Madonna "almost cried" when she returned to the recording studio.

The 53-year-old singer took a break from her music career to direct W.E. and although she enjoyed working on the film, she loved going back to the "simplicity" of songwriting for her new album MDNA.

"It's amazing to be back in music. I like the intimacy of a recording studio and song writing. I'm using a different part of my brain when I work on music versus when I'm directing a film. It's very different. I love doing both, but it was nice to have the simplicity of song writing after three years of writing a script and directing and editing and talking about my film, to sit down and play my guitar and sing a song. I almost cried."

Madonna also said she refuses to listen to other artists' work when she is recording because she needs to work from a "clean slate" with no external influences: "I wasn't listening to anything to tell you the truth when I wrote this. I was working on the soundtrack to my movie W.E. So just classical music. I actually don't like listening to pop music while I'm working on pop music - it doesn't really work. You don't want to hear other people's stuff, you need a clean slate to work off."