Estelle Apprehensive Over Rick Ross Collaboration
Estelle didn’t always intend to have Rick Ross on her breezy new single “Break My Heart.” The British songstress, who is prepping the September release of her third album All of Me, reveals that though she and the Teflon Don had talked for years about a collaboration, she didn’t think the tune was right for him.
“My label surprised me with it, because I didn’t think of him as being the first person to be on the record,” she told staging-rapup.kinsta.cloud. “And then I got the record back and he was on it.”
When it comes to her music, Estelle isn’t one to get a random feature for the sake of nabbing a big name. “The thing about me is I never do records to do them. I try to find the right person to be on a record if I have a feature,” she continued. “So they suggested him and I was like, ‘I don’t know if this is the right one.’ And they said, ‘OK, cool, cool.’ Then they got him to do it, and I was like, ‘Yeah, this could be the right one. This could be it.'”
While she was initially skeptical about a long distance duet, she felt it ended up in the right hands. “I wrote the record with a certain feeling in mind, and you know when you write a record and you sing it and it’s just you on a record, you kind of get used to it,” she explained. “And then I heard him on it, and I was like, ‘No, this fits. This makes sense. It’s perfect.’ I didn’t think it was going to be this song that we ended up doing. I thought we were going to do it a different way, and it just worked. I’m definitely not about recreating or fighting something that works.”
Estelle will get face time with Ross this week when she shoots the video for “Break My Heart” with director Chris Robinson. She’s mum on the clip’s concept, but promises it will fit the season. “It’s going to be beautiful. It’s going to be epic. It’s going to feel like summertime,” she gushed. “I feel like my mission this time around is to make people feel versus just listening to music. I want them to feel something.”
–Steven J. Horowitz