Christina Aguilera has gone retro before, but this time she’s putting a new spin on her own history. For Christina’s greatest-hits-with-a-couple-new-songs album, Keeps Gettin’ Better, A Decade of Hits , out yesterday, the 27-year-old pop star is looking back on some of her biggest hits while also moving ahead.
“It was tough looking back, it was surprising. It was really gratifying to see how much hard work I’ve put in over the last 10 years. When you’re in it, you just don’t realize as it accumulates how much you’ve done and how far you’ve come. I can’t believe it’s been a decade already. On the album, I wanted to include all the songs that I know I loved and that are crowd pleasers and real staples of my career thus far.”
Of course, a lot has changed for the singer in recent years. She’s gotten gotten married and became a mom when her son, Max, was born earlier this year. “It’s such a special time for me, being a new mom, releasing this album, the first year of my son’s birth,” she explained. “I’m looking forward to the next 10 years, which is partly why I named the album, Keeps Gettin’ Better, ’cause it does.”
Christina decided to reinvent two of her biggest hits, “Genie in a Bottle” and “Beautiful,” for the new LP. “They are two of my favorites for that reason. I think my fans at this point know I like to change and revisit my catalogue every time I go on tour to give my songs a fresh new life, and I think they appreciate that,” she said. “I wanted to give them a little sneak preview of what’s to come, and the vein of the new material is sort of futuristic, what was inspiring me at the moment, and it has a very pop-art feel visually.”
These songs, as well as the album’s single “Keeps Gettin’ Better,” are only a taste of what Aguilera fans can expect for her next album, which she was inspired by the likes of cultural icons such as Blondie, Velvet Underground chanteuse Nico, and artists Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. She said she’s diving deep into “electro in particular” and she’s lined up a slew of dance-music artists to collaborate with including Goldfrapp (who are strongly evoked in the sound of “Keeps Getting’ Better”) and Ladytron.
“It is a sneak preview of what’s to come for the next record, hopefully to be released in the summer of 2009, which is very exciting,” she said. “It’s a challenge and an exciting new project for me to reinvent what I am doing yet again, and come up with something new and fresh.”
