Tue, 17 Jan 2023
by JC Alvarez
When the Queen of Pop hits the road in 2023 she is planning on taking fans through a musical retrospective, a veritable celebration of her 40-year career and it will undoubtedly emerge as the most ambitious event of the season!
Where does one begin when it comes to chronicling their career? That’s the plight facing Madonna as the artist prepares to embark on a new world tour in 2023 that is expected to celebrate her 40 years in the industry and is tentatively expected to include hits from every one of her groundbreaking albums. In the case of the Queen of Pop, that’s more than 50 chart-topping singles, across 4 decades, and a musical exercise that redefined pop music across all scores of musical genres, as most recently referenced in the profoundly robust release Finally Enough Love: 50 Number Ones.
The announcement ignited a groundswell of excitement, legitimized by her long-standing collaborations with Live Nations and her longtime manager Guy Oseary, who will also be working with Madonna to examine her impressive catalog of music to perfectly define a live show experience that would include tracks from her early days like “Holiday”, and “Material Girl” and evolve into seismic hits like “Vogue” and “Ray of Light”, to her more contemporary award-winning compositions including “Music” and club-favorite “Living For Love”. Whatever direction the show takes, it has been guaranteed to fill arenas and stadiums alike and maybe her most ambitious show to date.
Her last live event, the “Madame X” Tour was creatively directed to promote the 2019 album of the same name and uniquely curated for theatrical spaces, a far cry from the usual settings that Madonna had been accustomed to performing in. The scale of the show was far more intimate, faced several challenges, and was ultimately cut short by the pandemic. The show would eventually feature in a full-length live performance documentary on Paramount +, and a live digital album Madame X - Music from the Theater Experience recorded live from the Coliseu dos Recreios in Lisbon, Portugal.
In recent times, Madonna has reentered into a mutually beneficial contract with Warner Records that extends to the entirety of her music catalog, giving the label the opportunity to re-release, remaster and reimagine music from across her career. This has proven extremely exciting as it has allowed Warner to rerelease many of her previously unavailable remixes and singles, for example marking the 30th anniversary of Erotica and the 40th of Madonna’s first single “Everybody” which hit the to top of the dance charts in 1982 as hi-res digital masters.