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Madonna: The Confessions Tour

Confessions on a Dance Floor (2005) was Madonna’s heralded return to club music. Not only did the album resuscitate her record sales, debuting at #1 on the Billboard 200 and topping charts worldwide, its singles (“Hung Up”, “Jump”, “Sorry”, and “Get Together”) were among the most infections club hits of Madonna’s 25-year career. Altogether, Confessions on a Dance Floor proved that Madonna, approaching 50 years-old, is a vital force in the ever-expansive landscape of popular music. Buy that album. Her latest release, however…

The Confessions Tour follows on the release of I’m Going to Tell You a Secret (2006), which was a documentary about Madonna’s “Re-Invention” tour. Like its predecessor, The Confessions Tour is a lavish CD/DVD package. Instead of a documentary, the DVD on this set presents a full-length concert directed by Jamie King from Madonna’s Wembley Arena date. The CD contains 13 highlights from the show. Aside from over-saturating the market with three Madonna releases in two years, there’s a fundamental problem with the release of The Confessions Tour .

Experiencing recorded dance music in a club and hearing it rendered live in concert on a CD constitutes two very different experiences. The 4/4 beat that stimulates the body to dance sounds less dense in such a massive space like Wembley. This works against the The Confessions Tour since most tracks have a fast beats-per-minute count. If the beat is a bone, so to speak, there isn’t a lot of muscle cushioning it. The aural clarity and seamlessness of the songs on Confessions on a Dance Floor are also butchered on The Confessions Tour by zealous audience reactions. Enjoying propulsive tracks like “Hung Up” and “I Love New York” is difficult because of interminable vamps that are dotted by annoying hoots and hollers. Just what is everyone yelling about at the 00:42 mark during “Sorry”?

Such curiosities are answered on the DVD of The Confessions Tour . Whereas the CD is a superfluous “value add”, the DVD is thrilling entertainment, particularly for Madonna fans. Since Madonna is among the few artists to successfully and consistently exploit the visual medium to her benefit, it should surprise no one that The Confessions Tour is a stellar visual experience. Each song is dramatized and choreographed to within an inch of its life; therein lies Madonna’s most indispensable and enduring talent — dancing. The limbs that gave birth to a million “Madonna Wannabe’s” are stronger and more sinewy than ever. On The Confessions Tour Madonna is joined by a dozen or so dancers who narrowly escape injury during remarkable acrobatic dance sequences. Even more amazing is that Madonna breathlessly keeps pace with every one of them.

The stage design of The Confessions Tour gives Madonna and her “children” a decadent playground to frolic about. The moment she enters the stage inside a gargantuan mirror ball, understatement ceases to exist. Most notorious among Madonna’s grandiose gestures is her entrance from the stage floor cuffed to a gigantic crucifix posed like Jesus Christ, replete with a crown of thorns. After singing “Live to Tell”, Madonna descends the cross and warbles “Forbidden Love”. Accompanying her are male dancers who stand side-by-side in two’s, intertwining their arms and hands in obvious defiance to the cross. It’s an effective tableau .

Following a static-fueled montage of vintage Madonna videos, a DJ announces, “All right boys and girls, it’s time to get your dance shoes on. You’re listening to K UNT. (Get it?) It’s all Madonna, all the time”. The familiar bass line of “Disco Inferno” by The Trammps explodes with a chorus-line’s worth of disco dancers and roller skaters. Madonna emerges in a three-piece white suite à la John Travolta and sings “Music” over the sampled track. It’s gloriously fun, feckless, and tacky.

Less so are Madonna’s cold rearrangements of “Like a Virgin” and “Lucky Star”. The soulless Eurodisco beat fails to match the charm of the originals. The melodies are basically sung over chord progressions that bear little resemblance to the original arrangements. “Lucky Star”, for example, is paired with the track to “Hung Up”, itself a sampling of ABBA’s “Gimmie! Gimmie! Gimmie! (A Man After Midnight)”. The match is not made in heaven, though Madonna’s skin-tight, ABBA-esque jump suit is an amusing intertextualization.

But even the most rabid anti-Madonna listener or cynical music lover would find elements of The Confessions Tour impressive, whether the jaw-dropping talent of Madonna’s B-boys and girls, the awe-inspiring diligence of her lighting and sound crew, her rock-chick pose on “I Love New York”, or the audacity of her massive “fuck you” to George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Osama Bin Laden, and Condoleezza Rice on “Sorry”.

The oversaturation of recent Madonna product is ultimately what precludes The Confessions Tour from being wholly satisfying to anyone but the die-hard Madonna fan. How many people actually care to hear Madonna lead the audience in a three-minute call-and-response contest to the “Time goes by so slowly” refrain from “Hung Up”? Clocking in just under four hours, Madonna might as well be referencing the The Confessions Tour package.

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Madonna: The Confessions Tour

The Confessions Tour is the second live album by American singer and songwriter Madonna. It was released on January 26, 2007 by Warner Bros. Records. Directed by Jonas Åkerlund, the album ch... Read all The Confessions Tour is the second live album by American singer and songwriter Madonna. It was released on January 26, 2007 by Warner Bros. Records. Directed by Jonas Åkerlund, the album chronicles Madonna's 2006 Confessions Tour. It was recorded at Wembley Arena during the Lond... Read all The Confessions Tour is the second live album by American singer and songwriter Madonna. It was released on January 26, 2007 by Warner Bros. Records. Directed by Jonas Åkerlund, the album chronicles Madonna's 2006 Confessions Tour. It was recorded at Wembley Arena during the London dates of the tour, and was released in both CD and DVD format. The DVD contains the ent... Read all

• Dago Gonzales
• Jonas Åkerlund
• Steven Klein
• Stuart Price
• Steve Sidelnyk
• 13 User reviews
• 1 Critic review

Top cast 25

• Self - Keyboardist
• Self - Drummer

• Self - Guitar Player

• Self - Backing Vocals
• (as Donna De Lory)

• Self - Vocals
• Self - Dance Captain
• (as Addie Yungmee-Schilling-George)

• Self - Dancer
• (as Charmaine 'Charm' Jordan)

• (as Leroy 'Hypnosis' Barnes Jr.)

• Self - Traceur

• (as Sébastien Foucan)
• Steven Klein (backscreens)
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Did you know

• Trivia The "Live to Tell" performance contains an uncredited sample from the song "Tears" by Giorgio Moroder , taken from his album "Son of My Father" released in 1972.
• Connections Featured in Somewhere Over the Rainbow (2014)
• Soundtracks Future Lovers/I Feel Love "Future Lovers" written by Madonna and Mirwais Ahmadzaï "I Feel Love" written by Donna Summer , Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte Performed by Madonna

User reviews 13

• Benjamin_Lumb
• Dec 19, 2017
• What show date did Madonna not talk about George Bush during ILNY?
• How many times does Madonna play the guitar on this tour?
• November 22, 2006 (United States)
• United States
• Madonna: The Confessions Tour Live from London
• London, England, UK
• Black Dog Films
• Semtex Films
• See more company credits at IMDbPro

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• Runtime 2 hours 1 minute

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The Confessions Tour

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Not the article you're looking for? Try Confessions Tour or The Confessions Tour CD .

The Confessions Tour is the 7th live album by Madonna.

The Confessions Tour received mixed reviews from contemporary critics. Some preferred the DVD versions to the CD, while others complimented the finale of the tour. After its release, the album reached the top of the official charts in a number of European nations while reaching the top ten in Canada, Japan and the United Kingdom. It reached a peak of fifteen on the Billboard 200 albums chart in United States. At the 50th Grammy Awards held on February 10, 2008 at Staples Center in Los Angeles, California, the album won the Grammy Award for Best Long Form Music Video.

Tracklist [ ]

•   Future Lovers/I Feel Love
• Get Together
•   Like A Virgin
•   Confessions
• Live to Tell
• Forbidden Love
•   Like It Or Not
• Sorry (Remix)
• I Love New York
• Ray Of Light
• Let It Will Be
• Substitute For Love
• Music Inferno
• La Isla Bonita
• Erotica / You Thrill Me

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The Confessions Tour

Pop/R&B

Warner Bros.

February 23, 2007

Recorded at a 2006 show in London, The Confessions Tour is Madonna's second concert CD+DVD set in eight months. The first, I'm Going to Tell You a Secret, supported her American Life album and had the distinction of being both the first live album of her quarter-century career and her greatest musical fiasco. While similar in staging, this new set supports a much better album, 2005's stronger Confessions on a Dance Floor , and that alone makes it the better of the two. Viewed together-- their quick succession makes it impossible to assess them separately-- this pair of releases signals the beginning of a new stage in Madonna's career, one in which director Jonas Åkerlund has become more crucial than musical producer Stuart Price, and music has become secondary to the dizzying, dazzling, slightly nauseating spectacle of her live show.

That spectacle has eclipsed music in the Madonnaverse is readily apparent on the Confessions tracklists. The DVD contains a full concert, with 21 tracks running more than two long hours. The CD has a mere 13, including two versions of "Sorry" and several of Stuart Price's instrumental interludes, which demand visuals to explain what the hell is going on. Instead of "Live to Tell", the CD contains songs like "Confessions", during which Madge's dancers describe life-changing experiences. One tells of an abusive father, another of her belief in angels, the third of his "decision to gangbang." Without the performers' hyperactive and not unimpressive moves, the song sounds aimless and exploitive, group therapy set to music.

Instead of presenting herself as the art-school activist of Secret (which was recorded during an election year, after all), on Confessions Madonna plays the part of a self-help guru-- Tony Robbins with a Farrah 'do and an ugly leotard. The recurring theme is self-empowerment, which she means to be universal, but which ultimately is specific to Madonna. On the lively "Jump" she extols the virtues of self-motivation and sisterhood. She confidently masters the simplest guitar riffs on "I Love New York" and "Drowned World" and doesn't care what you think of her clumsy dances moves.

Granted, empowerment is easy when you've got thousands of fans applauding your at every turn. And why shouldn't they? Madonna has the power to put on a ludicrous, obscenely expensive stage show-cum-counseling session year after year, as well as the brand name to make Confessions one of the top-grossing tours of 2006. She has the body of her much younger self, so she can still rock a leotard or a feathered collar, no matter how ill-advised such wardrobe choices may be. And her voice has aged surprisingly well. She can't sell the girlish giggle of "Lucky Star" or "Like a Virgin", but she's got a deeper, heartier range that works best on ballads like "Drowned World/Substitute for Love" and "Paradise (Not for Me)". We are left, however, to imagine how commanding Madonna would sound on a good ballad, like "Oh Father" or "Something to Remember". "Live to Tell" might have fit the bill here, but she delivers it perched uncomfortably on a mirror-covered cross, which limits her breathing and phrasing as well as our ability to take her seriously.

Let's talk about that disco crucifixion. Nothing says "I've got a messiah complex" like performing on a cross, and this notorious routine, which begins as a comment on the travails of fame, sure enough turns into a plea to end AIDS in Africa. That's a serious issue, and it deserves better than this confused, self-aggrandizing pitch. Nevertheless, this segment will likely be a selling point for many fans and bystanders alike: It was cut from the original NBC broadcast of the show following the expected avalanche of Catholic uproar and outraged punditry.

But it's a polite curtsy compared to what happens when Madonna's politics go global. During "Forbidden Love" two male dancers appear with symbols of Islam and Judaism painted on their abdomens, locking arms stoically in a choreography that makes them look like two children fighting in the backseat. But that's just silly, not insulting. The show's nadir comes during "Isaac". Centerstage stands a giant cage in which a burqa-clad dancer twirls and gyrates. When the gate lifts, her cage dance becomes a striptease. From one oppression to another...

As always, Madonna is at her best when the stakes are low and the music frivolous, an approach that seems natural for the frothy disco of Confessions on a Dance Floor . The live show's best-- and consequently most meaningful-- moments come during the closing disco-kitsch set, which begins with a mash-up of her underrated single "Music" and the Trammps' "Disco Inferno" and closes with a medley of "Lucky Star" and "Hung Up". Despite the tacky travel-agency brochure vibe of "La Isla Bonita", these songs achieve the sort of gaudy pop transcendence that justifies the month's-pay ticket price.

Still, it's too little too late to salvage Confessions , which, with Secret , feels like a failure of imagination. Åkerlund gives you everything you don't want from a concert film: incessant quick cuts that you give you no sense of space or stage, overdubbed music and vocals that give you no sense of performance, and only a few shots of the audience to gauge their excitement. But Madonna herself is mostly to blame. On stage, she draws from a deep well of amazing pop songs and has the money and power to reinvent this sort of traveling circus. So why not try to break down the wall between performance and audience and hold a gigantic rave? Or, better yet, launch a small-club tour and share the spotlight with some musical collaborators. Work with Timbaland or even Xiu Xiu. Let other people write songs for you. Reinvent yourself for real this time. Until Madonna comes up with something completely new and makes her shows as exciting to watch as they are to perform, her spectacle will never be as fun or as world-changing as her music.

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Television Review | 'The Confessions Tour'

Listen for the Music, Look for the Muscles

By Ginia Bellafante

• Nov. 24, 2006

Will Madonna ever get old? She may acquire more gravitas, continue to mature emotionally and find greater meaning in her work with kabbalah, but will she ever come to look arthritic, puffy, menopausal? This increasingly seems doubtful. Madonna no longer reinvents, she maintains.

It is the sheer spectacularity of her physical form, the near menacing force of it, and largely that alone, that sustains your attention in “Madonna: The Confessions Tour, Live From London,” the two-hour film of a concert she gave at the Wembley Arena in London this past summer, which was broadcast on NBC Wednesday night and will be shown on Bravo next week.

With each tour Madonna has embarked on in recent years, her deltoids appear to have grown more regally expansive, robust and winglike. Toward the end of the Wembley show, part of a worldwide tour pegged to her album “Confessions on a Dance Floor,” Madonna sings one of the hits from it, “Hung Up,” a song about a woman who migrates between boredom and agony as she waits for a man to call. But who could this man possibly be? Unless Madonna is expecting a call from Wladimir Klitschko about meeting him in the ring, the sight of her singing a song like this, in a leotard no less, leaves you feeling as you might if you were forced to watch Ethel Merman trying to impersonate Chet Baker.

The show pays tribute to Madonna’s current and former selves and does so with dizzying jump cuts and all the spectacle — the acrobatics, playground sets, endless costume changes — that have become the hallmark of her concerts.

Today, Madonna, who is 48, is a concerned citizen of the world. She has made African AIDS orphans one of her causes and wants to adopt a child from Malawi, causing some controversy. At one point in the concert, she sings “Live to Tell” against the backdrop of images of children in Africa and a speeding tally of the number who have been left parentless. But here again, her perfect musculature produces a kind of dissonance. Madonna doesn’t have an altruist’s body, she has a denier’s. What you’re tallying in your head when you watch her dance with the strength and agility of a 19-year-old are the number of hours she spends each day practicing Ashtanga yoga, running hills and bench-pressing the weight of a Regency table. You are tallying all the calories that Madonna is not eating.

In addition to keeping up her legendary physical regimen, Madonna now also rides horses on her country estate in England. Some critics have seen this as another aspect of her Anglophilic pretensions, but what is really surprising is that it took her so long to cotton to a sport so steeped in the dynamic of submission and control. Madonna the equestrian seems the most inevitable Madonna of all. Perhaps realizing that on some level, she opened her Wembley show looking as if she were about to ride in a reimagining of Ascot. She danced around, directing men on all fours before she rode an apparatus meant to look like an electric horse.

Madonna travels backward in the show to the beginning of her career, the time before she was encumbered with the need to do good. The documentary “I’m Going to Tell You a Secret,” which follows her on her 2004 world tour, reveals a Madonna who wants to learn all the time, who hugs her assistant and dancers, who wishes she’d been nicer to people when she was young. Perhaps she knows that many in her audience miss the Madonna of so many Madonnas ago, the one who refused refinement and probably thought Oxford was just an insurance company.

“The Confessions Tour” gets deeper and deeper into her early disco years as it progresses, with Madonna getting in and out of a “Saturday Night Fever” tuxedo and Jane Fonda-esque aerobics gear before it’s all over, as if to tell us that sometimes, yes, she misses herself too.

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Confessions on a Dance Floor

(15 nov 2005).

With one foot in the early roots of her career as a "dance artist" and the other foot planted firmly into the sound of "future disco", Madonna returns to the clubs with a vengeance. Recorded in London

• Hung Up Lyrics
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When Madonna hit the road again in 2006 with her Confessions Tour , the live magic was back at MadonnaTribe for another Summer full of emotions that instantly turned into the nicest memories.

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Madonna: the confessions tour.

Directed by Jonas Åkerlund

Filmed in its entirety at London's Wembley Arena during her worldwide sold-out 25-city Confessions Tour (2006's top-grossing tour world-wide), this concert film features songs from throughout the queen's career but largely focuses on Confessions On A Dance Floor.

Madonna Stuart Price Steve Sidelnyk Monte Pittman Marcus Brown Donna DeLory Nicki Richards Isaac Sinwani Jason Young Addie Yungmee-Schilling-George Charm La'Donna Daniel 'Cloud' Campos Mowii Levi Meeuwenberg Mihran Kirakosian Oleg Vorslavs Reshma Gajjar Sébastien Foucan Sofia Boutella Steve Nestar Tamara Levinson Victor Lopez Williams Charlemoine Ryan Allen Carrillo Rylan Clark

Director Director

Jonas Åkerlund

Choreography Choreography

Alison Faulk

Warner Music Entertainment WEA/Reprise

Releases by Date

22 nov 2006, releases by country.

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Popular reviews

Review by david ★★★★★ 1

my aunt gave me this dvd when I was like eleven and I'm pretty sure that made me gay

Review by Héctor ★★★★★ 2

On this tour Madonna did not sing Like a Prayer or Express yourself or Vogue or Papa don't preach or Material girl or Holiday (all iconic), and yet it is her best tour. A WORK OF ART.

Every time i feel low or sad I come to watch this again and I don't know why but it helps me, always.

Review by Lebowskidoo 🇨🇦 🎬 🍿 ★★★★★

Madonna on tour in her disco-spiritual era is an amazing career-culmination concert of epic pop proportions. The quality and care taken to produce this tour and concert DVD is super-evident, it all looks and sounds immaculate. Even Madge haters would have to agree she works hard and delivers a monster show.

"Music Inferno" is still a damn good jam. I rewatched this to feel happy and it delivered...again!

Review by ola ★★★★★

WRESTLE WITH YOUR DARKNESS ANGELS CALL YOUR NAME CAN YOU HEAR WHAT THEY ARE SAYIIIN WILL YOU EVER BE THE SAAAME AAHHH AAHHHH AHHHHH EMININAAAA LO EMININAAA LOOOO HMMM HMMMMM HMMMMMMM

Review by Héctor ★★★★★

This is not a show, this a masterpiece. GOD, MADONNA IS PERFECT!!!

Review by Ryan ★★★★★

The glittery birthplace of The Modern Disco Throwback Album (another trend the pop diva arguably started) that particularly exploded around 2020 thanks to the inimitable Kylie, Dua Lipa, Jessie Ware, Róisín Murphy, etc. Madonna might be the only musician capable of making the flat neoliberal imagery of a coexist bumper sticker into pure art. (Also very obsessed with the dancer who won’t stop sticking his tongue out and how great Sofia Boutella’s solo during Isaac is.)

Review by nick ★★★★★

madonna is truly the most visionary pop star of all time, and this tour is an honest testament to it!!!

what is one of the best pop albums of the 2000s and why is it Confessions On A Dance Floor?

Review by sammi sweatheart ★★★★★

I watched this multiple times and I just want to say that the opening with Madonna coming on the stage in disco ball triumph over anything The Godfather does. Marlon who?

Review by Brad ★★★★★

One of the greatest live concerts recorded.

Even the DVD quality looks HD such is the care and quality in which it was filmed.

Review by Ryan ★★★★★ 2

And if I said Confessions  deserves the reputation Bedtime Stories has received as a successful comeback also shrewdly functioning as an apology and change of pace for the maligned previous album? Anyway. Exceptional concert!

Review by Belu ★★★★★

Madonna, yo no soy digna de que entres en mi casa, pero una palabra tuya bastará para sanarme

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Confessions on a Dance Floor (album)

Background [ ]

Confessions on a Dance Floor is the tenth studio album by Madonna , which combines elements of disco from the 1970s, 1980s electropop and modern dance music. The singer decided to incorporate features of disco music in their songs, not the desire to remake the music of the past, but as a way of paying tribute to artists such as Bee Gees and Giorgio Moroder. The songs reflect the thoughts of Madonna on love, fame and religion, hence the name of Confessions on a Dance Floor . This issue turned out to be completely opposite to that included in its previous production, American Life (2003).The topics in this album were a directed diatribe American society. However, Madonna decided to take a different direction for her new job.

Recordings for the project took place in August 2004 and June 2005.

To promote the album continued, Madonna embarked on the Confessions Tour in 2006, which was a success that led her to be the most successful tour for a solo until that time, and also saw the release of an official concert album.

Singles [ ]

Four singles were released from the album. " Hung Up " was released as the lead single on 17 October 2005, and went on to become one of Madonna's most successful singles worldwide, reaching the number one spot on the charts in 41 countries. It was followed by " Sorry ", yet another chart success and her twelfth number one hit in the United Kingdom. " Get Together " and " Jump " were released as the third and fourth singles respectively, both proving to be successful on the dance charts.

• 1 Erotica Photoshoot
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