Madonna is very down to earth
Madonna´s producer Nate “Danja” Hills has spoken out about working with the star on her forthcoming album.
Production team Timbaland and Danja have been holed up in a London studio working on tracks for Madge’s 11th studio album, which is due out in the US on April 29.
Danja, who also worked with Timbaland on Justin Timberlake’s hit album ‘FutureSex/LoveSounds’, said that the new album is “a very different sound for her.”
“She wanted up-tempo, dance, club music, and for everything to have a hip-hop underlining,” Danja told Rolling Stone.
He added that Madonna loved Timberlake’s album, which is why she asked the production team to work with her.
“She would just come in, sit in her chair in the corner and just vibe with us,” Danja said. “She was very down-to-earth, very cool person, very easy.”
The album’s first single, ‘Four Minutes To Save The World’ — co-written by Timberlake — was leaked in December, as previously reported. A video for the track by French duo Jonas and Francois is due out in March.
Pharrell Williams also produced several tracks on the as-yet-untitled album, including ‘Give It To Me’ and ‘Candy Store’.
Source: NME
No jury duty for Madonna
Madonna spent Sunday evening hosting a Beverly Hills post-Oscar soiree that was the talk of Hollywood. She spent the night fabulizing with pals Demi Moore and Tom Cruise and chit-chatting with guests Owen Wilson, Christian Slater, and Eva Mendes. So imagine the crash to earth when, bright and early the next morning, the Material Girl had to rush to another event—jury duty! Rumor has it that the pop diva didn’t get to bed until 4 a.m. after the Oscar fete. She was spotted at the Beverly Hills courthouse looking exhausted, and wearing brown sweats and an Ed Hardy t-shirt. Lucky for her, she was officially dismissed from duty yesterday afternoon.
Source: Modern Mom
Madonna in talk for peace gigs
Justin Timberlake, Aerosmith, ZZ Top also on the cards. World Peace One is in talks with many of the world’s top acts to stage a series of international concerts to bring peace to the world.The shows, which are scheduled to kick off May 17 could feature performances from U2, Madonna, Led Zeppelin and Justin Timberlake, among others.The not-for-profit group is attempting to bring peace through a 10-year campaign via concerts, education and government initiatives, reports , ZZ Top, Lionel Richie, Celine Dion, INXS, Velvet Revolver, , and Timbaland, are among the acts in talks with the organisation, according to the group’s founder Doug Ivanovich.The concerts will kick off May 17 with shows in Beijing, Istanbul, Turkey, London, Johannesburg; and Miami, as well as the United Arab Emirates, Portugal, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Colombia and India, the report says.Concert organisers at World Peace One include former executives from Woodstock and Live Earth and the group are currently building relationships with the world’s top promoters to make the shows happen.
Source: MusicheatXL
Madonna urged to get Hep. A shot
NEW YORK - Celebrities Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher and Madonna are among hundreds of patrons of a New York bar being urged by New York health officials on Thursday to get a Hepatitis A vaccination after a bartender was found to be infected.
The city health department issued a statement, warning anyone who visited Socialista in Manhattan’s West Village on Feb. 7, 8 or 11 to get a vaccination.
Local media reports said Moore hosted a 30th birthday bash for her husband Kutcher at the venue on Feb. 7 after a star-studded dinner at Gemma restaurant.
Entertainment photo agency WireImage showed guests at the Socialista event, including Madonna, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ivanka Trump, Liv Tyler, Catherine Keener, Lucy Liu and Salma Hayek.
Other celebrities reported at Socialista were Javier Bardem, nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar, Eric Dane, Rebecca Gayheart and fashion designer Roberto Cavalli.
Socialista was not immediately available for comment, nor were representatives of Moore, Kutcher or Madonna.
“Any patron who visited the establishment after 8 p.m. on February 7th or 8th, or after 10 p.m. on February 11th (the times the infected person worked after becoming infectious), is considered to be at risk and needs a preventive shot,” the health department said.
It said the bar owners were cooperating fully and estimated between 700 and 800 people had visited the bar on those nights, but added that no cases of illness had yet been identified.
Hepatitis A is a liver disease caused by a virus and is spread from person to person by putting something in the mouth that has been contaminated with traces of fecal matter from an infected person, the department said.
Symptoms include jaundice, fatigue, abdominal pain, nausea and diarrhea.
Source: Reuters
Filth and Wisdom directly to iTunes
Madonna has announced that her new movie ‘Filth & Wisdom’ will bypass the cinema. She wants to take it straight to iTunes.
The material girl made her directorial debut with ‘Filth & Wisdom’. It is about three struggling flatmates in London.
“I want the most people to see it as possible” she told Variety. “I don’t do anything conventionally”.
However, after the movie was screened at the Berlin Film Festival last week, the critics and film fans alike have been panning it. “All I can say is it’s an insufferable mess,” one critic wrote at IMDB.com. “Dreadful acting and a script so full of crass banalities that it almost collapses under its own dreadfulness.?One to miss”.
He continues, “The Material One says she’s thinking of releasing this on the internet - small wonder. I doubt there’s a distributor anywhere that would touch this appalling car-crash of a movie. The music is quite fun, to be fair and there is a lot of it (probably because there’s really not much else - perhaps she should think about directing a rockumentary next time). The dialogue is full of pretentious, meaningless attempts at ‘insight’. Sadly, you’d get more insight looking at an unwashed pair of underpants”.
Source: Undercover
Madonna on “Filth & Wisdom” and privacy
“I don´t subscribe to victimhood, I think that whatever happens to you in life, is meant to happen to you. You have to take that lemon and make lemonade out of it. Everyone gets dealt a hand of cards, we all get given gifts, and we get given things which are percieved as handicaps, but in fact it´s those handicaps that ultimately are our gifts. Sitting around feeling sorry for yourself or blaming others for your hardships is a waste of time. So it was important to me that my characters weren´t victims, but it was also important that there was no judgement passed on them, because I don´t think any of them were ultimately wrong or bad.
There´s the life that I live out in public, the life that I present to the public, and then there´s hopefully my private life that people don´t know anything about. I think that the only way to maintain sanity being a public figure, or a celebrity, or whatever you want to call it, is to have a private life and be very clear which is which.”
Madonna´s new album gets a thumbs up!
Rolling Stone got an early preview of five of the tracks from Madonna’s new R&B flavored album and they liked what they heard. The first single “4 Minutes to Save the World” is a collaboration with Timbaland and a video directed by Jonas & Francois, the creative team behind Justice’s “D.A.N.C.E” video.
Rolling Stone writer Caryn Ganz claims the most lyrical of the five songs she previewed was “Miles Away,” a song about long-distance relationships with a Timberlake FutureSex/LoveSounds vibe. Madonna croons, “I guess we’re at our best when we’re 6,000 miles away.
Timberlake says:
“Basically, our job was to reinvent her sound. My thing was producing her vocals – really experimenting with rhythm. Everything she does with rhythm is straightforward. What I do is more staccato and R&B. So the challenge for me was writing songs, then saying, “How can I make this sound more like Madonna?” I’m a big fan of her first album. So my mission was to write a modern-day “Holiday.” I wrote a cool house record for her called “Miles Away” that I think is a smash! She sounds great on it.
Source: PoolParty
Madonna and kids at LAX
After spending time at the Berlinale Film Festival, Madonna arrived at LAX Airport on Sunday afternoon with her three kids, Lourdes, Rocco, and David in tow.
According to an insider, “After much controversy over her adoption of David from Malawi, it’s starting to look as though it will finally be official in April.”
Meanwhile, the Material Girl is coming off of a big few weeks - as she recently hosted a star-studded party in NYC for Gucci, along with making her directorial debut for the film Filth and Wisdom.
During an interview about her movie, Madge told press, “I have always been inspired by the films of Godard, Visconti, Pasolini and Fellini and hope that I may one day make something that comes close to their genius.”
In the liner notes to Filth and Wisdom, Madonna wrote, “I have always admired the art of filmmaking and the ability to tell a good story. After almost three decades of being in front of a camera, I decided to put my money where my mouth is. ‘Filth and Wisdom’ was essentially my way of putting myself through film school.”
Source: GossipGirls
Madonna to see The Storys
WELSH band The Storys will tomorrow perform a live version of Like a Virgin – especially for Madonna.
The Swansea-based six-piece play a post-premiere party for movie The Bank Job starring Jason Statham, a big pal of the pop queen’s husband Guy Ritchie. Madonna is expected to be there.
Lead singer Steve Balsamo said: “We’ve run through Like a Virgin a few times and will give it our own little guitar-based spin. It should be a hoot – I hope Madge likes it, along with our own material.”
The Storys play the party – in London’s exclusive Paper club – because they appear in the film and supply some tracks.
Around 500 guests will attend, enabling the band to showcase their second album Town Beyond the Trees, which comes out next month.
Legendary scriptwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais have penned the Brit-flick in which Statham stars alongside Saffron Burrows. It goes on general release at the end of this month.
The movie tells the tale of a notorious 1971 London bank robbery. The Storys were called into the film because director Roger Donaldson felt their music fitted the mood he wanted to create for a nightclub scene.
Balsamo said: “We had a great time doing our bits for the film; now we can’t wait to see who’s at the party. I’m told Jason’s film buddies like Vinnie Jones, Keeley Hawes, Ian McShane and David Suchet will be there.”
Statham appeared in the Ritchie-directed 1998 Brit hit Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
Source: IC Wales
Madonna: “I look young - from far away”
Her acting has taken a critical beating, but it’ll take more than that to dampen Madonna’s big-screen blonde ambitions.
The singer – who turns 50 this summer – made her directorial debut Wednesday at the Berlin Film Festival with Filth and Wisdom, and announced she has big plans for the next 50 years.
“I will be making more music and films,” she declared at a press conference.
Then, when one journalist said the fresh-faced Madonna could pass for 21, she jokingly shot back, “That’s because you’re standing far away.”
As she prepared to helm the project – the story of a Ukrainian immigrant musician and his two female roommates – the pop star didn’t have to look far for professional advice.
The singer (who also co-wrote the movie) admitted to Germany’s Spiegel TV that she asked Guy Ritchie, her director-husband of the past seven years, for “one sentence of advice before I walk into this.”
His answer? “‘Confidence.’ That’s the most important thing you need to exude on the set. No matter what you feel, exude confidence,” she recounted. “And that was good advice.”
Perhaps the bravado was slightly misplaced. Reviews for the film have been mixed, at best. (A preview clip of the film – which includes some graphic language – is making the rounds.)
While the industry magazine Screen International called Filth a “good-humored, averagely amateurish” film, Britain’s The Guardian found it “so incredibly bad that Berlin festivalgoers were staggering around yesterday in a state of clinical shock, deathly pale and mewing like maltreated kittens.”
The Hollywood Reporter managed to be won over by the “oddly appealing” film. “Ragged, uneven and potholed with some dire dialogue and performances,” according to the review, “the film’s cockeyed optimism and likable leads conspire to bring a smile by the time it’s done.”
Madonna also gets plenty of love when it comes to her music, though. She’ll be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame next month.
Source: People