Mary J. Blige Turned Down This Rihanna Hit

It is always so interesting when we learn about songs that could have been sung by another artist. Can you ever really think of some hits being performed by another artist? It is quite hard to imagine it.

Mary J. Blige has a similar story when it comes to hits that could have been hers. In an interview on the 7PM in Brooklyn with Carmelo Anthony podcast, Anthony asked the singer "one song or beat" that got away. Her answer was quite surprising.

Blige went into a story about how during the time of her Grammy-nominated album, The Breakthrough, she was offered to take another song. Producers The Dream and Tricky Stewart came to her with a song that she felt her fans would not understand coming from her. What was that song? Rihanna's hit, Umbrella.

“It’s not something that got away from me. It’s just that I know what’s for me and what’s not for me,” said Blige. “Dream and Tricky came to me with ‘Umbrella,’ and all I heard was ‘aye, aye,’ and I was like ‘Yo, my fans is gonna bug out on me if they hear me talking about ‘aye aye, aye.’ So I was like, ‘I got a lot going on. So I’m going to pass.'”

The song ended up on Rihanna's 2007 Good Girl Gone Bad album and topped the charts for weeks after its release.

“Then, when I heard Rihanna do it, I was like, ‘See, it was for Rihanna. It wasn’t for me,'” Blige said in the interview. “I’m not afraid to pass on something that’s not for me. It got away, it got away, but it wasn’t for me in the first place.”

See the full episode of the podcast below.