Britney Spears' Glory - Track-by-Track (Patreon Preview)

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You can also of course subscribe for the audio only directly here in the Apple Podcast app. Enjoy this preview! Welcome to pop pantheon All Access, the podcast, where we do even more over analyzing of all your favorite pop stars and do other stuff too. This is your host, DJ Louie the 14th. Thank you so much for being subscribers. I'm here with my man on the moon, Russ Martin. Russ, are you feeling glorious this morning? I'm feeling glorious as another pop star would say August has slipped away like a bottle of wine. Right, it really did. It really did! We put a lot of thought into this summer's schedule, both on Patreon and on the main feed, because we had a lot of stuff going on in our lives. And as a result of that, we actually ended up doing a lot of stuff that I thought was really fun. I hope that the listeners really enjoyed it as well. And we thought about what we could give them that they would really like, and we know that they absolutely love Miss Brittany Jean Spears. So this morning, we're going to do a track-by-track review of Glory just off mic. You were mentioning to me that leg two of the pop pantheon summer vacation, Louie edition, is headed to Las Vegas, Nevada. Tell the listeners what you're getting up to. The site of Brittany Spears' "Quickie Marriage" indeed. Jason Alexander. I indeed, yes. Like one of my upcoming vacation is that myself and my best friend from high school are going to Vegas to see the backstreet boys at the sphere. And I'm extremely excited about it, although slightly scared to see how old they look. Very excited for the show, but definitely feel like there could be like an existential element to seeing the boys. Yes, I have probably talked about this on the show, but I really enjoy consuming other people's nostalgia as opposed to my own. My own nostalgia often ends up making me feel a little bit sad, but I love to see someone else's nostalgia. You know, I love to see Diana Ross and be the youngest person in the crowd for the backstreet boys. That's going to be a lot of people my age and that is going to remind me of my time on earth coming to "Words of Hill." Yeah, that's true. I mean, Diana Ross has been Godlover, a woman of a certain age since we've been alive. So that's a different experience, you know what I'm saying. And also, she's looking at this point, fucking fabulous for forever old. She is. The most inspiration that you can get about life. Yes, yes. So I agree. It's like it's your own, like to me, the backstreet boys are always how they looked in like the as long as you love me music video. So I know I'm going to have to go through an adjustment with that, but overall, I'm extremely excited to be going. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is your first show at the sphere. My first show at the sphere. My first time in Vegas since I was a teenager. Wow. When my grandparents, Rosemary and David, God rest their souls thought it was a fun vacation to take a 14-year-old to Las Vegas. Okay. Well, I spent the entire trip watching the fake pirate ship battle that happens outside of Treasure Island every 15 minutes or so. There's like a full-scale pirate battle, ship sinks, ship comes out of the water, resets, does it again. And I spent, I think, an entire day in the hot Nevada sun watching that happen. Because, you know, that's what you're doing in Vegas when you're 14. No kidding. Have you been there to Las Vegas? Nevada? Yeah. Yes. I have. I saw Lady Gaga. I saw both of the Lady Gaga shows there. And I have been to Las Vegas on work trips a few times, which is much less fun to cover technology, conferences in my past life as a business reporter. But we are not here to discuss that today. We are here to discuss a more glorious time in my life. Actually, in 2016, when this album came out, that was the time in which I was doing stuff like going to Las Vegas to business conferences. So a very different era for me. Take me back to 2016. Pascal's to the show Brittany Luz was just posting about how 2016 was actually canonically a bad year for those of us who lived it. It's the portal year. To me, that's the year we've got on the bad timeline. Like, that was the year where everything got a went off the rails. Yeah. If you go back down, you look at the headlines from that year, some negative energy in the air. However, we are looking back with Rose Covered Glasses. We are revisiting Glory, the final and ninth Britney Spears album. This was recorded over the process of two and a half years. It got quite stalled. It came following the release and subsequent underperformance of the single Pretty Girls with Mississippi's Alien. Do you remember that one? Oh, do I remember that one? That is an omery roll in classic. Never housed on an album that one ended up being Lucy Goosey. Seems to me like the label was hoping that that would take off and it would become a lead single. It got repackaged as a nothing single. Remember Ike Yazalia being a chart force that some thought could elevate a Britney Spears angle? Mm-hmm. She worked with a lot of people. The credits on this record are real graphic names. Everyone from Julie Michaels and Justin Tretener to Cashmerecat, In Kirkpatrick, Oscar Gores, Burns, the Deluxe edition of this, which you're gonna chat about a little bit at the end of this has even more names on the credits. My impression here is that this was a difficult process to get this album all together. Is that your memory as well? I don't know if I have a memory of like at the time knowing what the process of getting this together was. My memory of the context of it was, and we should state outright, you know, we're doing this because it's 10 years, which is crazy. So it has been officially been a decade since Britney Spears released an album. What I remember is that this was obviously the follow-up to Britney G in which was widely seen as the Nadeer of Britney's career. Some say she wasn't even performing on aspects of that album. Kind of a deep conservatorship black hole of music. She was in Vegas, speaking of Vegas. She was deep in her residency at that time. I think she had already been doing it at this point for like maybe three years or so. They had been relaunched by that point, I think, at least once. Was the relaunch like centered around this album maybe? And the context was that at least the story was that this album was more coming from her, her own inspiration. After a series of albums, you know, some of which are really good like Circus and femme fatale that felt like it wasn't clear that Britney was in control of making them. It felt like the factory around her was kind of like just throwing her in the midst of the machinery and what her involvement was in the process of making those albums are being on those tours, et cetera, felt confusing. And I think she has clarified in recent times that it truly was a situation that she was not particularly keen on and that she was kind of forced into. So I remember the story around this album and I think as much as we can glean from her memoir that came out in 2024, she's very proud of this album and this album is something that she at least had a role in kind of like putting together herself. Like she wanted to make an album that had more of her fingerprints on it that truly came from her own artistic inspiration. That was like the narrative that surrounded this. And of course the involvement of people like Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter are there both because they're obviously in an extremely hot period of their hit making. Like this is just post Justin Bieber's purpose. There's songs with Selena Gomez. Their big songs from Selena Gomez's revival which came out in 2015 and is obviously like a big touchstone for some of this music. They're known as you know kind-hearted artist-friendly support figures therapy in studio therapy type figures. That's how they've been framed you know versus people like Max Martin or Dr. Luka had worked on femme fatale or obviously people like will I am who had worked on pretty Jean who are sort of like seen as top-down Sven Goliath types of songwriters and producers. So that was kind of the memory that I had around them. I, of course, do remember "Pretty Girls," although I actually hadn't thought about that in "Brepping for this." So, perhaps there was a bit of like a pained process here, but at least the narrative that was sold around this was that this was Britney's return to some form of agency in making her music. And I think we can talk about how much that feels present on this music or not. I think that is kind of an important thread to pull out here. Were you paying attention to Britney at this phase? What was your relationship to this? You have a memory of it coming out? No.