Madame X

Madame X is the fourteenth studio album by Madonna. It was released on June 14, 2019 via Interscope Records, her last album with the label.

Madonna revealed that the title is based on a nickname that the legendary dancer Martha Graham gave her when she was 19. The singer was a student at Graham’s dance school and her rebelious behaviour and rule-breaking led Graham to say to her:

Everyday you come to school and I don’t recognize you. Everyday you change your identity, you’re someone else, you’re a mystery to me. I’m gonna give you a new name, Madame X.

With that comment in mind, Madonna created the Madame X alter-ego– an international woman of intrigue with (at least) twelve twelve different personas:

Madonna first began teasing the album on April 1 by posting the letter X on her Instagram. On April 14, the album title Madame X was confirmed through Instagram by Madonna herself.

When Madonna moved to Lisbon in 2017 she started to get involved with local culture. The singer would meet several artists, painters and musicians who would invite her to “living room sessions”, in which they would sit around a table, eat, play instruments and sing mostly. One of the closest friends she made was the musician Dino d'Santiago, who introduced her to several of those artists, such as the Batukadeiras Orchestra. During those sessions, Madonna was exposed to a whole bunch of music genres like fado, morna, batuque, funaná, gumbé and samba. This allowed Madame X to be sonically influenced by sounds from Morocco, Cape Verde, Portugal and Guinea-Bissau; Brazilian funk and Colombian reggaeton are also featured on the record.

In an interview, Madonna explained how the experience in Portuguese streets influenced her:

It was as if everywhere I went in Lisbon, every club I went to, every house party went to, I was constantly being exposed to music I’d never heard before. And I was obviously inspired. It was a little bit like when I saw, you know, voguers or voguing for the first time and was like, ‘Whoa, this is insane. I have to share this with the world’.

Regarding the meaning of the album and how it came to life, she commented:

No matter where we are. Where we travel. No matter who we’re with or what language we speak, when we hear music, even if we don’t understand the words, we can still connect to the vibe, to the soul, to the feeling, the emotion that the artist put into that music. You can still relate to it. It doesn’t matter what language people are singing in, or the beat or genre. We will always, in a primal way, be connected through music. I feel that my record, because Lisbon is a melting pot of culture, from Angola to Spain to Brazil to France – I had the pleasure and honour to meet musicians from all these places and be inspired by their music and let it influence me. And that’s how all these songs came to be. We were connected before Instagram, people.

For the third time, Madonna would work with producer Mirwais Ahmadzaï. She told MTV how it was to work with him again.

I was amazing. I mean I hadn’t worked with him probably in about seven years and so it was not, I wasn’t sure whether he was gonna like the direction I was gonna go, that I wanted to go in. And I sent him some music, some Portuguese guitar that I had sampled from a living room session and I said “What do you think you can do with this?”, and he wrote me back the next day, couple days later, and he already had added an 808 to it and gave it a beat and cut it up and turned it into something amazing. So I knew we were on the same wavelength and whenever we work together, he’s very, he’s a very intelligent guy. He’s very philosophical, very educated, very cultured, and very political. So inevitably all of our work will end up becoming those things and so I’m very inspired by his intelligence and
hopefully vice versa.

Four singles were released from the record: “Medellín”, with Maluma, “Crave”, “I Rise” and “I Don’t Search I Find”. Madame X debuted at the top of the Billboard 200, being her ninth album to top the chart.