Music

After American Pie she announced that she was pregnant with her son Rocco and concentrated on the album. Sessions began in September 1999 at Sarm West Studios in London. A first round of songs with William Orbit was thrown out: after about nine she felt they were too close to Ray of Light and started again. Guy Oseary of Maverick introduced her to the French producer Mirwais Ahmadzaï, through a demo tape from the photographer Stéphane Sednaoui. Impressive Instant and Paradise (Not for Me) came almost wholesale from his demo. Pitchfork counts six of the ten songs as his and three as Orbit's. They struggled with a language barrier at first, and Auto-Tune was used on some tracks at her request. Guy Sigsworth produced What It Feels Like for a Girl, which builds on a sample of Charlotte Gainsbourg's voice from the film The Cement Garden. The title track is Music.

The western look came from a photo shoot with Jean Baptiste Mondino on 10 to 13 April 2000, with a cowboy look suggested by Mondino and styling by Arianne Phillips. The whole album leaked on Napster on 22 August 2000. It topped the charts in 23 countries, sold four million copies in its first ten days and entered the Billboard 200 at number one with more than 420,000 copies, her first number one album there in more than a decade. Metacritic averages 80 from 16 reviews, though The Guardian's Garry Mulholland dismissed it as screamingly, amusingly, hypnotically naff. Pitchfork's Shaad D'Souza, writing in 2023, called it an album designed to unite the disparate tastes of America and Europe. Kevin Reagan won the Grammy for Best Recording Package for its design.