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Christina Aguilera just needed a break. The singer, on the cusp of a major comeback at the age of 37, had just been released from a day in New York spent getting reacquainted with the metabolism of the pop star album cycle, which she hadn’t experienced in the six years since 2012’s Lotus. There had been a photo shoot followed by a video taping followed by an industry appearance, all crammed into a five-hour sprint during which Aguilera was touched and clothed and instructed and observed closely by people she’d just met. Most distressing of all for her, though, was how the day had begun: with a one-on-one meeting with Anna Wintour.
“Of course I was nervous,” Aguilera said. “I mean, my goodness!”
Now, after a respite alone in her hotel room at the Four Seasons, she re-emerged relaxed and refreshed, her shoulder-length platinum hair pulled back into an efficient bun, wearing a layer of natural makeup. Aguilera, who has owned the calling card of tiny person with the ginormous voice since she was belting out Whitney Houston covers at elementary school talent shows outside Pittsburgh, padded out of her bedroom freshly scrubbed, having shed the armor of her blinding white Michael Kors pantsuit for black Adidas track pants, a white tank, and a black silk polkadot kimono that looked like it could’ve come from the studio of Yayoi Kusama. She curled up on a gray couch with her bare feet tucked beneath her. Although there was no one else in sight—somewhere in the massive suite were a publicist, a manager, and two assistants, and in the hallway was a bodyguard twice her size—Aguilera seemed capable of bursting into laughter that could fill a TV studio at any moment. She can still be irrepressible as her voice.
“But it ended up being great!” she said of her meeting with Wintour. “I left the office and everyone was like, ‘We’ve never heard her laugh like that.'”
“Anyway, my head’s still on,” she continued, pulling her kimono tightly around her shoulders. Even with everything going on, Aguilera’s first order of business, she told me, was the progress of her younger sister’s engagement party, which she was planning as the maid of honor. “I just want everything to be special for her. She’s one of those people who never thinks about anyone else, so I’m very mama-bear with her.” The timing couldn’t be worse, of course, with Aguilera’s comeback imminent. “Ay yi yi,” she said, and rolled her eyes. “When is it ever the best time for anything?”
In January, Aguilera finally addressed her long-awaited return by having a little fun with a fan who memed her Hollywood Walk of Fame star by placing sticky notes over the photo to form the question: “Dear Christina Aguilera, where the f*** is the new album?” To which Aguilera replied, “It’s coming, bitches….” In early May, she released the first single from Liberation: “Accelerate,” a sultry vibe-out produced by Kanye West, and a reminder to her fans that Aguilera, who hasn’t made the tabloids in years for being too rowdy, still knows how to get down—and a signal to a potential new audience who might have come to it because of Ty Dolla $ign and 2 Chainz, who take the song in new and surprising directions for Aguilera. “There’s something loose and admirable happening here: Everyone is trying new things, and the disarray verges on flamboyance,” Jon Caramanica wrote about “Accelerate” in the New York Times.
Others, though, were left disappointed by the instrument noticeably underused in the song: Aguilera’s famous voice. “She should be wrapping her golden throat around something like Demi Lovato’s operatic ‘Sorry Not Sorry,'” advised Pitchfork.
On Wednesday, she did, releasing “Fall in Line,” featuring Lovato, who along with Keshaand Katy Perry is among Aguilera’s natural pop successors. “Fall in Line” could very well be Liberation’s “Beautiful,” a fiery barn burner for little girls with dreams that allows Aguilera to really wring her voice for every drop of might be called ecstatic schmaltz. And, like “Beautiful,” the song really works.
“I’m a soul singer—my voice just goes there,” Aguilera said. “It’s actually hard for me to sing songs straight.”
Soul, of course, is defined by the way it transforms centuries of struggle into something beautiful and full of sorrow at the same time. As an artist, Aguilera, who idolizes Etta James and even formed a bond with her before she died, has at times been a sufferer in need of something to suffer. Her album, which will at last be released on June 15, has been endlessly delayed. The six-year hiatus is due to a number of reasons: Aguilera kept meeting collaborators she wanted to work with (Anderson Paak, Che Pope, Mike Dean, and Kanye West are all credited as producers on Liberation). She’s also been busy raising her 10-year-old son, Max, with her ex-husband Jordan Bratman, and her 3-year-old daughter, Summer, with her fiancé, Matt Rutler. And then there’s the thorny deterrent we’ve come to identify Aguilera with of late: The Voice.
“It was such a hamster wheel,” Aguilera said, sounding dismayed by the memory. She had signed on as one of The Voice’s original judges, along with Adam Levine, Cee Lo Green, and Blake Shelton, in 2011, sometime after the release of Bionic, her foray into electronic music (and a critical and commercial flop of sorts, though it still has a certain fandom today). In case you’re the rare person who has never seen it, the NBC competition show’s gimmick is that its judges sit in huge chairs with their backs to the contestants, so as to make their decisions solely on the quality of the singing. It smartly played to Aguilera’s strengths, at least at first. “And t
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