Back to Basics

The fifth album was a double album, recorded between February 2005 and April 2006. Aguilera said she took her cue from singers of the 1920s to the 1950s, among them Billie Holiday, Otis Redding, Etta James and Ella Fitzgerald, whose music she called music that really had heart. She wrote letters to producers asking them to experiment and create a modern soul feel. The first disc drew on hip hop producers: DJ Premier, Rich Harrison, Kwame and Mark Ronson. The second was produced by Linda Perry, and apart from Candyman, which uses a sample, it was recorded live without samples. Scott Storch was asked back but declined after a dispute over airfare, and the album includes the interlude F.U.S.S. Her marriage to Jordan Bratman in 2005 is the main theme, and Oh Mother is about her childhood with her father. She took on a new alter ego, Baby Jane, and a platinum blonde look, and Ellen von Unwerth took the cover photographs.

Metacritic averages 69 from 17 reviews. Dorian Lyskey of the Guardian found the concept so wide as to be meaningless but called Ain't No Other Man a brassy, brilliant love song, and Slant thought it more cohesive than Stripped. Mike Joseph of PopMatters picked Mercy on Me as the standout. It entered the Billboard 200 at number one with 346,000 copies, her second number-one album, and was her first album to debut atop the UK chart. Ain't No Other Man won the Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, and the album was nominated for Best Pop Vocal Album. The Back to Basics Tour ran from late 2006 to late 2008. Entertainment Weekly placed the album at number 80 on its 2008 list of the hundred best albums of the previous 25 years.