Upon listening to it again, she realized she needed to recruit a collaborator. “I thought I need to sing with a man on this song cause it’s a song about desire and longing,” she says. “I liked the tone of his voice, so I asked him to be on it with me.”
“I think he’s really talented," she adds of Swae Lee. "I think he’s a very good writer, I think he’s a great singer, and he’s so cute…He has good energy.”
Speaking of narrowing down the tracks on the album, Madonna confesses that she had no idea how many songs she would end up with. “The record was born in Lisbon," she says. "Originally, I’d worked with a lot of Portuguese musicians, and sang several songs in Portuguese, and then it kind of expanded to different countries, to Brazil, to Colombia, and then interspersed working with Mirwais, the French producer, so the song kind of, it’s really a global album.”
When asked if the record is a concept album, seeing as she takes on different personas, such as equestrian rider and teacher, she downplayed it.
“I do all those things,” she notes. “Believe it or not, I do clean my house, so I consider myself a housekeeper. And I ride horses and I love it. And I can teach you how to do the cha cha if you want. So it’s saying that I am all these things.”
Madonna also reveals how she decided upon the title, Madame X, explaining that it was a name given to her when she was 19 years old and first moved to New York City.
“A woman who I looked up to and admired [Martha Graham] gave me that name, because she said she couldn’t recognize all my different personas because I kept changing the way I looked,” Madonna recalls. “That was in the beginning of my career when I didn’t think about who I should be or what I should be. I was experimenting. And so I felt like I had come full circle and gave the record that name, cause I’m in the same frame of mind.”
You can watch the full video interview with Madonna above.
