The prospect of a new version of Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” with vocals from Britney Spears has sent the music world into a tizzy for weeks, particularly since Spears has not released fresh music in six years amid the knockdown, drag-out battle over her conservatorship. Luckily, “Hold Me Closer,” produced by Andrew Watt and Cirkut and finally due out at midnight ET, is an unabashed dance-floor celebration of good vibes much in the vein of John’s surprise smash 2021 collaboration with Dua Lipa, “Cold Heart,” which was built on elements of his past hits such as “Rocket Man.”
John first worked with former Grammy producer of the year Watt while making a guest appearance on the 2020 Watt-produced Ozzy Osbourne album “Ordinary Man,” which led to Watt producing John’s “Cold Heart”-featuring “The Lockdown Sessions” album last year. “The song is still in the 20s on the global top 50, and it has been over a year,” Watt (pictured above) tells Variety of “Cold Heart.” “It really resonated with people, because the world is so serious right now. It was a way to scream an Elton John song while you’re out at a nightclub and also feel Dua’s energy. Elton wanted to do a follow-up to that song. Why wouldn’t he? We thought we’d try something with ‘Tiny Dancer,’ so they sent me the original stems.”
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“Andrew and I have been collaborating on a bunch of music recently, and one day he called me up to ask if I’d want to produce something for Elton together,” says Toronto-born Cirkut (real name: Henry Walter), who has also worked with Spears several times in the past. “I’ve been a fan of Elton’s since I was young, so of course I had to be involved. We were able to mix in and re-arrange the original strings, guitar, piano and background vocals from ‘Tiny Dancer.’ We stumbled upon this amazing guitar part that I didn’t even know was in the song — it’s not a prominent part of the original production. We used that as the basis for the beginning of ‘Hold Me Closer’ and built around it. We had it playing on loop while Watt started playing bass and I programmed the drums.”
Of that Caleb Quaye guitar part, Watt marvels, “It literally sounded like Hendrix. I was like, what the fuck is this? Is this actually Hendrix? Was he even alive then? I FaceTimed Elton and played it for him, and he was like, ‘That’s fucking amazing!’ I said, ‘Give me a couple hours. I just got really inspired.’” When the two producers laid the “Tiny Dancer” hook atop of their nascent instrumental bed, “that was it,” Watt says. “It clicked. We had our fuckin’ record.”
“We had to figure out how to put a new spin on it while still preserving the spirit of the original,” Cirkut says of the challenge inherent in reinterpreting a song as well-known as “Tiny Dancer. “The original song’s tempo is 73 BPM (beats per minute). We could have gone half-time with it and taken it in a completely different direction than we did but we wanted to do something upbeat and danceable, so we essentially slowed down the tempo of the original and made the beat double-time. Once the groove was locked into place, I knew we had something special.”
Watt was leaving his Beverly Hills studio in anticipation of flying to Dallas to meet John the next day when another idea hit him. He recalls, “As I’m going up the stairs, I’m singing to myself, ‘hold me closer … hold me closer.’ What if we take that first line of the classic chorus and repurpose the melody a little bit? I ran back downstairs and Cirkut was already packing up his stuff, but he’s so amazing that we quickly took my idea and turned it into this post-chorus type of thing at the end of the song. The structure was developing. But there’s a lot of pressure to sit down and be like, ‘Hey Elton, here’s another version of “Tiny Dancer.”’ What I had to keep telling myself is that this is not a new version of ‘Tiny Dancer.’ It’s a great addition to an already amazing piece of art. Luckily, he loved it.”
While John and Watt were sitting together in Toronto the next day, John’s husband and manager David Furnish showed off some new merch featuring photography used on John’s 1992 album “The One.” Says Watt, “We’re staring at this hoodie while sitting on the couch, and it hits Elton: What about ‘The One’ for the verses? He starts singing it, but he’s singing it a little different. We went through melodies together, and it’s the words and the vibe, but the melody is repurposed to work over the chords. We took the vocal from that and tweaked it. ‘Tiny Dancer’ and ‘The One’ are 20-something years apart, but they worked together unbelievably.”
John later played Fender Rhodes piano through a Roland Jazz Chorus amp and added new piano parts to “Hold Me Closer,” leaving one important and final element of the song to be conceptualized. “He wanted to collaborate again with an artist and came up with the idea to have Britney on the record,” Watt says, confirming that Spears recorded her vocals at his studio. “The fact that it came together and she wanted to do it and how she sounded on the record — you couldn’t have made it up. It’s amazing. It’s a moment in time. She elevated the record so much and put so much of her own personality into it — all of her ad-libs, runs and soulfulness.”
Spears “was actually one of the first major artists I got to produce for back when I was first getting my start professionally,” says Cirkut. “It feels very special to be a part of her first release in quite some time, not to mention at a significant positive turning point in her life and career. Seeing her fans’ excitement gets me excited.” Adds Watt, “I was born in 1990, so she’s my pop star, you know? She’s the one I grew up watching on MTV. She’s my Madonna. To record with her and hear that voice was just incredible. She was a master at hearing her own voice and knowing when she had the take. You’d never think her and Elton’s voices would blend so well, but they do. She took the record to a place we never dreamed it could go and really made it an event.”
Ultimately, “Hold Me Closer” is a ray of positivity amid a world perpetually struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic, the threat of escalating war in Ukraine and bitter political and cultural divisions. “Everyone is on edge,” Watt says. “This song is just a celebration. It hopefully keeps the summer going for another couple of months. It’s a song to go out and sing your ass off to at Elton John karaoke. You can get lost in it. You want to have a good time. The songs that are serious and can change the world are amazing too, but this one, you can just leave everything off to the side and enjoy. Britney’s had a lot of stuff to go through, and maybe this is that moment for her, too — a moment of getting to be carefree and use her voice to make people dance and have fun.”
Asked why he thinks John has been so enthusiastic about revamping his classic material when so many artists of his vintage are content to rely on decades-old formulas, Watt says the artist “loves music more than anyone in the world. He’s the only person on the planet I could sit with and in the same sentence talk about Lizzo and Jerry Lee Lewis. We just sit and listen to other people’s music for hours and hours — the other night we went from James Blake to Aretha Franklin. His breadth and knowledge of music is so wide, so it makes sense that he enjoys making modern music. You can’t play ‘Tiny Dancer’ in a nightclub. You could, but it would have to be a remix. So for Elton, why not do it himself? Why not put his musical genius into it and make a version that the youth of today will want to listen to?”
John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road tour has been paused since early August but will resume with shows on Sept. 7-8 in Toronto. Watt produced Osbourne’s next, star-packed album, “Patient Number 9,” which arrives Sept. 9 from Epic, while Cirkut was behind the boards for his longtime partner Ava Max’s upcoming release “Diamonds & Dancefloors,” due Oct. 14 via Atlantic.
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