20th Anniversary: Anastacia's Self-Titled Third Album
The album remains one of my 10 favorite albums of all time.
Once upon a time, the process of acquiring a new album wasn’t as simple as a few taps on an iPhone. Sometimes (even still), albums are given stifled releases throughout territories to give artists the opportunity to promote them, or to break and build a following. But in the early 2000’s and prior, nothing was promised. It took me 6 months to acquire a copy of Anastacia’s eponymous third album here in her native United States. Part of that was due to an initially delayed U.S. release, which was ultimately canceled in 2005. Admittedly, part of it was also pickiness on my part because I had to have a copy that included the bonus disc. Ultimately, receiving the album almost 6 months to the day after its initial March 29, 2004 release was amongst the most satisfying music purchasing experiences of my more than 2,500 pieces of physical music, and Anastacia remains one of my all-time favorite bodies of work.
I can’t fully explain what it was about Anastacia, but she had me from the first time I heard her song “One Day In Your Life” in the spring of 2002. As I’ve previously explained, a comparison to Aretha Franklin piqued my interest and her voice put me in a vice grip that it continues to hold more than two decades later.
It was easy to get a copy of her sophomore album Freak Of Nature, which received a U.S. release in June 2002, 7 months after its initial release in Europe. That was an effort to allow her to continue to build a U.S. presence. Getting a copy of Anastacia in 2004 was nothing short of a saga. Released in Europe on March 29, 2004, it never received a U.S. release despite a few attempts and a renewed campaign in 2005. It only became available in the U.S. on streaming platforms and digital outlets in the mid-2010’s.
Anastacia was a rebirth for the singer, who worked on the album as she recovered from the late January 2003 diagnosis of an aggressive form of breast cancer, and a surgery that followed barely 3 weeks later. She largely departed from the funky upbeats and grandiose ballads that informed her first two records, and heavily incorporated rock into her sound, emerging with a soul/pop/rock that she affectionately deemed “sprock,” complimentary to the rock-driven sounds being thrusted into the mainstream around the same time by major female acts including Evanescence, Avril Lavigne, Ashlee Simpson, P!nk, Lindsay Lohan, Hilary Duff and Kelly Clarkson.
I visited Anastacia’s website daily (as one did in those days), and kicked myself for missing her first televised performance post-surgery. She debuted “Heavy On My Heart” on September 30, 2003 in Los Angeles, at Lifetime’s Women Rock! Songs From The Movies, a breast cancer benefit. Strangely, BeBe Winans is prominently featured in the song’s performance, which changes the hook to “heavy on her heart” instead of “heavy on my heart.” It’s a powerful performance that brings the audience to tears.
During Women Rock! Anastacia also performed Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing,” with Winans, and a brief interlude of “Stayin’ Alive” alongside Heart’s Ann Wilson, Mandy Moore, and Mya.
And while I found a piece of the covers online afterwards, I didn’t miss her next televised performance, which took place on November 29, 2003. It was not only momentous for the company she kept and the event she participated in, but it was also the perfect segue as she pivoted her sound towards rock.
While working on Anastacia with Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, he brought a song to her that he’d been working on for an event honoring Nelson Mandela. She co-wrote and led the new song, called “Amandla,” alongside Dave Stewart and Queen. She performed the song alongside the legendary band and Stewart, as well as an ensemble that included Bono and Beyoncé (clock the moment when she harmonizes with Beyoncé at 3:59, to heavenly results).
During the concert, she also took on perhaps one of the most intimidating roles in rock music: she fronted Queen for “We Will Rock You” and a particularly meaningful rendition of “We Are The Champions.” Her voice fits these grandiose staples of arena rock impeccably. If you can get a reaction like that out of a crowd while fronting one of the biggest rock bands of all time, you’re going to do just fine incorporating rock into your repertoire.
After that, she was quiet until word of “Left Outside Alone”’s release trickled out in late January 2004. I wrote more extensively about my separate saga with “Left Outside Alone,” which became my first-ever iTunes purchase, a few weeks back on the anniversary of its release.
“Left Outside Alone” is a magnanimous record written about her father leaving the family when she was young. The feelings of abandonment and loneliness that she conveys are universal, wrapped up in a sweeping, irresistible chorus. Co-written with and produced by the spectacular duo of Glen Ballard and Dallas Austin, it has all the makings of a hit, which it was, hitting number one in more than half a dozen countries.
A stack of the “Left Outside Alone” CD singles, which was released in the US on April 20, 2004, appeared at my hometown’s Sam Goody shortly after releasing, to my joy. I was taken with the song immediately, and with its release just weeks before the album, my excitement was high, though that transformed quickly. The album didn’t have a release date in the United States, and this was one of the first times I’d been subjected to a regional delay in release for music. I hated it then as much then as I still do now. Though now things are so easily accessible I can have the album as soon as it hits a digital outlet somewhere in the world. I like instant gratification and it’s still frustrating to have to be patient and wait my turn.
Back then though, I had to feed on crumbs. Anastacia’s website saved me from full-blown famine, while simultaneously fueling my unrelenting desire to hear the whole record. Snippets of 2/3 of the album- “Left Outside Alone,” “Welcome To My Truth,” “Time,” “Heavy On My Heart,” “Sick And Tired,” “I Do,” “Pretty Little Dum Dum,” and “Maybe Today,” played on a loop. By the time I got my copy, I knew every note of every snippet.
My memory is fuzzy, but there’s certainly a reason why I didn’t pirate the full album. I certainly had the technology to pirate the album (Morpheus and/or Kaazza, this was pre-Limewire), but at that time I didn’t really download full albums, just a song or two from an artist and of course remixes, live performances, and other rarities. I’d usually go and buy the full thing thereafter. I was, and still am a big advocate for buying music, and my living room full of physical copies backs that up. I didn’t really start downloading full albums until the late 2000’s. I also might have looked for songs and not been able to find them. I’m not entirely sure, but at any rate, I didn’t hear the rest of the album until I had my copy in my hands.
My best bet for acquiring Anastacia back then was eBay and Amazon, but it was all a game. I was also hellbent on scoring a deluxe version of the album that included the bonus disc so I could watch the accompanying documentary. This was further complicated by conflicting DVD formats (there’s NTSC and PAL, and most of the DVDs accompanying Anastacia were in the not-compatible-with-the-U.S. PAL format). Eventually, in September 2004, I secured a copy of the album’s Malaysian pressing from eBay. That pressing included the bonus content on a VCD instead of a DVD, therefore side-stepping the compatibility issues.
I will never forget watching the USPS tracking page of the package like a hawk once it entered the country, and actually going down to the Post Office in my town to try and intercept it because I was an absurdly impatient 14-year-old. Funny enough, it had already been delivered by that time, though I didn’t realize it. The joy of finally holding that album in my hands on September 30, 2004 (per my unapologetically nerdy CD catalog spreadsheet) and hearing it in full was overwhelming. It was a months-long journey finally complete.
On the album’s cover, Anastacia refreshes her look. A new gothic font displays her name/the album’s title, with a distressed effect on top the logo and at the edges of the photo. Anastacia is seated on a trunk, serving a serious face below her signature sunglasses, with flowing reverse balayage hair. In a big-sleeved top and tight jeans, she gives edgy rocker chick chic vibes. It’s a perfect illustration of the music the album contains. A second version of the artwork also exists, which zooms in on the same image.
Anastacia is a multifaceted body of work that largely reaches inward, while not shying away from looking around to comment on the state of the world. She arms herself with an artillery of incredible collaborators to expand her sound, and for the first time, she co-wrote every song on an album. Glen Ballard (Alanis Morisette, Michael Jackson), who Anastacia previously worked with on her 2002 FIFA World Cup theme “Boom,” co-wrote and produced half of the album. Dallas Austin (TLC, P!nk) joined Ballard as a co-writer and co-producer for half of those songs. John Shanks (Sheryl Crow, Ashlee Simpson) and Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics each contributed a duo of tracks, and Patrick Leonard (Madonna) and Ric Wake and Richie Jones (who worked on Anastacia’s first two albums) each added a song into the mix.
Kara DioGuardi, who might be best known as the fourth judge on American Idol, is the most significant player without production credits. DioGuardi has co-writing credits on half of the album. Her hits date back to Kylie Minogue’s “Spinning Around” and Jessica Simpson’s “A Little Bit” but she helped fuel this rock-driven moment in pop, contributing to albums by Lindsay Lohan (“First,” “Over”), Hilary Duff (‘Fly”), Ashlee Simpson (“Pieces of Me,” “Shadow,” “La La,” “Boyfriend,” “L.O.V.E.”).
Part of what makes Anastacia so strong is that it’s just that: an album. Her first two albums, Not That Kind and Freak of Nature both contain some fantastic material, specifically singles like “I’m Outta Love” and “One Day In Your Life,” and choice album cuts like “Who’s Gonna Stop The Rain” and “Don’t Cha Wanna,” but they struggle to come together as full and complete bodies of work. Rock and the electric guitar serve as the threads that tie almost all of these songs together, playing a significant role in the arrangement of every song except the hopeful, orchestral closer, “Maybe Today,” which might be a slight sonic departure, but perfectly punctuates this reflective body of work.
Opening with the apt “Seasons Change,” she makes it clear that sonically and lyrically this album is going to be a departure. Her previous openers, both that album’s title track, were self-identifiers (“I’m not that kind of girl,” “I’m a freak of nature,”), but here, the “I’”s are largely observational and desire-driven. Produced by Glen Ballard and co-written with Kara DioGuardi and Goo Goo Dolls’ lead singer John Rzeznik, the song is a matter-of-fact acknowledgement of the only constant in life: change. It can be exhausting, but it’s going to happen one way or another. Nothing is forever. Electrified with distorted guitars and a hard drum arrangement, it’s a rock song through and through.
She explores similar sentiments on “Time,” another Ballard-Austin production and “Where Do I Belong,” produced by Patrick Leonard. On “Time,” the lyrics are introspective. In the album’s documentary, she poses the questions behind the song: “what are we doing with the time that we have here? What’s happening with all the time that we’re experiencing?” She was trying to remind people that time is precious and our time isn’t forever, so make the most of it. On the song’s post-bridge crescendo her magnanimous voice flexes over filtered backgrounds, heavy drum breaks, guitars, and bass.
On “Where Do I Belong,” she seems to consider the battle with cancer and the effects of the treatments. “To win this twisted war inside me, won’t justify the pain,” she laments, while remembering that “life doesn’t promise a bed of roses.” The hook gives her space to belt and flex her vocal capacity for conquering a rock record.
She continues the narrative started in “Left Outside Alone” on the album’s third single, “Welcome To My Truth.” It further reflects on the abandonment of her father, but recognizes the resilience she possesses as a result of that trauma and the other challenges she’s encountered in her life, whether it be career-related, health-related, or beyond. “I still love,” she sings optimistically.
“Sick and Tired” and “Rearview” serve as the album’s breakup tracks, although the sentiments expressed in each can easily double as illness-related double entendres. “Sick & Tired” served as the album’s second single, and was given a unique flair with a sampled vocal line in Punjabi. The sample translates to mean “I gave my heart to someone who does not care,” complimenting the song’s message about a lover who doesn’t listen or care, causing Anastacia to be “sick and tired of always being sick and tired.
She finds herself moving on as she drives around and reflects on the Shanks production “Rearview.” It’s a driving track with a triple whammy of driving verses, anticipatory pre-chorus, and sweeping hook, one of the strongest on the album’s second half. She blends together bittersweet melancholy with a sense of certainty that some things are in the past for a reason, and she’s not going back.
“Heavy On My Heart” expresses every piece of what I went through,” she says in the album’s documentary, which in-part used footage documenting Anastacia’s surgery originally filmed for a 20/20 profile that aired on May 2, 2003. It serves both as the album’s centerpiece and as the one big ballad, a departure from previous albums which were more ballad heavy. Co-written with Billy Mann and produced by Ballard, she pulls no punches about the overwhelming nature of her rapid diagnosis, surgery, and recovery from breast cancer. “If I could paint a picture of this melody, it would be a violin without its strings,” she sings, heartbreakingly. “I never thought that I would touch an angel’s wings,” she adds in the second verse. Her voice is overwhelming as she pleads for help and acknowledges how terrifying it is to face your own mortality so unexpectedly and in such an ominous way.
Even her commentaries on the world come off organic and genuine, and retrospective in the face of mortality. She growls for a better world on “I Do,” which features a small feature from P.O.D.’s Sonny Sandoval. She more softly hopes for better days on the album’s closer “Maybe Today,” which she created alongside Dave Stewart “This is how I want to say goodbye for now… the message delivered here is, why can’t we just live for today?” she says in the album’s documentary.
She’s similarly got a message to deliver on the more bubbly mid-tempo Ballard production “Pretty Little Dum Dum.” The commentary on conforming to the standards of society and others encourages people, specifically women, to think freely and independently, and be themselves instead of letting others dictate their lives, choices, and thoughts.
The only moment when Anastacia gets as playful as she has on other albums is “Sexy Single,” a self-proclaimed nonsensical record that came out of the label’s push for a single. She thought to herself, “well what if it was a sexy single?” and came up with this ditty alongside Dave Stewart.
It’s easy to imagine how some of these songs could have been given overwrought arrangements in the hands of other producers. “Pretty Little Dum Dum” and “Sexy Single,” would have easily been funk numbers, “Time” actually got a production makeover in 2005 for Anastacia’s ‘Live At Last’ Tour. Anastacia didn’t perform the song but it was used as a vignette between songs. A new mix of the song, a sparse but sticky, poppy arrangement with a hard drum track, replaced the rock arrangement originally applied by Glen Ballard and Dallas Austin.
AFter I received my copy of Anastacia and obsessed over it for a while, my work wasn’t done. I had to secure the singles as they were released. I found a copy of “Welcome To My Truth” at Tower Records in Philadelphia a few days after Christmas in 2004. I then secured a second version of that single and the “Sick and Tired” single at the Virgin Records in Downtown Disney in Orlando, Florida, during a high school trip in January 2005. I scored my copy of “Heavy On My Heart,” online, through an official source, if memory serves correct. Each single release came with a b-side, and one was better than the last, giving me four additional songs to enjoy on top of the album’s initial 12. My favorite of the four are “Twisted Girl” and “Underground Army,” the latter being the only song from the sessions that Anastacia did not co-write.
Her success in Europe was stunning. It became the #2 album on Europe’s year-end chart, peaking at #1 in a dozen countries, scoring gold and platinum certifications all across Europe, and Australia.
She followed Anastacia in 2005 with a stunning collaboration with former Evanescence member Ben Moody. “Everything Burns” was recorded for the soundtrack to 2005’s ‘Fantastic Four’ film, and was a perfect fit for Anastacia.
Later in 2005 she released Pieces Of A Dream, a greatest hits compilation featuring 2 new songs and a bonus disc full of remixes. I managed to score a copy of that deluxe edition in Rome in 2006, because I’m a nerd like that and, even in a city full of centuries of history, b-lined to the record store.
A U.S. release of Anastacia never materialized, but it was in the works more than once. My Sam Goody used to have a release list printed at their registers, and Anastacia was listed and re-listed throughout 2004 as it got pushed further and further back to TBD, at which point they refunded me the few dollars I’d deposited to pre-order it. At some point, it was revealed that the U.S. track listing would replace “Sexy Single” with “Underground Army,” “Heavy On My Heart”’s b-side. A U.S. promo copy of the album listed on Discogs corroborates that information. They even shot a new, sexier video for “Left Outside Alone” and released new single artwork of Anastacia sans sunglasses.
Twenty years later, I’m still frustrated that the label decided to drop the U.S. release of Anastacia. This album fit in perfectly with what was focal in popular music in the U.S at the time, and had serious potential in the market. I’m not entirely surprised though. A decade ago, I interviewed for a job at her old label, and saw the ugly side of the business. The executive I interviewed with had a plaque for the Anastacia album on his wall behind him. I was both surprised and excited to see it in a U.S. office, and immediately pointed out how much I loved the album. He went “oh, I should probably take that down,” got on his chair, and peeled off a hard-to-see-from-my-seat mustache taped on her face. He proceeded to bash her for the next 10 minutes as the worst artist he’d ever worked with (because she’d annoyed him by been overly concerned with a detail in a music video), and then pulled up Soundscan to laugh at the sales of her next album, 2008’s Heavy Rotation (released after she changed labels), which didn’t perform as well as Anastacia. I won’t say his name, but according to the liner notes of one of her albums, he’s celebrated with a “you’re the man.”
The Anastacia journey isn’t over though. I just recently scored a copy of the ‘Live At Last’ DVD (again, hesitating all these years because of disc compatibility), and years back I scored a shirt from the tour on eBay, which is one of my favorite shirts. I want more shirts from the tour. The album has never been pressed on vinyl, but with Not That Kind finally receiving the vinyl treatment in 2020, here's hoping Anastacia follows suit. She’s also never headlined a show in New York City, and I’ve never seen her live. Hopefully that all changes one day, but in the meantime, I’ll be getting lost in Anastacia like it’s 2004 all over again.
Stream and purchase Anastacia