Britney Spears And Elton John’s “Hold Me Closer” Duet Is Here
Britney Spears’ last album Glory came out in 2016, and since then she hasn’t released new music beyond yodeling on Instagram. Well, it’s Britney’s return to music, bitch! As we’ve been hearing about for what feels like eons, Brit Brit joined forces with Sir Elton John for a re-working of his classic Tiny Dancer (or “the song that the lady from How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days sings on a bus in that old movie” as my uneducated little cousin calls it) called Hold Me Closer. The song also features a heavy serving of Sir Elton’s The One along with a spoonful of Don’t Go Breaking My Heart. It’s finally here, and Tony Danza’s ears must be tingling something extra today as we all warble out “Hold Me Closer, Tony Danza” while listening to Brit Brit and Elt Elt’s duet.
Last year, Sir Elton released his duet with Dua Lipa called Cold Heart, a mash-up of his hits Rocket Man, Sacrifice, Kiss the Bride, and Where’s The Shoorah? Sir Andrew tells The Guardian that he wants to put out a duet mash-up with a pop star every year. This year, Sir Elton and music producer Andrew Watt decided to remix Tiny Dancer, and when thinking about who they were going to ask to duet with him, his husband, David Furnish, brought up Brit Brit. Sir Elton and Brit Brit don’t really know each other, but he loved the idea and followed the fall of her 13-year conservatorship. Britney agreed to do it, and Andrew says she deserves a Bugatti, a Maserati, and to party in France, because she worked, bitch. via The Guardian:
It was as if no time had passed since Spears last stepped inside a studio, Watt adds. “She was so prepared. She had spent time with the record and knew how she wanted to do it.” To construct the song, he explains meticulously, he took the guitar from Tiny Dancer, originally buried so low in the mix you could hardly hear it, and fiddled with the tempo. Extracting the original bass and strings and speeding them up gave it a disco feel. To amplify that sense of transcendence, he punctuated the song with a scale-climbing, heaven-bound sample of “hold me closer”. And John played new Rhodes piano (those are his original vocals).
“She’s unbelievable at layering her voice and doubling, which is one of the hardest things to do. She really pushed herself, vocally. Sometimes when you produce, the greatest thing in the world you can do is say nothing, so I just let her do her thing. She’s so good at knowing when she got the right take. She took complete control.”
Spears recorded the falsetto parts first, then the lines where she belts. Watt never had to ask her to do anything, and watched as she exacted her own high standards. “She kept going: ‘Nope, again, again, again.’” Then she had an “amazing idea”, he says. “She wanted to listen to the music a bunch of times and she started doing all her incredible ad libs that make the record so her. Tiny Dancer with her voice is special enough, but then she went through and did all these amazing runs.”
A few days ago, Elton shared a clip of his duet with Brit Brit while at a restaurant in Cannes:
Sneak peak of Hold Me Closer – out this Friday 🌹🚀#HoldMeCloser pic.twitter.com/O7ull88sl4
— Elton John (@eltonofficial) August 23, 2022
And below is the entire song. It’s giving me 90s gay pool party, and if it did come out in the 90s, I’d definitely use it as my voicemail song (cut to me slowly turning the volume down on my stereo to get that highly technical fade-out effect). But they needed to turn Brit Brit’s voice up more! Hold me closer, auto-tuuuuune!
Sir Elton says that he loves the way it turned out, adding “Everyone was saying they don’t think she can sing anymore. But I said, she was brilliant when she started so I think she can. And she did it, and I was so thrilled with what she did.” But Britney wasn’t so sure that their duet was ready for ear holes and needed to be convinced. via The Guardian:
It was afterwards, John admits, that Spears needed some convincing that releasing the track was the right thing to do. (On 25 August, she tweeted about being “kinda overwhelmed … it’s a big deal to me !!!”) “We had to get her to approve what she did,” he says. “She’s been away so long – there’s a lot of fear there because she’s been betrayed so many times and she hasn’t really been in the public eye officially for so long. We’ve been holding her hand through the whole process, reassuring her that everything’s gonna be alright.”
Hold Me Closer is currently #1 on the iTunes Top Songs charts in the U.S., the UK, and many more countries. But I can’t fully get into Hold Me Closer, until I see Britney, who is currently taking a break from Instagram again, twirling like a banned Sky Dancer to it.
Pic: Instagram