(from RollingStone.com)

"Confessions" already lighting up European dancefloors

Madonna is returning to her roots with the club - friendly Confessions on a Dancefloor, due November 15th. For her tenth studio album, the follow - up to 2003's American Life, the pop legend worked closely with British producer Stuart Price (a.k.a. DJ Jacques Lu Cont) at his London apartment.

Price met Madonna later in her career, playing keyboards on her last two tours - - "I was a bit too young to be a fan in the Eighties," he says, laughing. She approached him after last year's Re - Invention Tour, when she began work on a music - driven screenplay, bringing him onboard to create a sound she called "future disco." The idea for Confessions came from those sessions.

"We live real near each other in London, and we could just send ideas back and forth and get together and work on stuff," Price says. "The creative process was very short. There were a couple of weeks in London at my studio where we were doing a song every day."

At night, the producer would test out the tracks during his club gigs.
"Whenever I was DJ'ing, I'd take dub or instrumental versions out with me," Price says. "I had my camera with me, and the next day I'd tell Madonna, 'This is what a thousand people in Liverpool looked like last night dancing to our song.' You can work on a song for twelve hours, but I guarantee you'll know within the first ten seconds of putting it on at a club whether it works or not. So these songs were tested on unwitting subjects throughout Europe."

But Price insists that he and Madonna did not blindly trust the club scene, wanting to create something more lasting. "There's a bit of a danger with dance music that you can create something that's cool but doesn't have much substance to it," he admits. "Every few months, a club record comes along that hits a nerve with people, and they connect to it. They don't know why, but there is something magical in it. That's what we were trying to make."

The first single is the uptempo synth - disco jam "Hung Up," which Price calls "a big feel - good song. You put it on and you want to get in your car, turn it up and drive around smiling."