Ciara: One handed debating

Now, it might be that - if you were Ciara, and had recorded a duet with Chris Brown, you might have had some concerns about releasing the track. You know, with that whole 'hitting women' thing hanging over him and all.

But Ciara has decided to go ahead and release it any way. Of course, she's really thought it through:

"You know what it is? Honestly, with that record, it's just more about the music for me," Ciara told MTV News last weekend. "I wanted to focus on the music and leave it at that, because it's a record that I've had for a while, I love the way it sounds and it's one of my most favorite records on the album. And if I alter it, it's not gonna sound the same. So for me, really it's nothing more than about the music, so I kept it there."

"I'mma be honest with you, pretty much everyone on my team was supportive [of keeping the record on the album]. Because we knew what the whole reasoning of wanting to keep it was," she explained. "Being as though I was leaving it at that, I felt OK about that. When you listen to the album, from the beginning to the end, it feels good to you, and it just felt good to me. I could try to do it a different way and I even had moments where I played with it a little bit, but it didn't feel right. So it's all about what feels good to me, so that's why I kept it.

"It definitely took time [to make the final decision]," Ciara added. "In the decision-making process for the records, once you get down to the last few days, that's when you kind of know. It definitely took time, but [the question was] more if the record made sense for the album, period. And that's how I weighed all the records."

So it sounds like she drew up a pair of lists, one headed 'in favour of not incurring further expense rerecording record' and the other headed... well, actually, I don't really think there was another column. Perhaps Ciara could have explained a little about the actual weighing of the decision, but it looks a little like someone at the label decided to go ahead and the rationale has been reverse-engineered from there?