Dirty Girl Cleans Up

Her new release, Back to Basics, is a double CD of new tricks on which she adds a unique, modern twist to the black music she grew up singing, and recasts herself as a modern pinup girl with a penchant for old-Hollywood glamour. It was during her world tour supporting Stripped that Christina formulated the game plan for her new look and sound, which she says "began as an attempt to realize what makes me wanna dance, to sing, to love, to appreciate, to enjoy life and to want to make music."

She found the common thread in the music that she had sung as a child, at block parties and at the local pool. Christina grew up in Pennsylvania, Texas and Japan -- wherever her army-sergeant father, Fausto, was stationed. Fausto and her mother, Shelly, divorced when she was seven. She chronicled her father's domestic abuse on a song from Stripped, "I'm Okay." Music was always her way of coping with the pain in her life -- from the age of two, she would line up her stuffed animals and sing to them. Sometimes she was drowning out the sound of her parents fighting.

After their divorce, Christina, her younger sister Rachel and her mother moved in with her grandmother, Delcie Fidler, in Rochester, Pennsylvania, a small Pittsburgh suburb. "My grandma was the first to realize that singing was something I did all the time," says Christina, "something I loved. For me, my voice and music was always an outlet. Growing up in an unstable environment and whatnot, music was my only real escape."

When Christina began singing in public, Grandma Delcie got a major kick out of watching the crowd's shocked response as wee Christina belted tunes far beyond her years -- songs from the repertoires of Billie Holiday, Otis Redding, Ella Fitzgerald and Pearl Bailey. "There's a lot of meat in that music," Christina says. "I really connected with that pain. At a young age I just gravitated toward that." Christina and Delcie would travel to Pittsburgh to scour record shops for those "nitty-gritty" soul and blues numbers. Christina would learn these songs immediately and sing them through a dinky Radio Shack karaoke machine for her grandma, who'd shower her with constructive criticism. "She always taught me to go deeper within myself," she happily remembers. "If I was belting too close to the mike, she'd say, 'Pretend Daddy is over there asleep on the couch and you don't want to wake him.' She always gave me something to think about." To this day, she still refers to those records as her "fun music."

Once the Stripped tour ended, Christina escaped from the public eye. Not seeing her on TV or in the news, her grandma even called to ask what was up. Christina was laying low, methodically plotting her return to the spotlight. She was also spending quality time with a new man, Jordan Bratman. Soon, though, she had compiled a two-CD mix of songs from her past that would help define her vision to prospective producers, everything from the Andrews Sisters' "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" and vampy numbers from Eartha Kitt to Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You" (along with Nina Simone's take on the same song), as well as Otis Redding's "Tramp" and more modern classics like Gang Starr's "Ex-Girl to Next Girl" and Xzibit's "Get Fucked Up With Me." . . .

[Excerpt From Issue 1007 — August 24, 2006]