Metamorphosis (Hilary Duff Album) - Recording and Production

Recording and Production

Duff, her mother Susan, and Recke enlisted the songwriting and production team The Matrix—whom Recke had previously hired to write songs for Myra's 2001 eponymous debut album—and songwriter Charlie Midnight, who had contributed to Santa Claus Lane (2002). According to Duff, her, her mother and Recke worked very hard to get music that she related to and was age-appropriate for her. Duff said that she did not want to make "a really poppy album" because that was not the type of music she listened to. The presence of The Matrix was noted because of their work on Avril Lavigne's highly successful debut album, Let Go (2002), but Duff said that did not want to emulate other artists: "There are definitely people I respect and I love their music, but there was never really an artist that I said, 'I want to be just like them...' ... I wanted to be like myself".

According to Duff, although she did not write most of the songs, she collaborated on each of them. Aside from The Matrix and Charlie Midnight, contributions to the album came from singer-songwriter Meredith Brooks, Kara DioGuardi, Matthew Gerrard, John Shanks and Duff's sister, Haylie, who Duff said knows her better than "anyone else in the world". Duff discussed her feelings with some of the songwriters, and she praised them because they were open to her opinions and "really got it". She said that she would have liked more time to work with the songwriters and co-write more of her own material, saying "I feel like you need time to really get in touch with yourself to do that". In May 2004, Meredith Brooks, writer and producer of "Party Up", complained about the million-dollar budgets major labels spend to produce albums, saying "There's something seriously wrong with all that! You can't keep that going. Artists have to sell millions of records for anybody to make money off of those bloated budgets."