This July, in a small basement studio in Beverly Hills surrounded by candles, colored lights, keyboards and her new husband, Britney Spears restarted her music career. Six years since her last album and nine months since she was released from the guardianship that had ruled her life for 13 years, she was in producer Andrew Watt’s home studio, recording her parts for Hold Me Closer, a duet with Elton John. which combines perhaps his definitive hit, 1971’s Tiny Dancer, with his 1992 song The One (and a dash of 1976’s Don’t Go Breaking My Heart).
Spears arrived with her warm voice and determined ideas about her contribution, and nailed the performance in less than two hours. “She sang fantastically,” says John from his home in the south of France. “Everyone said they don’t think she can sing anymore. But I said it was great when it first started, so I think it can. And he did, and I was really moved by what he did.”
The euphoric Hold Me Closer, released today, follows Cold Heart, John’s 2021 duet with Dua Lipa, which combined his hits Rocket Man, Sacrifice, Kiss the Bride and Where’s the Shoorah? and made him the first solo artist to achieve a UK Top 10 single in six different decades. “I want to do one every year to get a fun, happy summer record,” says John. After he and Watt created the new Tiny Dancer remix, they weren’t sure who to invite as a guest vocalist. Then John’s husband, David Furnish, had an idea. “He said it would be wonderful if Britney Spears did it,” says John, as the pair sit next to each other the day after surprising diners at a Cannes restaurant with an impromptu rendition of the song . “I said, that’s a pretty amazing idea. It’s been so long since I’ve done anything. I’ve been following what happened to him for so long.”
The Hold Me Closer single.
John had been a fan from day one. “She just put out incredibly brilliant records,” he says. “He sang and danced very well.” They first met at his AIDS Foundation Oscars party in 2013, and she was “lovely, lovely”. And they had their respective residences in Las Vegas at the same time, she at Planet Hollywood, he at Caesars Palace. But although they often stayed in the same apartment block, “we didn’t really see each other,” says John.
Given what we know now, it’s hard to imagine that many people saw Spears at the time. In her chilling testimony at a court hearing about her guardianship in June 2021, Spears said she was punished and put on lithium for refusing some new choreography during the residency, and was compared to a slave, earning millions for the controllers of the deal, including her father, Jamie Spears, while being allocated a weekly allowance of $2,000.
Elton John during his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour in New Orleans in January. Photo: Derick Hingle/AP
In January 2019, he canceled the residency and announced an “indefinite hiatus”. Soon after, the #FreeBritney movement went viral, convinced, accurately enough, that Spears was being exploited and abused. In September 2021, the New York Times published the documentary Framing Britney Spears, which detailed her struggle with her father. John looked at it. “You forget that she was the biggest star in the entire world at the time. And to see what happened to her makes me so angry. What happened to her shouldn’t have happened to anyone.”
Spears was released from her guardianship by a judge in November 2021. The following month, she said her experiences had left her scared away from the music industry, with no intention of resuming her career. “Not making my music anymore is a way of telling you to fuck off,” she wrote on Instagram. But she needed no convincing to join John for the duet, she says.
It is very difficult for young musicians today to start a career. But I’m Uncle Elton. They can call me
Spears was due to fly to London to record with John, but was in the middle of her honeymoon following her wedding to Iranian-American model and actor Sam Asghari, having been restricted from marrying or managing her own birth control under tutelage, and so recorded with Watt in his studio in Los Angeles. I had never met him before. When he arrived, they talked about the music they liked. “He asked me who my favorite artists were, Prince, and I asked him who his was. He said Elton John,” says Watt. “The song meant a lot to her, and you can hear it in her vocal performance. She’s singing her ass off.”
It was like no time had passed since Spears last entered a studio, Watt adds. “She was very prepared. She had spent time with the disc and knew how she wanted to do it.” To build the song, he meticulously explains, he took Tiny Dancer’s guitar, originally buried so low in the mix that he could hardly hear it, and played with the tempo. Extracting the original bass and strings and speeding them up gave it a disco feel. To amplify this sense of transcendence, he punctuated the song with a sky-high “hold me closer” sample. And John played a new Rhodes piano (these are his original vocals).
Music producer Andrew Watt in his studio in Los Angeles. Photo: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP
Watt is 31, the first age to have been a huge childhood fan of Spears with her posters on his wall. Now she was up against one of the biggest pop stars of all time recording her voice in the same room, instantly identifiable, strobe and brushy. “He’s amazing at putting on vocals and dubbing, which is one of the hardest things to do. He really pushed himself, vocally. Sometimes when you’re producing, the best thing in the world you can do is not say nothing, so I just let her do her thing. She’s so good at knowing when she’s made the right take. She took full control.”
Spears recorded the falsetto parts first, then the belt lines. Watt never had to ask him to do anything and watched as he demanded his own high standards. “She kept saying, ‘No, again, again, again.'” Then he had an “amazing idea,” he says. “He wanted to hear the music a bunch of times and he started doing all of his amazing promos that make the record what it is. Tiny Dancer with his voice is special enough, but then he went on and did all these amazing runs “.
Once they recorded, Spears was “incredibly specific” about how she wanted her vocals and levels to be mixed, she says. “She was very collaborative and had great ideas about the production. She’s an expert at making you dance music.” (Spears’ main form of acting in recent years has been posting dance videos self-choreographed on Instagram.) “Many of his records are pop perfection, he worked with the best of all time and made timeless pop. We experimented with speeding up the record and increasing certain elements of the sound to make it work and make you want to dance.”
Britney Spears performing in San Jose, California in 2016. Photo: Steve Jennings/WireImage
Given how disempowered Spears has said she was in the process of making her own music while in custody, she must have felt liberated to exercise her expertise in the studio, I suggest. “We didn’t really get into it,” says Watt. “He came there to sing and record. She is very professional. And if that was something he was thinking about, he put it all on the record.”
It was later, John admits, that Spears needed some convincing that releasing the song was the right thing to do. (On Aug. 25, she tweeted about being “a little overwhelmed…it’s a big deal for me!!!”) “We had to get her to approve of what she did,” she says. “He’s been out for so long – there’s so much fear because he’s been betrayed so many times and he’s been out of the public eye officially for so long. We’ve been holding his hand through the whole process, reassuring him that everything will be fine.
“I’m really excited to be able to do it with her because if it’s a huge success, and I think it can be, it will give her a lot more confidence than she already has and she’ll realize that people really love her and look after her and want her to be happy. That’s all any sane person would want after she’s been through such a traumatic time.”
John is no stranger to helping musicians who are experiencing difficulties in either their personal or professional lives, from George Michael, Robbie Williams and Geri Horner (Halliwell) in the 90s to contemporary artists such as Lewis Capaldi, Oliver Sim of the xx and Sam Fender. He is motivated by his memories of his own struggles, he says. “It’s hard when you’re young. Britney was broken. I was broken when I got sober. I was in a terrible place. I’ve been through this feeling of brokenness and it’s horrible. And luckily, I’ve been sober for 32 years and it’s the happiest I’ve ever been. Now I have the experience to be able to advise and help people because I don’t want to see any artist in a dark place. A lot of artists, you’d think they’d have a lot of self-esteem, but they don’t, and that’s why we get on the stage and get the applause, and then we leave the stage and go back to square one.”
He wants musicians to “enjoy what they’re doing and feel it’s worth it,” he says. “They deserve to be happy and loved and to have an affirmation from someone like me. When I first went to America, I got affirmations from Leon Russell, George Harrison, The Band, Neil Diamond – it made me so happy. It makes you realizing that they cared and it gave me validation that what I was doing was okay.”
The child artists in the artwork Hold Me Closer.
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