Hoobastank say they abandoned a Rihanna feature due to a “total lack of foresight”

16 February, 2023

Hoobastank frontman Doug Robb has revealed that the band decided against including a song featuring Rihanna on one of their albums. 

Robb shared the revelation on Twitter yesterday (February 15). “There is a version of a [Hoobastank] song featuring [Rihanna] when she was a ‘newer’ artist,” Robb wrote. “Displaying a total lack of foresight, we didn’t use that version of the song for the album.” In the accompanying tweet thread, Robb said the song was 2006’s ‘Inside Of You’, which featured on the band’s album ‘Every Man For Himself’.

Robb said that the lack of foresight in abandoning the Rihanna feature extended to the band’s choice of singles. “We also didn’t think ‘The Reason’ was a single though either”, the singer wrote in reference to Hoobastank’s 2003 smash hit. “Oops.” Elsewhere in the thread, Robb said he could “possibly” re-release the Rihanna-assisted ‘Inside Of You’ now, but said he was “not sure” of the legalities in doing so.

The tweet was accompanied by a clip of Rihanna’s Super Bowl halftime show – which took place earlier this week – with her original song ‘Rude Boy’ replaced with Hoobastank’s track ‘Crawling in the Dark’. In a statement provided to Consequence, Robb elaborated on the band’s “stunning lack of vision to see what a star Rihanna was going to be”.

“We gave [Rihanna’s] 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 said that had Hoobastank approached the song with the knowledge that it would include a feature, they “probably would have felt differently and used it”. He continued: “I think the way we did it was just wrong. The paint had already dried so to speak.”

Hoobastank’s most recent album, ‘Push Pull’, was released in 2018. Rihanna, meanwhile, revealed in an interview published yesterday that “it’d be ridiculous” if her long-awaited ninth album didn’t arrive this year.

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