Madonna Might Not Be As Free as She Thinks on “I Feel So Free”—But the Sense of Freedom She Instills Within Others Continues to Work

After an unprecedented seven years of a Madonna album cycle drought, the dam broke on April 15th, with the announcement that Confessions II would be released on July 3rd. In addition, she unleashed a one-minute-long “snippet” of the album’s first track (though not necessarily first single), “I Feel So Free,” which was released in full on April 17th.

Sampling spoken portions from Li’l Louis’ 1989 dance hit, “French Kiss,” it’s his verse, “Oh, by the way, it all started like this/‘So how’s your evening so far?’” that follows Madonna’s own “welcome” into to her latest installment in the “Confessions universe.” One that starts out with a direct and to-the-point, “Thanks for coming.” She then continues (in a vocal intonation that reminds one of the opening lines to “Ciao Bella” from Madame X), “Sometimes I like to just hide in the shadows/Create a new persona/A different identity/I can be whoever I want to be/Create a new persona/Honestly I wish I could be like other people/And just not care/But out here/On the dance floor/I feel so free.”

This sentiment capturing what she has always said about going to “da club.” Starting from the moment she was taken to her first gay nightclub in Detroit by her dance mentor, Christopher Flynn. And so, right from the outset, Madonna does the thing she’s always been most adept at: paying homage to the dance floor. A space that has grown less populated in more “modern” times, especially for those who don’t live in certain cities on the West or East Coast. Which is perhaps at least part of why she’s chosen to revisit her 2005 album, Confessions on a Dance Floor: wanting to compel people to remember her own adage, “If all else fails and you long to be something better than you are today/I know a place where you can get away/It’s called a dance floor.”

However, another undeniable part of why Madonna would home in on this specific album to “reinvent”/build on anew is for the same reason that Lady Gaga opted to “reinvent”/build on Born This Way with Mayhem: wanting to appeal to the fans. Since, in all bluntness, many of them haven’t felt as “sated” by Madonna’s work since 2005, with the albums in between being 2008’s Hard Candy (one of her least respected), 2012’s MDNA (maybe her second least respected, especially now with the taintedness of Nicki Minaj being all over it), 2015’s Rebel Heart and 2019’s Madame X. And while the latter two were critically and artistically valued, they didn’t seem to bode well for Madonna continuing her journey of “conventional chart success.”

With Confessions II, she seems keen on cultivating a chance to get back to that (and without any help from The Weeknd and Playboi Carti this time). Which could also be part of the reason she waited so long to return with a new album. For, as two other pop stars—Lily Allen and Hilary Duff—recently reminded, the longer one stays away, the more the public seems to become rabid over their new work.

And it’s a rabidity that has shown itself to Madonna already as well, particularly in terms of the crowd’s reaction to her appearance onstage at Coachella during Sabrina Carpenter’s headlining performance. A “cameo” (which is too dainty/insignificant a word for what Madonna did on that night of April 17th) that not only incorporated two of her biggest hits, “Vogue” and “Like A Prayer,” but also another new track called “Bring Your Love” featuring who else but Carpenter. Such a feature also marking a departure from the original Confessions on a Dance Floor in that Madonna, at that time, wouldn’t have considered including another voice on one of her songs. Instead preferring to be the feature on other people’s (e.g., Ricky Martin’s “Be Careful [Cuidado Con Mi Corazón]” and Britney Spears’ “Me Against the Music”). Or making a rare exception by allowing Missy Elliott to be a feature on “American Life” in 2003—but that was just for the remix.

However, in 2026, allowing Carpenter onto her “sequel album” speaks to the idea that Madonna might not actually be feeling as free as she would have her listeners believe on “I Feel So Free.” Itself hemmed in by certain conventions despite its “experimental” sound, which stems in large part from having Arca as a co-producer alongside Madonna and Stuart Price. One of those conventions being for Madonna to do her version of Beyoncé’s Renaissance shtick. And yes, it’s because of the “house thing.” A genre that some Madonna fans would like to remind that she was “doing” at the very beginning of the 90s, starting with “Vogue” and continuing with Erotica and Bedtime Stories (not to mention the various Junior Vasquez remixes that resulted from the latter). But Madonna was doing it at a moment in history when it was slightly more “acceptable” for white musicians to overpower Black spaces (a.k.a. graft what they wanted from them and leave with the musical and cultural gold that would turn into more profit).

Maybe this reminder would only prompt Madonna to urge, “Don’t be a vibe kill,” as she does at the one-minute-fifteen-second mark, when the song veers into “Future Lovers”-sounding territory before she commands, “Come on meet me on the dance floor/Come here, baby, I can give you much more tonight/Oh, baby, let’s do it right.” That phrase, “Let’s do it right” also speaking to why it’s taken Madonna this long to put out another album. Wanting to ensure that’s it’s exactly right—that is, primed to chart in some significant way that will prove Taylor Swift hasn’t toppled the true Queen of Pop…despite recently surpassing her chart record for most number ones on U.S. pop radio. But maybe, with whatever Madonna’s “real” first single from the album is (for “I Feel So Free” is just an introduction), there’s a chance for her to definitively reclaim her throne. Though some would insist that Madonna “doesn’t care” about such trivialities anymore. Madonna being one of those people to insist on such a thing in her own new song, the abovementioned “Bring Your Love,” during which she declares, “Don’t try to distract me with numbers/I did it all for love.” This a reference to what started her out in “show business” in the first place: a love of performing.

Of course, there was more to that love than just love. Or passion. It was also of course driven by an insatiable need to be loved by many hordes of people in order to fill the void that was left inside Madonna when her mother died. And, in this regard, she will never be or feel truly free from the driving force behind why she does what she does. Which is to prove that not only is she still the “best,” but that she’s also beloved. Ironically, however, it is because of her mastery of cultivating the parasocial relationship (long before any other pop star) that she sing-speaks (in her most “Dita” of Erotica lilt in recent memory) during “I Feel Free,” “It’s really hard for me to trust people/Can you blame me?/I never know why people like me/That’s why I like to go dancing.”

She then adds the cliché (which isn’t used so often anymore considering how individualistic society has become), “Safety in numbers.” The adage referring to how one is less susceptible to being preyed upon when they’re in a large group (and, in this regard, it also comes across like a subtle/subconscious reference to Madonna’s sexual assault when she first moved to New York in the late 1970s). To emphasize that point, she soon after sings, “It’s dangerous with just one person/That’s not a nice feeling.” This embodying not only the “Dita” sound, but also the “Justify My Love”/“Where Life Begins” one (particularly when Madonna says on the latter track, “It’s not fair to be selfish and stingy”). Not to mention the sonic infusion of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”—a song that Madonna has expressed plenty of affection for during her first Confessions on a Dance Floor album, performing it as part of the intro to the Confessions Tour with “Future Lovers” (a song whose outro is heavily suggested in the outro to “I Feel So Free”). The combination of this sample and her lyrics about it being dangerous with “just one person” all feels like an innuendo, an allusion to, well, an orgy. Which is how Madonna made her dance floor choreo look during the first Confessions on a Dance Floor (primarily during the musical breakdown toward the end of “Hung Up”—for both the video and basically every live performance of it where she was joined by those same dancers from the video).

As such, the orgiastic sounds pulled from “French Kiss” converge upon the song around the four-minute mark as L’il Louis chimes in again to ask, “So how’s your evening so far?” To which Madonna continues to repeat, “I feel so free.” Prior to that, however, she has to admit, “Been so lonely, I can’t take any more/Give me champagne so I can get on the floor tonight.” That latter request harkening back to an image of Madonna holding a champagne glass up to her mouth with an unlit cigarette in the same hand at Danceteria circa 1983. In fact, this entire song is Madonna harkening back to those days—just as she’s always fundamentally doing. Trying to get back to the feeling she had when she was anonymous and on the brink of greatness. Which is exactly the kind of feeling that “I Feel So Free” instills within its listeners.