'Goodbye,' Indeed

Britney Spears' ''Before the Goodbye'' is a full-fledged dance-pop anthem, a potential hit driven by pounding Eurodisco beats and a choir's worth of backing vocals, courtesy of producer BT. But odds are that you haven't heard the track, since Britney and her handlers booted it off her latest album.

''She and I have talked about this in great detail,'' says BT (born Brian Transeau), who leaped from the dance ghetto to ''TRL'' after lending an electronic sheen to 'N Sync's hit ''Pop.'' ''[My songs were] too different from what the rest of the record was like. The record ended up with very sort of Neptunes-y, R&B-type slant on it. And the stuff that we did was dance music. The stuff didn't make sense for the American version of the record -- they put it on everything else.''

''Before the Goodbye,'' has, in fact, surfaced as a bonus track on various import versions of ''Britney,'' though another BT production, ''When I Say So,'' has yet to see release anywhere, according to his management. But ''Before'' -- which has also turned up online as an illicit MP3 -- is, in its own way, at least as musically daring as anything on the stateside version of ''Britney.''

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