MAD MAX? “Give him a bottle of red wine and it’s on,” Pink says of Swedish tween-pop producer Max Martin. |
Like most people with a passing interest in the radio and MTV, Pink used to associate Max Martin, the Swedish songwriter/producer, with the sugary Britney Spears–style dance pop that pads out his ample discography. That changed when she hooked up with him to work on songs for I’m Not Dead (LaFace). “I got him in the studio,” she reports over the phone from Las Vegas, “and dude is a punk-rocker. He’s a fucking punk! Give him a bottle of red wine and it’s on.”“Who Knew,” the aptly titled single they crafted together with Martin’s partner Dr. Luke, isn’t quite punk rock. A brisk, guitar-based tween-pop rave-up in Martin’s invaluable “Since U Been Gone” mold, it derives its considerable power from its metronomic beat and precise vocal harmonies, qualities that don’t crop up regularly in, say, the Black Flag catalogue. But it’s sure not Britney, and that sense of surprise — the notion that you never know what you’re going to get when you cue up a new Pink CD — seems to be the singer’s point.
“When I hear a hip-hop beat and an acoustic guitar, to me it sounds the same,” says Pink, who comes to Avalon this Tuesday, explaining why four albums into a career that began with the sassy white-girl R&B of Can’t Take Me Home (LaFace), she’s flitted from arena-glam electroclash to hair-metal power balladry to American Idol piano pop. “My voice is my instrument, and I wanna use it in as many different ways as I can. I grew up listening to all different kinds of music” — she cites Aretha Franklin, Patsy Cline, 2 Live Crew, Guns N’ Roses, Mary J. Blige, and the Mamas and the Papas. “It’s all my influences. And I don’t like to repeat myself; I get bored easily. I like being a big mystery bag. It confuses some people, but it works for me.”
Indeed it does. If previous Pink albums had raised the possibility that her eclecticism might be the product of an indecisive nature — one formed during a childhood spent skateboarding, singing in all-black churches, and studying opera — I’m Not Dead confirms that it’s a conscious strategy in a marketplace increasingly defined by narrowing tastes. Which doesn’t make working with high-profile songwriters and producers — each known for a specific sound, à la Max Martin — a walk in the park.
“They’re completely confused by me,” she says of her collaborators, who’ve included former 4 Non Blondes frontwoman Linda Perry, Tim Armstrong of Rancid, power-pop whiz Butch Walker, Dr. Dre sideman Mike Elizondo, and radio-pop hitmaker Billy Mann. “People are like, ‘Well, what kind of song do you wanna do?’ I’m like, ‘I dunno. Play something.’ ” She says the process usually involves lots of conversation and experimentation in the studio; she often starts by describing what she doesn’t want, “which helps me find what I do want.” For I’m Not Dead, she wrote and recorded more than 40 tunes, only 13 of which made the final cut. “Some of them I could never do, but somebody else could. Some of them don’t make any sense whatsoever: ‘Oh, so death metal and opera really don’t go together.’ ”
