Rihanna Says Super Bowl Halftime Show Will ‘Jampacked,’ Hints At Setlist

Rihanna just revealed that fans should expect a “jampacked’ Super Bowl Halftime Show that celebrates the superstar’s 17-year-long music career on Sunday.

Her much-anticipated performance comes after a nearly seven-year-long break from music and becoming a new mother to her son with ASAP Rocky.

During a news conference for the half-time show, Rihanna confessed that she was hesitant upon being offered to do the show, “I was like, ‘Are you sure? I’m three months postpartum. Should I be making major decisions like this right now? I might regret this.’”

But despite not having been on tour since her 2016 album Anti, Rihanna believes that performing at the Super Bowl “could have only been now.”

“When you become a mom there’s something that happens where you feel like you can take on the world and can do anything. The Super Bowl is one of the biggest stages in the world. As scary as it was, because I haven’t been on stage in seven years, there’s something exhilarating about the challenge of it all. It’s important for me to do this year. It’s important for my son to see that,” she said.

The music powerhouse revealed that one of the biggest challenges for her performance was the setlist and maximizing her 13-minute window. She explained that attempting to “cram 17 years’ worth of songs into 13 minutes” was incredibly difficult, but that she’s happy with their selection and that she thinks they “did a good job at narrowing it down.”

When asked about the selection process, Rihanna revealed that “there were probably around 39 different versions of the setlist” because she believes that “every little change counts.”

While she was careful not to reveal too much information about the show, she did confirm that her Caribbean culture will play a huge part in her performance. “That’s a big part of why it’s important for me to do this show. Representing for my country, Barbados,” she said. “Representing for black women everywhere. That’s really important.”

When asked about how she is feeling musically and whether her fans should expect her performance to mark a new chapter in her career, Rihanna described feeling “open to exploring, discovering, creating things that are new, things that are different, things that are off, weird.”

She admitted that while it may not “make sense” to her fans and to people who have been following her career, she wants to “have fun with music.”