You never really know what life might throw your way, but curveballs are almost unavoidable. Still, some of those end up simply unfavorable. For Stafford, England-born songwriter, DJ and music producer Matthew James Burns, better known as just BURNS, his moment turned out to be anything but disappointing when he decided to move out to Los Angeles four years ago and immerse himself in his fascination with pop production. Since then, he's worked the likes ofKelis, Pitbull, Ellie Goulding and, most recently,Zara Larsson for her forthcoming debut album.
And as fate would turn out, some of those studio sessions led up to his biggest collaboration of them all. We're talking about Britney Spears and her slinky R&B mid-tempo cut, "Make Me," the lead single from the iHeartRadio Music Festival performer's ninth studio album, Glory, which is set to be released on August 26.
Between touring, remixing a cut for On The Verge artist Bishop Briggs and dropping his most recent single, "Waves," featuring Elvis Brown, BURNS hopped on the phone with iHeartRadio for a one-on-one interview to talk about the pop titan's newest single, which takes Spears away from her routine dance floor territory and into the bedroom for a smooth and sexy romp. Take a look below!
You have a really busy schedule with your own tour dates. You're partaking in GTA’s trek. How are you digesting life on the road?
It's definitely gotten a lot more hectic over the last few months. With the Britney stuff, it's kind of become me juggling between doing my own project while doing production stuff for other people, so it's all about time management at the moment. It's getting crazy but I'm happy obviously and I wouldn't complain.
Congratulations on the Britney release. It shot straight up to the top of iTunes and is quite the breath of fresh air. How did the project come about?
I moved out to L.A. like four years ago and when I got out there I became more interested in production stuff. I was getting more of a fascination for pop music at that point. I hadn't really been delving into that realm much at all. I had been doing a lot of club music and experimental production stuff and slightly weird stuff, but I got more interested in U.S. radio and things are kind of interesting out here, in a pop music sense. Radio was getting cooler, which was good for me. I've been on the side as well making my own stuff. I've been doing pop beats [and] just playing around and doing things with guitar and mixing organic elements with that kind of electronic stuff. I made the ["Make Me"] beat a year or so ago, and somehow it managed to get into Britney’s team's hands and then they contacted me and were like, "Britney's starting a new record and we really love this," and it kind of steamrolled from there. We got the vocal done on it and it just became what it is now.
How does the U.S. pop radio scene compare to the one back home in the U.K.?
Right now I feel like it's actually more interesting out here. It didn't used to be that case. It used to be more, like, the U.K. was more adventurous. We would have a theme, and then America would have the same theme but like a year later. It was almost like we were a bit ahead, but I think over the last couple of years, Diplo and Skrillex have really opened up doors to more experimental stuff. The whole EDM scene is so big over here, and radio has just got so interesting. It's almost experimental. It's pop music still, but the sounds are different. In England right now, it's a lot of the same sounding stuff. It's all about U.K. sounding house music. It's a bit zany.
You mentioned that you created the beat a while back before hitting the studio with Britney. I think a lot of people were attracted to the record, particularly because this is a sound that Britney hasn’t explored before and usually her lead singles are out of the gate crazy dance records.You actually get to really hear her voice. Did you go in with that mindset?
Totally. I hadn't listened to a hell of a lot of the most recent Britney stuff. I knew that the previous singles to this one were very much, like you say, down the line. They’re all like fall to the floor kind of uptempo things. The vocal was one of my main focuses on this one because I wanted it to feel like there was some kind of emotion in that, which isn't necessarily in a lot of the most recent singles that she did. I wanted to steer away from that autotune kind of sound and have something much more natural sounding, so we spent a lot of time on the vocal and just getting it to where it sounded like she's actually singing it from the heart rather than it being too much production. I think we've achieved that. I've seen a lot of good reactions and that makes me happy to see because there's a lot of effort being put into the vocal production on the song.
You guys definitely accomplished that. Some of her recent catalog is just driven by the beat and I think that there was such thought put into the lyrics. It really created a special vision.
The thing that I always want to do with pop music is … even if I strip back all of the production stuff, if there's a really good song underneath that already, then it makes it so much easier. It doesn't have to rely on a production gimmick. You can play the song on the piano and it's still a great song, which makes a big difference in my eyes.
What was it like specifically working with Britney in the studio?
It was amazing. It was daunting for me to begin with because she's such a legend and she's kind of a weird entity. She has this crazy insane fan base and she's been doing it for so long. When I got in there, she's just the most normal, down to earth person. It was kind of really easy. It was like you get to know someone over an hour and then it's just like you're buddies working in the studio. It was really simple. I was pleasantly surprised by her because she is such a huge star. Sometimes you think there's going to be some type of ego or whatever, but she was just so cool and it just made the whole experience. She's such a nice person, as well.
There was another guy with you in the photo that she posted on Instagram by the name of Mischke Butler?
He's a vocal engineer. He was the person helping to record the vocals. [He’s] the person that hits the record button and gets everything in there [and] makes sure we get enough takes and stuff. He's really experienced as well. It's good to have him in the room. It was the first time I'd met him, too, but he was such a great guy as well.
You had produced the music prior to visiting her. When did the lyrics come about?
I'd actually made the beat in a friend of mine's kitchen, which is really weird. I was staying with a friend in L.A. I was in between L.A. and London at the time and I made the beat. I had a guitar and I was just on his kitchen counter. (Laughs) I recorded the guitar part there, plugged it into the laptop, which is really funny because it wasn't made in a studio. I finished it there and it was a few months passed that I had the beat. It had gotten into Joe Janiak’s hands, who's a writer from the U.K., who I'd never met before, either. He wasn't really writing for anyone in particular. He picked this beat. He said after the fact that the beat stood out to the him in the folder that he was given. He wrote this topline but it had no lyrics. It was just him doing melodies. It was just him doing gibberish over the beat, but the melody for making was all there. He had a really solid melody and he sent it back to me and I was like, "This is cool and this could be awesome." I think Britney's team heard the song without lyrics to begin with and they already decided that they loved it. It didn't even have lyrics. They were just like, "We need lyrics on this if we really want to use it." So me and Joe had to come up with the lyrics. I got back in touch with him. I was in L.A. He was in London and we just did like loads of stuff over e-mail. He took the verse lyrics, and the chorus came together pretty quick, and that was how that formed.
And now, you also have G-Eazy, who fills the bridge of this song. Was that your intent or Britney's intent to get a feature on the track?
I think it was her [idea]. That came later. Originally, there was no feature. I made a bridge and Britney was singing. There's actually a non-rap version. I think it's out. I have a feeling that you can listen to it. I don't know if it's been released to buy, but it's on the Internet. I know that part.
We'll have to do some digging.
The original non-rap version is around, which has Britney doing a bridge. We had G come in like last subject [about] a month or so before the record was out. I think it was just a suggestion. It’s that kind of vibe. It had that hip-hop feel to it, and I think the beat kind of lends itself to a rap. They were like, "Can you do a gap, where we can put some more in there?" I think G-Eazy heard it. He was just like, "This is big." He wanted to jump on it straight away. It just really came together. It topped it off and it also brought the song up there. It took it somewhere else in a positive way. It just kind of sealed the whole thing off.
Can we look forward to any other of your contributions on Glory?
I didn't really pitch anything else. There was nothing that I had at the time that I thought was in keeping with "Make Me" because I made the beat a year ago, so I was in a different kind of head space, so I just left it at that. I mean, obviously, I'm just really happy to be a part of her single now.
A lot of fans are hoping to see the BURNS remix of "Make Me."
I've been asked to do it. . . .But at the moment, there's just so many different projects that I'm working on and I'm so happy with the original that it doesn't make sense to go in on it again. I'd like to leave it to someone else to try, you know?
"Make Me" is available for purchase on iTunes and all digital retailers.
Image from Britney Spears' Instagram.
In a recent interview with UK paper Metro, singer LeAnn Rimes spoke about Britney Spears and her super public, super poignant mental health issues. LeAnn said she had “been in those shoes too,” and that while she didn’t shave her head surrounded by a mob of drooling paparazzi, and have the images plastered on the cover of every single tabloid ever, she did have her moments.
“I totally understand it,” she said. “I didn’t go there, but I definitely had the feeling of it I’m sure at some point.”
Of course, this has provoked a number of articles with headlines like “LeAnn Rimes Almost Had a Breakdown Like Britney Spears.” Because people can be, um, the worst.
It’ll be ten years next February since Britney reached her breaking point in a salon in Tarzana, California, before taking to a photographer’s car with an umbrella. All in full view of an hysterical crowd.
At the time, reports said she was complaining of her hair extensions being too tight, and that when asked by one of the salon’s employees why she’d done it, she'd responded: “I don’t want anyone touching me. I’m tired of everybody touching me.”
It doesn’t exactly take a hyperactive imagination to appreciate why, after a lifetime of controlled environments, rigorous and demanding schedules, and a frightening lack of privacy, a person might flip. It’s not “crazy” or “insane” for somebody in Britney’s position to eventually say “fuck this, I can’t do it.” If anything, it’s kind of strange that it didn’t happen sooner, or more often. Perhaps because she was the first of her kind.
Britney’s struggles with mental health, which eventually came to a head in 2007 and 2008, were the most public the world, and pop culture, had ever seen. At the height of her fame, Britney couldn’t even go to the bathroom without being followed. Her every move was pulled apart in telephoto-lense snaps, Perez Hilton proto-think pieces, and endless tabloid covers. Everywhere you looked, you’d see Britney robbed of her privacy. Mocked, chased, insulted, embarrassed, harassed, and defamed. A violating upskirt photograph of her crotch made worldwide news for weeks.
She was 26. And a mother of two.
The world watched, and fed off her instability. They egged the madness on. What could be more salacious than the world’s biggest pop star buckling under the pressure? What could sell more copies of People than Britney Spears losing her goddamn mind?
Nothing. Because juicy and perverse makes money. In Vanessa Grigoriadis’ 2008 Rolling Stone feature piece “The Tragedy of Britney Spears,” we were invited to meet The Real Britney. "The Tragedy of Britney Spears." As if she were a play, not a nuanced and complex human being.
“She is not a good girl” Grigoriadis wrote. “She is not America's sweetheart. She is an inbred swamp thing who chain-smokes, doesn't do her nails, tells reporters to ‘eat it, snort it, lick it, fuck it’ and screams at people who want pictures for their little sisters.”
Buried between Grigoriadis’ petty reductions, and accounts of Britney's many unusual business relationships that seemed nothing if not manipulative and toxic, the profile unearthed stories of Britney being forced to work when she was unfit, and told of her father’s emotional abuse and drug addiction that Britney witnessed as a young woman. Yet Grigoriadis’ piece failed to find any empathy for her.
Instead, Britney was the scathing, indignant fame whore, who took advantage of us for her own gain. We were the victim, and she had failed us.
Britney on the cover of V Magazine.
The Rolling Stone cover story did give us something, though: a record of red flags. We see obvious signs Britney was losing her ability to cope with her own super-sized fame. Accounts of her behaviour changing over time, from the All-American “good girl,” who was endlessly polite and a joy to work with, to a snappy, cagey, and increasingly paranoid woman who wouldn’t even give a fan the time of day. She, understandably, felt like nobody could be trusted.
Still, in Grigoriadis’ closing paragraph—less than a hundred words after the part about her possible attempted suicide, when she'd overdosed on prescription drugs in 2007—we were told that “after blaming everyone else for her problems, Britney's finally starting to realize the degree to which she's messed up, but her sense of entitlement keeps her from admitting it to herself, or to anyone who is trying to help her.”
In November of 2008 the world was invited to go deeper still, with the intimate documentaryBritney: For the Record. A collection of interviews and behind the scenes footage, For the Record showed us a side of Britney’s fame that we weren’t really ready to see.
This is what it was actually like to be Britney. Not the girl next door, the “...Baby One More Time” Britney. But the Britney who was going through a heartbreaking divorce. The Britney who was attempting to rehabilitate after a major mental health crisis. The Britney who’d had her child knocked out of her arms by unrelenting photographers, trying to get to her car to escape them, only to have the photo of her “dropping her baby” spread like wildfire, on every front page, and used as an example of her incompetence.
In one particular scene (the one that everyone always talks about) we watched Britney try to make sense of the recent months—her marriage to Federline, her custody battle, the hair thing. She breaks down, cries, and says “I’m sad.” This was meant to be her comeback film.
In the documentary’s deleted scenes, we saw an even more disturbed Britney. “If I wasn’t under the restraints that I’m under right now,” she’d said, referring to the strict confines of her day-to-day life, “I would feel so liberated. And when I tell them how I feel it’s like, they hear me… but they’re really not listening.”
“Even when you go to jail, there’s always the time that you know you’re going to get out. But in this situation,” she starts to cry, “it’s never-ending.”
Since then, reports have smattered the pages of papers and have popped up online, claiming that all manner of indecencies were plaguing Britney and her camp during this time, including her being drugged and controlled by her former manager Osamah “Sam” Lufti. Following a popular trope of the inexperienced right-hand-man to an impressionable superstar (a la Brian Wilson and Anna Nicole Smith), from the moment she met Lufti, Britney's life spiralled further out of control.
Britney met Lufti in a club through a mutual friend. He was a “consultant” at a gas company at the time. Lufti told Britney he’d manage her affairs for an extremely casual 15% of her $800k a month salary. That’s a paycheck of $120,000 a month. He apparently printed their contract off the internet.
Image from Britney's Instagram.
Britney’s father eventually took out a restraining order against him, fearful that he was trying to control her assets, her timetable, her music: basically, her life. Lufti had moved into her house, cut the phone lines. Several people close to Britney believe to this day that Lufti was slipping prescription drugs into her food. Sam Lufti has had three other restraining orders taken out against him.
To this day he is still trying to take Britney to court, claiming financial retribution and labelling her as a “meth addict.”
Looking back on what happened to Britney—what still happens to Britney, if you’re in the habit of Googling her and coming across articles that say things like “it's hard to remember when she was famous for making music and not for being crazy”—you’d think we’d have learnt our lesson. But if Amanda Bynes and Lindsay Lohan are anything to go by, we’re still as predatory as ever. And that is a pretty depressing thing.
LeAnn Rimes also said in her interview with Metro that she admired Britney. “I look at her and think it’s really amazing what she’s overcome. It’s nice to see someone come out the other side and be successful again.”
That’s the quote that deserves follow-up articles. That’s the quote. Because Britney Spears is still one of the most successful women in pop.
If you have to, forget the guts it took for her to step back into the spotlight, back out on stage, knowing full well the ridicule and speculation that would come with it—that some people were probably expecting her to fail. That kind of strength is pretty incredible, but that's not even the story here.
Since 2008, we have seen three full-length albums from Britney Spears, and there's another, Glory, on the way. She has toured the world twice—pause on that for a moment. The world. Twice—and has performed her Piece of Me stage show, AKA her residency in Vegas,fifty times a year for the last three years. That is insane.
She also appeared as a—mind-blowingly screencap-able—judge on season two of U.S. X Factor, and was the highest-earning judge on a singing competition series in history. She was also named music’s top-earning woman in 2012 by Forbes Magazine.
Most importantly, she told People magazine that she’s the “happiest [she’s] ever been.” Don't believe her? Look at her freakin' Instagram.
No matter how much the world wanted this woman to fail, she didn’t.
"You're an amazing dancer, oh my goodness," Spears gushed at the end of her "Freakshow" performance, calling Haynes "so beautiful" and joking that he could call her "anytime." Haynes, meanwhile, was still strapped helplessly in a harness.
Later, as Haynes exited the stage, Spears couldn't help but let out an emphatic, "Everyone's so beautiful -- and his a**!"
"I don't even know what just happened," Haynes wrote on Twitter after the show. "I got brought up on stage to perform with @britneyspears & I hope I get a residency now!!! Lol."
On Instagram, Haynes admitted that he was "still in shock."
"What the hell just happened!!!??? So cool!!!" he captioned the video.
Britney has just officially announced her debut performance of "Make Me" with G-Easy at the 2016 VMA.
Remember it has been 9 years since her last this is her first time performing back on the show after all this time. And yes we know 2007 last performance was the "Gimme More" but we all forgot it when her team removed all videos from the Web just about.
We are excited her first big performance back on the VMAs a reason to watch the show and be amazed.