Just this side of Britney
Many hard-rock acts would slap you upside the head with a double-neck guitar for suggesting they have anything in common with Britney Spears. Def Leppard isn't one of them.
When vocalist Joe Elliott and guitarist Phil Collen previewed the group's 10th album, appropriately titled X, for Montreal media last week, they made no bones about their intentions to "make a very commercial record," as Elliott put it. Of course, the meaning of "commercial" has been revised since the late 1980s, when Def Leppard's behemoth Hysteria album found a home in 16 million households. That's where the group's collaborators on X came in.
X was recorded with several producers, including longtime associate Pete Woodroffe and Marty Frederiksen, who the group admired for "taking 20 years off" Aerosmith on last year's Just Push Play album. But the collaborators who have raised eyebrows are Andreas Carlsson and Per Aldeheim, the Swedish writers who unleashed Britney Spears and NSYNC hits upon the world.