Hayley Williams Explains Why She Passed On Lil Uzi Vert Collab
Hayley Williams is no stranger to collaborations with rap stars. In a different era, the Paramore leader sang on a massive hit with B.o.B., “Airplanes,” which peaked at #2 on the Billboard charts in 2010 and got nominated for a Grammy for Best Pop Collaboration With Vocals. But Williams is on a different path nowadays, gearing up for the full release of her first-ever solo album.
Her stellar voice remains the same, though, and it’s no wonder that artists want to work with her. In a new interview with Apple Music that she did while in quarantine, she says that Lil Uzi Vert asked her to collaborate on a track but she turned him down because she didn’t want to be “that kind of famous person.”
“I remember Uzi asking me to do some stuff with him and I know that fans are going to be so pissed at me for saying this, but I literally wrote him back on Instagram and I was like, ‘Buddy, I love you so much, but I don’t want to be that famous,'” Williams said during her interview.
“I told him like we were getting ready to take a break. I obviously had a lot of issues going on that no one really knew about and I was like, ‘Bro, I just need to disappear. I don’t want to be that kind of a famous person.’ Because that is … He’s like a big artist, man. My stepbrother is obsessed with them. He was pissed when I told him the story.”
Lil Uzi Vert recently released what amounted to two full-length albums with his Eternal Atake and its deluxe edition extension LUV Vs. the World 2 — he stayed at the top of the Billboard albums chart for two weeks because of them. He seems to have bad luck with pop stars! Last year, we found out that he never downloaded some beats that he asked Grimes to make him a few years ago — that’s how we got “Darkseid” from her own Miss Anthropocene.
In other Hayley Williams news, she said she recently covered a Broadcast track while at home alone. Perhaps something from their debut The Noise Made By The People, which recently turned 20? “Come On Let’s Go” opens the new playlist she shared with Beats 1’s Zane Lowe, anyway, which you can listen to here.