RuthAnne Cunningham helped write Work Bitch, one of Britney Spears’ most iconic (and motivational!) songs and a viral, Top 10 hit. Funny thing is, as the Reservoir-signed star recalls, she didn’t actually realise it at the time...
Work Bitch happened by accident. So often, as a songwriter, you’re really planning songs and thinking about titles, but Work Bitch was the opposite: it was just fun.
I previously had a song on hold for Britney’s Circus album and I was so excited. When you get a song on hold you think, ‘Oh my God, it’s going to be a Britney Spears song!’ I was so close but then it didn’t get on the album. After that, I had put her out of my mind at the time because she was kind of gone [between album campaigns], I didn’t even know anything with Britney was happening!
Basically, there was a guy called Anthony Preston, who was working with Will.I.Am, and every so often he would call me up and say, ‘Hey, do you want to come write with me for a few hours?’ I would go to Treehouse Studio in Santa Monica and Anthony would take a track and then I would start singing melodies and making words to them, that was how we worked together – it was all very quick.
The track Anthony played me [that became Work Bitch] was different, and was originally called ‘Fingers To The Sky’ – we were writing an empowering song and those words are still present in it. The inspiration behind it was that we were talking about the music industry: just how much we get screwed over by different things, and how hard it is. We wanted to come up with a new way to say, ‘Up yours!’ [Laughs].
Afterwards, Anthony took what we’d done to Will.I.Am and he really liked it. Will already had the Work Bitch idea and verses and so he took our sections and put them in and all the concepts fitted. I had no idea this was all actually happening – I got a call four days before it was released!
The inspiration behind Work Bitch was that we were talking about the music
industry: just how much we get screwed overRuth-Anne
At the time, I had just been broken up with, I was feeling really shit and I was broke… And then I got a call from Anthony saying, ‘I want to play you something’. He played it to me over the phone and I was like, ‘Is that Britney Spears?’ Is that our song?’ He said, ‘Yeah, it’s called Work Bitch and it’s her new single!’ That was the fastest turnaround for a song of mine – when I wrote Too Little Too Late, it took two years trying to find a home before JoJo picked it up.
Because I’d been in the industry for so long and so many things don’t happen, I thought it probably wouldn’t come out. Four days later I was getting all these messages because Britney had tweeted the song credits! It just took on a life of its own after that, people were sending me all the different memes – it was even parodied in South Park. I thought it was so clever the way that the two songs worked together.
When I went to see her Vegas show I was like, ‘She probably won’t perform it,’ and she actually opened with it and the merchandise was all Work Bitch themed. It was a big moment and a really good time for her. Every time I would bring my friends to the show, they would turn around to people and say, ‘My friend wrote Work Bitch’ and no one believed them.
With other songs, I work with the artists, but I never met Britney and that makes it even more exciting. I’m from the era of Britney, Christina Aguilera and Backstreet Boys and I kept her as my childhood hero. I’m still so excited by the thought of her performing it. She doesn’t know who I am or how obsessed I was with her as a teen. To write her comeback song, to be a part of that, is crazy to me.
Writer’s Notes
Publishers I.Am Composing, BMG, Refune, UMPG, Sony/ATV, Britney Spears Music/Universal Music-Z Tunes
Writers Britney Spears, Will.I.Am, Otto Jettman, Sebastian Ingrosso, Derek Weintraub, Anthony Preston, RuthAnne Cunningham
Release Date 29.09.13
Record label RCA
Total UK sales (OCC) 224.812
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