Rita Ora: The Party Girl Gets Serious
Though Ora, now 25, was born in Kosovo, she moved to London at age 1, when her parents fled the persecution of Albanians. (She still speaks fluent Albanian and visits Kosovo often, returning as a kind of shiny folk hero.) She says she considers Britain, where she is very famous, to be her spiritual home. She even put a song about it on her new record. “It’s called ‘Home,’” she says. “And it’s about how I wanted to remind my hometown that I’m still here, you know? I’m always in the States and I’m always on the road, and sometimes when you're physically not here, people don’t think you're here, you know? But I’m here.”
Ora has never released an album in the United States. Her new, as-yet-untitled record, set to drop in 2016, will mark her true coming-out party on this side of the pond. It’s difficult to believe that she is still trying to break into the U.S. market, because her name — a household one in England, where her singles top the charts and she is a judge on The X Factor — has been swirling around the American music scene for years now. Her first U.K. single, “How We Do (Party)” was a bona fide club hit around the world in 2012. Her debut album, Ora, released that same year, yielded three No. 1 singles in Britain. She's signed to Jay Z’s Roc Nation label and considers Beyoncé and Prince to be her mentors. She wore ninja catsuits with Iggy Azalea in the 2014 music video for “Black Widow,” which has racked up more than 350 million views. She sang at the 2015 Oscars wearing elbow-length black satin gloves and a Grace Kelly gown, belting out “Grateful,” the nominated song from Beyond the Lights (a film that, appropriately, is about the rise of a young British pop star who hits the Billboard charts before releasing an album).
You might also recall that Ora was the face of Madonna’s Material Girl clothing line and Donna Karan’s latest New York fragrance. Ora's own design collaborations with Adidas Originals are available for purchase around the country. “I’m the only female since Missy Elliott to do anything with Adidas,” Ora says. “It’s, like, me, Missy, and Stella McCartney.” (She mentions this as a source of pride; during our interview, she alternates between humble and swaggering, the seesaw that a star must balance on when talking to the press.) And finally, Ora's love life is a constant source of fascination. Tabloids and gossip sites have followed her romances with Calvin Harris, Rob Kardashian, and Blink 182’s Travis Barker breathlessly.
And yet, here in the States, she is still somehow positioned as an up-and-comer, someone who the industry has been trying to “make happen” for years now. There are memes about it: One features Mean Girls' Regina George posing with the words, “Stop Trying to Make Rita Ora Happen.” Another involves users on Twitter responding “Who?” every time Ora’s name pops up in the press. The masses can be cruel to pop stars, and they are decidedly flippant when it comes to Ora. Her latest singles, “Poison” and “Body on Me” (the latter featuring Chris Brown) reached No. 3 and 22 on the U.K. charts, respectively. But they didn’t chart in the States. She is known everywhere, seen everywhere, but not yet appreciated everywhere as an artist.
Nearly seven years later — an eternity in pop years — Ora is focused on what she wants for the new record. And that is to release it worldwide on the same day. She lobbied her label hard for this, pushing back even when management told her it would be better to focus on her European fan base. “It’s been seven years,” she groans, then asks her assistant for a cup of Earl Grey tea with lemon. “And it has been a bit of a battle. With the first record, we didn’t expand to the United States. Label-wise, they said, it wasn’t the right time. I was only 19 or 20, and I was so excited to be making music and performing live. I didn’t know better. But now I do. I told them, ‘Look, I just want to release my album everywhere.’ Everybody thinks that they know best. But I won the battle.”
As for how the Chris Brown “Body on Me” collaboration came about, Ora describes it as something akin to happenstance. “Honestly, it was so easy,” she says. “It was unforced. He was next door recording at the same L.A. studio, and I walked in and said, ‘Hey, there's this song I need you to hear, I want you to be involved in.’ It was that simple. It was, like, artist to artist.” I ask her if she ever hesitated to join forces with a person who continues to be polarizing almost six years after his arrest on domestic violence charges for beating up Rihanna. “I didn’t think that far ahead,” she says. “I'm just a fan of his music and I wanted to work as a musician with another musician, really. All that other stuff has nothing to do with me."
“Body on Me” is an upbeat, R & B groove in the vein of The Weeknd, but Ora emphasizes that her new album will have a little something for everyone. It’s got pop, soul, hip-hop, even ballads. She worked with producers and co-writers Dev Hynes, Ed Sheeran, Diplo, Naughty Boys, Sigma, and “these amazing kids from the U.K. called TMS.” She hopes listeners — even her loyal Ritabots — will see the new songs as a kind of rebirth. “It has a darker, more sexual tone to it,” she says. “And I guess it’s more blunt.”
More photos and the full interview:
http://www.refinery29.com/2015/12/99...lbum-interview
This is a GREAT Read and I love the shoot. I'm glad she kept the work with Dev Hynes and Diplo. I can't wait! That Ed Sheeran song needs to be replaced though...
Oh Rita wish ha the best
