tour, Christmas in Spiceworld, in London and Manchester, also showcasing songs from Forever. The recording process for Bunton's first solo studio album A Girl Like Me took place between late 1999 and October 2000 at recording studios in London, Dublin, Stockholm, Miami, Los Angeles and New York. She worked with a mix of familiar writers and producers from the Spice Girls' recording sessions, including Richard Stannard ("Wannabe") and Rodney Jerkins ("Holler"), as well as new songwriters and record producers, such as Andrew Frampton, the duo Carl Sturken and Evan Rogers, and Rhett Lawrence. In a web chat on the group's official website, she described the sound of A Girl Like Me as a "bit of R&B; quite a lot of guitar and quite folky. It's even got some country on there." Bunton said that the album would likely include 11 or 12 tracks and the release date was planned for the spring of 2001. Writing and recording "What Took You So Long?" started as a backing track on an "in progress" DAT tape in Richard Stannard's Biffco Studio in Dublin, Ireland. The chords were put together by songwriter Martin Harrington, and the track was then used as the basis for a writing session. Stannard explained that the two of them worked in an "organic manner", placing a microphone in the middle of a room, then playing the chords and laying down tracks on top of them, finally singing the first ideas that came up. The melody was composed by singing over the chords, before Stannard wrote some of the lyrics on his hand from watching a film the night before. Because of his professional and personal relationship with Bunton from their previous work during the Spice Girls' sessions, the creative process was fairly simple, he commented: "With that backing track we just got writing straight away and before you knew it the words were done." Bunton finished writing the song with Stannard and songwriter/producer Julian Gallagher, and she commented about the process: "I'm very hands on with lyrics and production, I have to know what's going on. I'm really pleased with it." The song was captured on a hard disk using Pro Tools with a Logic front end. Recording engineer Ash Howes employed an Avalon microphone amplifier and equalizer for the main vocal chain, then a UREI 1176 for dynamic range compression. For the mixing Howes used a GML Stereo