Madonna Recording New Album

Daniel Boczarski/Getty Images

Madonna has begun work on her 12th studio album. "It's official.. Madonna's 1st day in the recording studio for the new album," her manager Guy Oseary tweeted yesterday. There is no official word as to who the pop icon will be working with on this new record, but it has been rumored that superstar DJs A-Trak and David Guetta will be involved.

Photos: Madonna on the Cover of Rolling Stone

This new record, which could come out by the end of the year, will be the singer's first collection of new material since Hard Candy came out in 2008. That album, which included collaborations with Timbaland, Justin Timberlake and Pharrell Williams went for an urban pop sensibility. If Madonna is indeed collaborating with Guetta and A-Trak, this could indicate a move in a hard electro-house direction.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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