on in the world and what’s going on in her life. But really that mirror on Confessions II is now used as a mirror of discovery. It’s used to find new elements about oneself and to share new elements about oneself and to use that as a way to engage and connect people.

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So I think that those shifts actually just come from a great deal of living in between these two albums.

We know there’s a bunch of leftover tracks — I think she said seven or eight. Are you confident we’re gonna hear those?
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. And yes, I’m being cryptic, but that’s because I think that we still love this continuum idea that Confessions is an extended moment of time that has different elements to the performance of it, and so that’s why I’m speaking in those terms.