Hoobastank reveal they cut Rihanna feature back when she was a ‘newer’ artist: ‘Total lack of foresight’

‘I had never heard of her,’ Hoobastank lead singer Doug Robb said

Days after Rihanna stunned audiences with her Super Bowl halftime show, Doug Robb of Hoobastank admitted the rock band once abandoned a feature from the megastar.

“True story. There is a version of a @Hoobastank song featuring @rihanna when she was a ‘newer’ artist,” lead singer Robb wrote in a tweet.

“Displaying a total lack of foresight, we didn’t use that version of the song for the album. We also didn’t think ‘The Reason’ was a single though either so… Oops,” he said, referencing the band’s biggest hit.

Robb included a clip from Rihanna’s halftime show in his tweet with the audio replaced by Hoobastank’s “Crawling in the Dark”, which contains the lyrics, “‘Cause I’m looking and I just can’t see what’s in front of me.”

The singer elaborated on how the band botched a feature from one of the biggest stars in the world in a statement shared with Consequence.

“Back when we were recording our third album, Every Man for Himself [2006], we were approached by someone at our label, Island Def Jam, about potentially featuring a ‘new artist’ on one of the songs,” he said.

“This kind of stuff happens all the time. We said, ‘Sure. Who do you have in mind?’ It was Rihanna. I had never heard of her. I don’t think anyone else in the band had, either, at the time.”

He continued: “We gave her camp a song called ‘Inside of You.’ I think they rearranged some of the music to create a pre-chorus section, that wasn’t originally part of the arrangement, for her to sing a small part on. We heard it and didn’t really love it so we passed on using it. It’s really just that simple. I think we had already gotten used to hearing the song as it was written so it just felt weird to us.”

Robb added that if the band had “done a proper collaboration with her”, perhaps things might have been different.

“We’d run into her at various award shows after and she was always very sweet and super cool,” he said. “I think everything worked out ok for her in the end.”

Rihanna broke Twitter after her performance on 12 February caused a huge spike in site traffic. Her show was followed by confirmation that she was pregnant with her and boyfriend A$AP Rocky’s second child, leading fans to inundate the social media site.