One of the most addictive choruses of the 2010s came roaring back to life in Queens Thursday night (Sept. 17).
Indeed, Hayley Williams fans who were unable to secure tickets for the second of two back-to-back shows at Forest Hills Stadium were left kicking themselves as footage started to pour in of the Paramore singer reviving B.o.B’s 2010 single “Airplanes.” B.o.B. wasn’t on hand for the performance, but Williams injected fresh energy into the Hot 100 hit by recruiting Rico Nasty, one of several support acts on her current tour.
The three-time Grammy winner, and 11-time nominee, performed the track alongside B.o.B. in 2010 but appears to have left it out of her own setlists until now, making this the first time she’s played it live in roughly 16 years.
The song’s lore, for those unfamiliar, connects its origins to Lupe Fiasco’s Lasers album. As Williams recalled in a recent Vulture interview, she was informed that it was set to become a B.o.B. single “mere weeks” before its release.
“I tracked those vocals to a demo when that song belonged to Lupe Fiasco,” she explained. “I was backstage at, I wanna say Hammerstein Ballroom, and someone from the label comes up and was like, ‘Would you ever do a feature on a hip-hop record?’ I was like, ‘Duh. To be one of those voices that’s in the chorus of a rap song? Absolutely. That’s a life goal.’”
Williams continued: “I was really pumped to get to collaborate with Lupe because I really, really love his music. And then, like, mere weeks before it came out, they were like, ‘Just kidding, we gave it to this new kid out of Atlanta.’ Then the song blew up in a way that I don’t think any of us saw coming. That was a really cool thing to experience. It didn’t feel like my song. I didn’t write any part of it. I was kind of, like, on the wave, on the ride. To this day, people don’t know it’s me.”
