New York — NEW YORK (AP) – Britney Spears was at a crossroads – and not just because the film “Crossroads” was soon to be released, marking her acting debut.
It was the year 2001. Spears, then just 19, was one of the most famous people on the planet, promoted as the ultimate teenage dream with a legion of fans around the world and a celebrity business. That year, she performed at the Super Bowl halftime show and changed the course of fashion forever—first, appearing with actor Justin Timberlake in matching denim at the American Music Awards and then with an albino python around her neck while performing at the MTV Video Music Awards.
She was entering adulthood, full steam ahead, after enjoying a meteoric run with her first two albums, 1999’s “… Baby One More Time” and 1999’s “Oops! … I did It Again.” Her third album, “Britney,” was released just before her 20th birthday and would prove transformative.
Legacy Recordings on Friday releases “Britney (25th Anniversary Edition),” an extended remaster of her landmark album, which went quadruple platinum in less than two months. The compilation features two remixes and five previously unreleased songs from that era, her first new (or is it old?) music since she announced she would “never return to the music business” in an Instagram post in 2024.
The news is an opportunity to reflect on the album and Spears’ unique position in the popular culture imagination – especially after the news of the past few years. In 2021, he was released from a court conservatorship that controlled the pop singer’s life and finances for almost 14 years. And in February, it was announced that she had sold the rights to her music catalog to Primary Wave for an undisclosed sum.
The album opens with a spoken statement. Back in 2001, it was considered inspiration – as is often the case when a young woman expresses her own fame.
“I know I might be young,” Spears gushes over R&Production B, courtesy of The Neptunes, the acclaimed duo of Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo. “But I have feelings too.”
The song is the single “I’m A Slave 4 U,” where Spears made it clear that the bubblegum pop of her previous releases had been traded for something decidedly more mature. And that’s true even of the songs from the album written and produced by former collaborators Max Martin and Rami Yacoub – tracks like “Bombastic Love” still shine, but with a new edge.
If Spears was borrowing from the teen-to-adult pop star path that forebears like Madonna or Janet Jackson put on “Britney,” she did so while keeping it PG-13 — hinting at a heightened sensibility as a way to express self-definition, but still be accessible and palatable to her younger audience. To put it another way, she blurts out the line: “I’m not a girl, not a woman yet,” as the single goes.
That’s all while autonomous calls – sexual and otherwise – punctuate the record. “Say hello to the girl that I am,” she invites “Pre-Protection.” “Now I live for me,” she flips the script to “Lonely.” “She’s in control,” said the “Boys,” amused.
The sense of self-reflection is heightened by the fact that the album is self-titled, and that Spears wrote five songs on the original album: “Lonely,” “Anticipating,” “Let Me Be,” “Sin Far an Gabh tu Me” and the spicy “Cinderella.”
The first of the five archive albums is “She’ll Never Be Me,” co-written by Timberlake, his then-boyfriend, who also sings background vocals. Timberlake wrote a track on the original album, but the new news comes after Spears wrote about their relationship in her 2023 memoir, sharing deeply personal details about pregnancy, miscarriage and a painful breakup.
As far as fitting in with the rest of the album, the song fits in nicely with the Y2K-inspired vocal effects and production – by any measure, it makes a good B-side.
The same could be said of the rest, from the deceptively slow rhythms of “Am IA Sinner” and the informed Latin rhythms of “Right Now (Taste the Victory)” to the glitchy, proto-hyperpop “When I Say So” and the soulful, unusually long “My Big Secret”, which features Spears’ strongest vocal performance on the entire album. It’s an amazing falsetto.
Thematically, several of these tracks could be read as a response to the tabloid media’s obsession with Spears’ virginity at the time of her release. “I don’t want to disappoint you,” she sings on “When I Say So.” “You’ll get some when I say so.”
And on “Am IA Sinner” she may very well be reflecting back on an unfair medium – or any bad relationship: “Tell me, am I a sinner? / Tell me, am I wrong? / There’s something wrong with the picture / This is not my fault.”
Since the release of her best-selling memoir, “The Woman in Me” — which details her childhood, rise to stardom, marriages, motherhood and conservation — fans have been working to recontextualize how Spears was portrayed early in her career. These songs will no doubt inspire more detective work. But others may approach it more simply, through the rose-colored glasses of easy nostalgia.
In the end, it is an album that was written and recorded in the space between adolescence and adolescence, from the woman that a generation was looking for guidance on doing the same.