One of the benefits of the streaming age is the unlimited access to more music than we could hope to listen to in our lifetimes. Here at MR HQ, we consume music at industrial levels, but it never ceases to amaze us which songs our peers cite as their proverbial desert island disc.
One of our brethren is a recording engineer. He’s worked with some huge names, from Depeche Mode to David Bowie, but once admitted to us that there was one particular song that had managed to capture his ear like no other, but if he was ever asked about it in public, he would flatly deny his admiration and liking for Britney Spears' effervescent Toxic.
Pop snobbery aside, there is an incredible amount about Toxic to respect. Released in 2003, the track's tightness in production terms - with heavily truncated and gated sounds - meant it hit the ears of millions with just the right amount of punch. It's also full of fascinating production flourishes, namely that swooping string sample…
Back in the beginning, Toxic wasn't intended to be a Britney song at all. It was originally written by Christian Karlsoon, and Pontus Winnberg (aka Bloodshy & Avant) alongside Henrik Jonback, and the master of commercial pop success herself, Cathy Dennis. Dennis penned the lyric about her recent breakup with former boyfriend Noel Fitzpatrick (aka, The Supervet, trivia fans).
Writing the lyric was difficult for Dennis; "That was sheer torture," she said in an interview with Songwriting Magazine "I beat myself up for seven days, not sleeping. The melody came first, then I had this puzzle of trying to fit words to the right number of syllables. It was really weird. I kept writing and then re-editing myself again, and again, and again."
“Some of my stuff I just couldn’t get, and Toxic is a great example,” Dennis told The Gentlewoman. “It’s not that I didn’t like it, I just thought it was too odd, too complicated. I felt like I had been so in my head that I couldn’t judge.”
Initially, the song was written with Janet Jackson in mind, but she passed, so they moved on to the next artist, Kylie Minogue. Kylie too, wasn't impressed…
Britney Spears was thrilled by the song however. According to sources, Spears was incredibly excited about the opportunity to record the song, insisting that the record company release Toxic as a single, even through there was reluctance and push-back to do so.
“I really like Toxic,” Britney told MTV. “It’s an upbeat song. It’s really different, that’s why I like it so much.”
Her instincts were on point, and Spears must have felt somewhat smug when Toxic became a chart-topper across the globe.
There's several reasons why Toxic has become such an important song for Britney, and continues to resonate over twenty years since its writing. Let's explore why…
One of the most endearing production traits of the song is the sense of space. The drums are gated and heavily compressed, without any sense of reverberation beyond a very short decay.
The guitar and bass tend to sit alongside the drums, adding punctuating rhythms which nicely frame the vocal.
However, one element that inadvertently became a key hook of the song, is the use of the string sample which we tend to hear at the end of each 8-bar section.
It nestles among an additional live string orchestration (recorded as a separate entity) which crescendos and adds a pad-like element to the verses.
The high glissando-based string sample was taken from the song Tere Mere Beech Mein, which was part of the soundtrack for the Bollywood film Ek Duuje Ke Liye. The production team also played around with the sample, stretching it out, and even reversing it on one occasion.
As a song, Toxic conforms to a fairly regular song construct. After a brief introduction, the first verse is driven by an 8-bar section, which is repeated.
Fixed in the key of C minor, Toxic plays around with the tonality of the relative major, and the major dominant.
After four bars which are fixed in C minor, we shift to Eb major and G major, both for a bar each, before returning back to C minor, for two bars, replete with the associated string sample at the end of the sequence.
Having repeated this section, it then repeats a further time, but this time with a different vocal line, acting as a pre-chorus bridge.
The vocal line here plays around with the chord structure even further, by using 6ths and 7ths in the melody, which are the element that adds that slight sense of James Bond-esque mystery to the harmony - it's a similar device to the James Bond theme in fact, where we hear the addition of a min/maj 6th leading line to a minor chord. It’s a classic John Barry trick!
After a short interlude, where we hear a synth bass with a heavy high-pass filter applied (or equivalent EQ), we head into the chorus.
This section gathers pace by increasing the speed of movement to a chord per bar, alongside a greater use of 7ths.
This begins with a straight chord of Cm, followed by a descending sequence of Eb7, D7 and Db7, all for a bar each.
This chromatic and descending movement also provides a further sense of spy-like mystery to the harmony. We then move back to Cm, and Eb, before things alter slightly, with a chord of Ab and a final chord of what sounds like G7 with an added #9.
This is an interesting moment, because while the guitar plays G7#9 for the whole bar, the bass shifts from G up to a Db, for 2-beats each.
This creates a further sense of angst and hiatus, as Db does not fit into this chord, but acts as a tritone pivot, before heading back to the home chord of Cm.
This section then repeats, but this time with a nice change to the chorus construct.
Now we hear new melodic content which is provided by a lead guitar which is also heavily garnished with tremolo, framing an additional vocal part from Britney.
Once we have heard a complete cycle of two verses and two chorus, we shift to a breakdown section, which serves as a form of bridge.
It is heavily reliant upon high-pass filtering with added distortion, and a bass part which leans heavily on the previously-heard chorus harmony.
This underpins the wailing and reverberated vocal which flies over the top, before we head back to the chorus for the outro of the song.
Backed by accompanying iconic video, wherein Britney was famously dressed as a stylised air hostess, Toxic became a worldwide smash, climbing to number one in the UK, with similar successes elsewhere. Toxic was, quite literally, inescapable.
Toxic has of course become one of Spears’ most recognisable songs, nominated for a myriad of different awards and securing Best Dance Recording at the Grammys, and winning the ASCAP and Ivor Novello awards for the most performed song of 2004. Not bad for a song that Janet Jackson and Kylie first assumed was a bit of a stinker…
"I listened to a snippet of it in the record-company offices and decided against it. I knew that Britney was keen for it,” Kylie later admitted to The Sun. “That's cool. I wasn't at all angry when it worked for her. It's like the fish that got away. You just have to accept it."
