Paid My Dues

Paid My Dues opened Freak of Nature, Anastacia's second album, and was released as its first single in November 2001. The lyric answers critics who had treated her debut as a manufactured success, and the arrangement matches it — brass, live drums and a chorus pitched for the top of her range. It became a top-ten single across much of Europe and in Australia. The album as a whole moved away from the dance-pop production of Not That Kind towards the rock-soul mixture that stayed with her for the next two decades.