The Lost Britney Spears Album

Buzzfeed has a great story on Original Doll, the Britney Spears album that never was, with a single called “Mona Lisa” that surfaced 10 years ago just once on radio and then was buried along with the rest of the album material in a fascinating period when the pop star simultaneously avowed control while losing it. After getting injured on tour for In the Zone, which the pop star called “the filtered-down version of Original Doll, or the more pop version,” Spears wrote on her blog:

“I’ve actually learned to say ‘NO!’… With this newly found freedom, its [sic] like people don’t know how to act around me. Should we talk to her like we did when she was 16 or like the Icon everyone says she is? My prerogative right now is to just chill & let all of the other overexposed blondes on the cover of Us Weekly be your entertainment… GOOD LUCK GIRLS!!” She also chalked up her knee injury to divine intervention. “I know now that my knee gave out on me this past summer so that I would have no choice but to stop,” she wrote. “My body was shutting down and needed rest. It’s funny how the Man upstairs works.”

Her words were interpreted as a temporary retirement, but she clarified what she meant in a later blog post. “What I meant was I am taking a break from being told what to do,” she wrote. “The things I’ve been doing for work lately have been so much fun, because it’s not like work to me anymore.”

“Mona Lisa,” for what it’s worth, is pretty good even in its rough mix: produced today it might be Lana Del Rey material. “I really know how the process works and I know I can do it on my own,” Spears said in an interview leading up to the In the Zone release, but we know how the story ends. [BuzzFeed]