page_title: Impossible Princess
section_title: Background and development
hierarchical_section_title: Impossible Princess / Background and development
caption_attribution_description: English: Nick Cave at the Union Square Barnes &amp; Noble to read from his new book, The Death of Bunny Munro. Photographer's blog post about the photo and event.
context_page_description: Impossible Princess is the sixth studio album by Australian singer Kylie Minogue, first released on 22 October 1997, by Deconstruction, BMG, and Mushroom Records. The singer asserted partial creative control over the project—taking part as a co-producer and composer to the material—and was assisted by various musicians and producers, namely Brothers in Rhythm, Manic Street Preachers, David Ball and Rob Dougan.
  Sonically, Impossible Princess is a departure from Minogue's previous music, having taken influence from the techno and Britpop revolution in the mid-to-late 1990s. Conceived as an experimental record, the material encompasses a variety of darker styles from the dance genre, including trip hop, electronica, rock, drum and bass and house. Additionally, selected recordings experiment with cultural elements like Middle Eastern and Celtic music. Lyrically, the album's central focus is Minogue's self-discovery after a series of trips around Asia, America and Australasia, and further delves into the freedom of expression, relationships and emotions.
context_section_description: Minogue signed a three-album deal with British dance label Deconstruction in 1993, and released its first offering, her self-titled fifth studio album on 19 September 1994. The following year, the singer worked with Australian musician Nick Cave and his band the Bad Seeds as a featuring artist to their single "Where the Wild Roses Grow". Additionally, Minogue began a relationship with French photographer Stéphane Sednaoui, and embarked on a series of trips throughout North America, Asia, and Australasia to gain inspiration for her upcoming record. She was encouraged by Sednaoui and Cave to take creative control over her next musical project, so she started writing lyrics. Explaining to British magazine NME that she wanted to "experiment" with her image and sound, Minogue decided to team up with British trio Brothers in Rhythm, who previously worked on her self-titled album.
  Each morning, she would present a set of lyrics to Brothers in Rhythm member Dave Seaman from the night before, and by October 1995, they started recording rough demos in Chippenham. From those sessions, they completed their first track "You're the One", which remains unreleased. Four more songs were developed at Real World studios in Box, Wiltshire; "Too Far", "Did It Again", "Limbo", and "Cowboy Style". Moreover, "Limbo" and "Did It Again" were published in their original demo form because Minogue felt the "raw[ness]" of the tracks worked better than being polished.
  Seaman noted that Minogue's input was more significant this time round, stating that majority of the album's subject matter was taken from "her own ideas", and that she wanted to grow as a person from this experience. Sonically, Minogue was inspired by artists-producers including Björk, Garbage, Towa Tei, and U2, all introduced to her by Sednaoui. Furthermore, she cited British "pioneers" like The Verve, The Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers and The Eels as influences to the album. Originally crafted to be an electronic dance record, the singer began working with Welsh band Manic Street Preachers, and the initial sound started to blend with rock elements. It was Minogue's first record to incorporate live instrumentation, a technique that was never introduced in her first five studio records.
  Deconstruction's A&R department were absent during the album's process, due to the illness of the label's director Pete Hadfield. Because of this, Minogue stood in to take partial creative control over the project. In order to help produce the album, she attended each music session with Steve Anderson and Seaman to learn about composing, arranging instruments, and "distorting" sections of the album's tracks. As a result of this, she was credited as a co-composer and co-producer on the songs "Too Far", "Breathe", and "Say Hey" with Brothers in Rhythm; she played the grand piano and the synthesizer. In total, Impossible Princess took nearly two years to record, the longest period of time Minogue had worked on a project since her time acting on the Australian soap opera Neighbours (from 1986 to 1988). Anderson later explained that its lengthy time was "due to the pure perfectionism of all creatively involved".
caption: Australian musician Nick Cave (pictured) has been credited by Minogue as a major influence and one of the reasons she took over partial control of the project.
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