Madonna‘s recent single ‘Bring Your Love’ is about the star “saying ‘fuck you’ to [her] doubters”, according to producer Stuart Price.
The song – featuring Sabrina Carpenter – appears on the Queen Of Pop’s new album ‘Confessions II’, which was released today (Friday July 3).
- READ MORE: Madonna – ‘Confessions II’ review: Queen Of Pop digs deep on thrilling return to the dancefloor
Price was recruited by Madonna to produce the record, having previously helmed the original ‘Confessions On A Dance Floor’ LP in 2005. He also reprised his role as Madge’s musical director for her career-spanning ‘Celebration Tour’ in 2023/’24.
During a new interview with Attitude, Price opened up about his return to the studio with Madonna, and shared some insight behind the tracks.
“‘Bring Your Love’ is not really a happy pop song. It is about saying ‘fuck you’ to doubters,” he explained. “The core message of that song is, ‘If you don’t understand why I do what I do, fuck you’.”
Price continued, saying that “people doubting Madonna is something that she has a hard time with” during her lengthy career.
He then discussed the “duality” of the official single version of ‘Bring Your Love’ and Madonna’s remix, telling the publication that there’s a “beauty of context around lyrics”.
“That it can either be about Madonna and Sabrina’s shared experience in the music business, or it can be very specifically about Madonna’s sense of what it’s like to be doubted and to be a fighter,” the producer went on.
“The beauty of lyrics is an ambiguity; you should never write a lyric that’s too on the nose. You always need to write and leave enough room for interpretation.”
When asked why Carpenter was the right artist to guest on ‘Confessions II’, Price said: “Sabrina’s been very open about the influence Madonna had been [on] her. They have very different paths into music, but I think Sabrina was very open that Madonna was always an idol of hers and that she wanted a career like [hers].
“Sabrina naturally had this admiration for her, and they were already in touch. There were a couple of things that we thought about on this album, which was how do you spread the message?”
Price added: “On ‘Confessions I’, we had ‘Hung Up’, which had ABBA as a conversation point. On this, the idea of doing a collaboration with someone like Sabrina is in itself a talking point, that creates curiosity, but it only works if there’s some kind of natural connection between the two people.
“And the truth is, you just don’t know until you go into the studio.”
In the defiant chorus of ‘Bring Your Love’, Madonna and Carpenter sing: “Bring your love ’cause you cannot shake me/ Bring your love ’cause you’ll never break me/ Bring your love ’cause you cannot take me down.”
During a TikTok interview this week, Madonna shared some details about the meaning behind the collaborative single.
“A lot of people were in my ear, saying, ‘You should do this, you should do that, you should make this kind of a song’, forcing me to focus on what’s popular, algorithms, following trends, and I found it to be the antithesis to art and creativity, so I was struggling with that paradox,” she remembered.
Highlighting the lyric “don’t try to distract me with numbers“, she added: “I don’t want to think about streaming numbers when I’m writing a song. I need to tell the story.” Watch the clip above.
In a four-star review of ‘Confessions II’, NME hailed the album as a “thrilling return to the dancefloor”. It concluded: “By drawing from her past, both personally and musically, Madonna has made her most vital album in over two decades. This grande dame still knows how to make us move.”
Madonna and Stuart Price launched the record with a special ‘Club Confessions’ listening event in London last night, following similar parties in Los Angeles and Paris. Last month, the pair played a brief ‘Confessions…’ live show in New York City’s Times Square.
In other news, Madonna has been confirmed as one of the co-headliners for the first-ever FIFA World Cup Final Halftime Show, alongside Shakira and BTS. She has also appeared to tease a bill-topping slot at Glastonbury Festival 2027.
‘Confessions II’ follows Madonna’s 2019 album ‘Madame X’.