“I wanted to be somebody – because I felt like a nobody”

Alexis Petridis met Madonna in London to talk about her new album Madame X. Her interview is out now on The Guardian – here’s a short excerpt.

Sometimes when she talks, she unmistakably sounds like a pop star forged in a different era. She is “dizzy” at the sheer turnover of pop in the digital age – “There are so many distractions, so much noise, so many people coming and going so quickly, it takes away the artist’s ability to grow” – and says the modern way of writing pop songs, where artists are thrown together with a rotating cast of random star producers and writers at songwriting camps, didn’t suit her at all. “Oh, I tried that on MDNA and Rebel Heart. I worked with a lot of talented people, but it’s too hard to have a vision when you work with so many people: there’s so much input. I didn’t enjoy the process at all. Sometimes it was great, but it’s very weird to sit in a room with strangers and go: ‘OK, on your marks, set, write a song together!’ You have to reveal yourself, you have to be vulnerable, and it’s hard to do that right away.”

Read the full story on The Guardian.