Confessions On A Dance Floor - Development

Development

Confessions on a Dance Floor is Madonna's tenth studio album. It merged elements from 1970s disco, 1980s electropop and modern day club music. She decided to incorporate elements of disco in her songs, with the desire not to remake the music from the past, but to pay tribute towards artists like Bee Gees and Giorgio Moroder. The songs reflected Madonna's thoughts on love, fame and religion, hence the title Confessions on a Dance Floor. It was the complete opposite direction from her previous studio effort American Life (2003). The songs on that album were a form of diatribe directed at the American society. However, Madonna decided to take a different direction with this album. Regarding the development, Madonna commented:

"When I wrote American Life, I was very agitated by what was going on in the world around me, I was angry. I had a lot to get off my chest. I made a lot of political statements. But now, I feel that I just want to have fun; I want to dance; I want to feel buoyant. And I want to give other people the same feeling. There's a lot of madness in the world around us, and I want people to be happy."

She started to work with Mirwais Ahmadzaï with whom she had previously developed her album Music (2000). However, that collaboration did not suit Madonna's musical direction. According to Madonna, " Mirwais is also very political, seriously cerebral and intellectual. All we did was sit around, talking politics all the time. So, that couldn't help but find its way into the music. I think there's an angry aspect to the music that directly reflects my feelings at the time." Hence after recording two songs with Mirwais, Madonna decided to stop the project and start fresh. It was then that she turned to Stuart Price who had served as musical director on her two previous concert tours and co-wrote one song on American Life. They started their collaboration with the intention of creating a movie score. But the plans for the movie were disbanded. Hence Madonna and Price decided to use the compositions for the album instead. According to Madonna, it was easy for her to shift from her previous album's sentiments, since she included those political views in her documentary I'm Going to Tell You a Secret. She elaborated:

"I was running back and forth, literally, from the editing room with Jonas Akerlund to working with Stuart, who was also mixing the music in the film. We were together, non-stop, all of us. Cutting 350 hours of film down to two hours. There are a lot of serious aspects to the movie. I needed a release. When I would go to Stuart's, and we'd go up to his loft, it was like, 'Honey, I want to dance.' I wanted to be happy, silly and buoyant. I wanted to lift myself and others up with this record. So, yes, the new album was a reaction to all the other stuff I was doing, which was very serious in nature. I hope that doesn't imply that I wanted to make a superficial record, because it's not. I want people to smile when they hear this record. I wanted it to put a smile on my face, too."