Rebecca Black Just Wants a Budget

“I mean, if it was up to me, I’d be f–king coming down from the ceiling every show and going back up to end the show. Or I would start the show outside the venue and be followed on camera all the way, like…”

This is rising pop singer-songwriter Rebecca Black, fantasizing about her ultimate live entrance. It’s the kind of scale that only a handful of superstars have both the means and the imagination to consistently pull off in 2025, and Black knows that she’s not quite there yet. But with each successive project, each successive tour, she’s getting a little bit closer — to the point where now, the reality of it bears far more resemblance to the fantasy than most, perhaps even Black herself, would’ve once thought possible.

Only 28 years old, Rebecca Black has already lived multiple pop lifetimes in her career. The latest started in earnest with the 2021 EP Rebecca Black Was Here, a transfixing set of sonically unpredictable, smartly written alt-pop gems, which was followed a couple years later by an equally impressive full-length debut in 2023’s crushingly vivid TRUST! LP. Both works nodded towards the frenetic production and pulse-racing beats of the hyperpop scene dominating the underground in the early 2020s — and she’s matched them with regular hyperpop-inflected DJ sets, including a high-profile 2024 Boiler Room gig, which have further established her within the dance world — but with much fuller and more varied songs than that subgenre tended to produce.

“I think my biggest gripe with hyperpop for many years in that kind of early stage was it felt like, ‘Oh, these are some of the coolest sounds I’ve ever heard – where’s the song?'” she tells Billboard at a West Village café following a New York tour date this spring. “The Gwens and the Madonnas and the Gagas, the Katys… those are really strong pop songs [that they write]. And that’s always really been so important to me.”

In addition to the fleshed-out songwriting, Black has also long displayed the pop vision and personality of a performer who grew up following those big-dreaming top 40 icons. Each of her 2020s releases, along with their accompanying visuals, has further fleshed out the Rebecca Black universe, building out an expressive and occasionally confrontational aesthetic that has enraptured more and more fans. During interviews, she’s thoughtful but often theatrical, sliding in and out of different accents or mini-personas with the ease of peak Nicki Minaj. And even at a low-four-digit-cap venue like Brooklyn’s Warsaw — where she played to a ravenous, packed-to-the-back crowd in support of her latest widescreen effort, this February’s dazzling Salvation EP — she brings extensive choreography, multiple costume changes (with video interludes), thematic coherence and enough of the kind of capital-M Moments to make those pop heroes beam with pride and recognition.

One of them was even impressed enough to invite her on tour with them. Black is currently in between legs of opening for Katy Perry on her Lifetimes Tour, taking her to the kind of arenas around the country that she hopes to one day be headlining. Perry even stopped by a date on Black’s own Salvation Tour — where Black had been mixing in an occasional encore cover of Perry’s controversial, pre-crossover single “Ur So Gay” — to publicly ask for Black’s hand in touring.

“I had no idea she was even aware of what I was doing these days, until I got a text, maybe six months ago, being like, ‘Katy just listened to [Salvation highlight] “Sugar Water Cyanide” and thinks it fucking slaps,” she gleefully recalls to Billboard during a second interview, from a hotel in Toronto last week.

The “these days” in Black’s quote is a sometimes-needed reminder that she does actually have history with Perry, and indeed was herself briefly a major part of the pop landscape around the same time as that superstar’s Teenage Dream-era peak. In 2011, the viral sensation “Friday” made a 13-year-old Rebecca Black a household name — though for different reasons than most teen-pop aspirants would hope, as the Ark Music Factory prefab concoction bewitched the public not just for its brain-sticking chorus, but for the unshakeable dissonance of its surreal lyrics and close-but-not-quite top 40 production. The song and its success (it even hit the Billboard Hot 100) made the teenage Black a target for some particularly cruel and unfair internet mockery, but it also inspired a couple of the era’s A-listers to rush to her defense — including Perry, who featured Black in her own 2011 music video for the Hot 100-topping “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.).”

Now, Black gets to return the favor to her pop idol, as Perry undergoes some backlash of her own while out on the Lifetimes Tour, which the star has acknowledged and responded to. “All I can say is, like — watch the show. Watch the whole show. There’s a million creative decisions that get made [as part] of that thing that I, in person, was so impressed by,” Black raves in Perry’s defense. “As somebody who had my back in a time where many people didn’t, I will absolutely have hers — and not just because [of that], but just because I do really believe in the artist that she is and and always has been.”

While on break from Lifetimes, Black has been playing a number of festivals — including her first-ever appearance at Bonnaroo, getting in her Thursday night DJ set before the rest of the festival had to be canceled due to weather concerns — and also headlining a number of Pride Month events, with a weekend of festivities awaiting her in and around Toronto when she spoke to Billboard last Friday.

“I come from a very conservative part of California, and I feel the line shift when I cross this freeway and when I have conversations with people in my life — I feel the importance to keep the fight moving,” says Black, who has been vocally out as queer since 2020, when asked about the tenor of Pride events in a politically fraught 2025 landscape. “And yeah, it’s like a very gorgeously fun, celebratory month — but it’s also a glaring reminder of of what’s happening for so many in our community and so many of these spaces people just can’t escape.”

Black will get back on the road with Perry in July, having learned important lessons from the first part of their trek together — including how to play for more of an all-ages crowd than she’s used to at her own gigs. (“I’m not afraid of bringing gay s–t around children,” she clarifies, “but I also, at the same time, am trying to watch my mouth a little bit.”) Salvation continues to bring her to new audiences, as the songs from that album have even pushed “Friday” — which she is not currently performing live, but still nods to via a hyperpopified remix of it — off the most popular songs on her Spotify front page. And as always, she’s looking to continue growing her live performance saying she’s looking to “beef up the show a little bit” for this next run of dates.

Will that include one of her entrance fantasies? “If I’m going to come down from the ceiling, you’re not going to know till that happens,” she teases.

Below is Billboard‘s conversation with Black from her Salvation Tour — about trying to make it as an independent, self-made pop star in an era where making it as such a pop star maybe feels a little more possible than it once did, and about why her show makes more sense the bigger that it gets. (This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.)

This was my first time seeing you live, but the guys in back of me kept talking throughout the entire show about, “Oh, man, I’ve never seen choreo like this from her before. And the production, she’s really taken it to a new level.” Was it a real focus for you to scale up this time?

Well, I don’t know if the goal was, “Let’s make it bigger,” in just that way. “Let’s just create more of the world” was the biggest thing for me. And I didn’t know how we were going to be able to do it logistically. But it does feel like that’s the most consistent feedback — even my agents and people like that are just like, “OK, all right. This is different.” Which is exciting.

Has that been the goal for you in the last three projects — building out the world of what it means to be a Rebecca Black fan or Rebecca Black as an artist?

Yeah. I mean, with this project in particular, I feel like I’ve had a couple go-arounds now where I felt really sure about wanting to just flesh out as much as I could. And it’s always a challenge in terms of how to bring it to stage, versus how to put it in a video. And how to make a video look like it costs three times more that it actually did.

It feels like with pop stars these days — there’s a lot being asked of them when it comes to putting out a project. It’s no longer enough to just do the single and the album, and even the videos. You do need to have a kind of conceptual backing to all of it. It needs to feel like a larger era. Is there any part of that that you don’t necessarily enjoy as much?

I think the only thing I don’t enjoy is when someone tells me that doing that is not worth it. And that was definitely a conversation I had going into this era. Being an independent artist of my size, especially before the rollout started, and before Trust, and before Boiler Room and all of those things. Like, the idea of presenting, “Hey, let’s put this much investment into something like a music video” — which, over the last 10 years has kind of had this reputation of having no return on investment from one side of the industry. Probably longer. I have an understanding of what visual content means to my project and what it means to my audience, and the way that it works. But it was incredibly validating to see that be the thing that has probably pushed me forward over this rollout.

How do you see that? How can you tell that it’s the videos that are making that kind of difference?

You see it everywhere. I know that the way that people consume these days isn’t by necessarily going on YouTube and watching the whole video — the way you consume is more in short clips. Unless it’s like a gay music video night.

But I just know the way people consume it is the one minute or 30-second clip that goes through social media — and it creates an identity and a very memorable moment for the song, whether it’s on a Twitter feed or Instagram or TikTok. And I want people to be able to delve into the world and understand the world within that time frame.

I saw in a recent interview you did that you were talking about reopening discussions of coming to Broadway at some point. Are you seeing these shows as almost like a training ground for that, for when that call eventually comes?

Sure. If the Broadway agents are listening, I’ve reintroduced that conversation to my team and world, and it’s something I’d love to do, if the moment was right and the show was right — you know, there’s certain roles that I would just love to play. I look at the shows more so as, like, auditions for arenas than I do anything else.

Well and you passed apparently, because that’s where you’re going next, right?

[Laughs.]  I guess, yeah.

So that that was always a specific goal of yours, to play arenas? Is headlining something you want to do eventually?

Of course! I know that’s where the show deserves to be at the end of the day. And I said this to everyone in my world — I’ve been stepping into the venues on the Salvation tour, and the biggest I’ve played on any headlining dates, and it only feels more right. The show only feels more correct. The bigger the venue, the bigger the stage, the bigger the production. That’s just like, what is in my bones.

I think you said something last night about how this is the first time you’ve ever really felt comfortable in a project. Is that true? What made the difference to this one compared to the last two?

I think having the reps really helps at this point. If there’s anything I’ve taken from my audience, is that they’re like, “Take the risk. Please take a bigger risk. And go further.”

That’s the feedback every artist wants, right?

Absolutely. And so I’m already trying to figure out what that’ll mean for, you know, the next thing. But I’ve just had some time to really build a relationship with people in my crowds. And I know them a little bit more now, and I’m very lucky that, like, what my crowd wants for me is what I want to give them.

Do you think that’s a thing about pop music in this particular point in time? I imagine if you were doing this 10 years ago, maybe you’d get more outside forces telling you not to take those risks, and maybe even the fans would be telling you not to take those risks. But do you think that we’re in a point in pop music where that’s actively being encouraged of our leading lights?

I think so. I mean, the internet has allowed for so many different communities to get really, really loud. For better and for worse. [Laughs.] And I think it’s no surprise that Charli xcx had the year that she had — and it feels like after the kind of hyperpop renaissance of the early 2020s, not only has her name been lifted, but it feels like SOPHIE is all over the place. Now it feels like Dylan Brady is all over the place. Whereas, those were once like, really niche, underground names. So yeah, I would hope that we keep moving in this direction.

Are you still active on the pop internet?

So active. I’ve been kind of busy on tour, but I’ve got the Gaga group chat. I love it. I live it.

What went into the decision to do “Ur So Gay” on this tour?

Well, weirdly and truly coincidentally, I wanted to do that song as the encore before Lifetimes came into my life. I was working on planning out the set list with some people on my team, and “Salvation” felt like the obvious closer, because it’s so euphoric and so anthemic — it feels like it encapsulates this moment. But when it came to that cover — I knew I wasn’t going to perform “Friday” for this era. So it was like, “What do we do? What will keep people on their toes? What will surprise people?”

And it’s been nice to have it as kind of an every-now-and-again encore to surprise the audience and give a little bit of love to the cities that have shown me a lot of love over the years. And I just have always loved the song “Ur So Gay.” You know, I know she doesn’t perform it anymore for whatever reason…

Well, do you feel like it’s kind of a misunderstood song? Because it’s been polarizing over the years.

I do think it’s misunderstood. I do think it’s one of the best songs of its time — that era of Katy has just always sat with me so well. And it’s meant a lot to me since I was a kid.

I just think it was one of the first times I felt like I was resonating with someone — and I was really young — but I was resonating with someone doing something really different in pop. And it was the same time that Gaga was also paving her own patch. To me, those were just the two girls that I felt so inspired by the way that they took risks. I feel like people are talking a lot about, like, early, early Katy right now. And I think that she has just incredible, really visceral writing — and especially back in the day, I think she wrote some of the best pop songs.

You guys go way back, to your “Friday” days and her “Friday” days. Have you gotten to talk to her at all about the show or about playing arenas in general? Has she gotten a chance to kind of give you any sort of tools of the trade or anything like that?

We haven’t talked a lot about that. It’s kind of an insane moment to see somebody at such incredibly different points in each of your careers, in such a wide gap. It feels, I think, very full circle for both of us. The last time I saw her, she was 27 I think, or 28. I’m 27 now [she turned 28 in June]. So it was such a strange out-of-body experience — it felt crazy to see her. Also the last time I saw her, I was literally 14. But she’s been really generous and really kind. She always has been.

Going back to those early days — I’m sure having a moment like “Friday” must have been jumbling in all sorts of ways and created doubts, like, “Is this something that I really want to keep pursuing if this is what it’s gonna lead to?” Do you remember a time when you felt assured post-“Friday,” like, “I know I can still do this, and I know I still want to do this?”

There have definitely been many moments like that, and I had a lot of moments in my late teens, in my early 20s — I’ve been living in L.A. for 10 years this year, and it has not been easy. I’ve worked with some really f–king bizarre people and met some really… I’ve just had insane experiences that have made me question a lot. But over the years, I have also made these really important relationships in my life, with people I work with, people I create with, friends of mine… I feel like what I do now is so close to what I did when I was just obsessed with music and theater as a kid. You know, I feel like I’m just playing all day, and if I could have looked at what my life would look like now, I wouldn’t even have believed that was the case.

I think that after I released Rebecca Black Was Here, which was kind of the first EP back when I started re-presenting myself — which was also kind of around the same time I did the “Friday” remix — I started making real relationships with artists in the community, and I just felt genuinely accepted, and less like I had this kind of metaphorical “Kick Me” sign. Or, like, toilet paper off my shoe.

I had an epiphany of my own last night as I was watching you, and looking at the crowd, and I sort of did the math in my head — and I realized there are almost definitely people at the show who don’t have any frame of reference for “Friday.” That was 14 years ago at this point, so if there’s a 20-year-old in the audience — which I’m sure there were — maybe they’ve heard of it, but they didn’t necessarily grow up with it, they might not know you from it. Is it cool to get to the point in your career where that’s now a possibility?

Yeah. I mean, definitely also scary, in the sense that it makes me feel so old. Because even for me — I’ve always felt kind of perpetually young, in the sense that I’m surrounded by older people. So when people are like, “Yeah, I was six when ‘Friday’ came out,” I’m like, “UGHHHHHH….”

About feeling old these days — it’s kind of a good time for “old” pop stars, isn’t it? Not only for someone like Charli XCX, who is obviously in her 30s, and has been in the game forever. But even someone like Sabrina Carpenter or Chappell Roan — they’re nowhere near old, they might even be younger than you are — but they’ve been around for years, and they’ve built a fan base, and they’re not popping off of one song, they’re popping off from who they are. Is that encouraging to someone like you who’s also been in the game for a little bit at this point?

Of course. What I love to see is that every queen out there right now has such a defined sense of who they are as an artist. And that only makes it so much easier as a fan to get in. I’m a fan of everyone. Like, I… love… pop. So it’s exciting to see everyone kind of in their own lane, doing really well.

So as you kind of feel yourself scaling up and playing bigger venues and being on the cusp of something, do you kind of feel like your natural defenses start to rise a little bit, because you have seen the kind of downside of that fame? Do you get to a point where you’re almost like, “I don’t know if I want to do this again?”

I think what I know is that at any given point in time, the internet can decide whatever it wants for itself. What I am to the majority of people on the internet is just something that keeps them entertained on their feeds. You know, obviously I have people who are there, and love the music and are here with me and invested — I’m not talking about those people. I’m talking about the kind of way this internet moves with people when they’re bored. And there’s always a story — every artist, every person on the internet, every figure has a story around them. And there’s always an arc. And it always feels like it has to be moving. And so if that means that it goes one way or another — I feel like I just don’t take it personally.

It seems like you have a pretty healthy relationship with criticism in general at this point.

We try. [Exhausted sounding] We tryyy... You know, it’s hard, but I’m way more concerned with the people who really know me, how they feel, more than anything.

But is there a point in the future that you could see yourself maybe hitting the pause button, saying, “Okay, I’m comfortable with the level I am now, and don’t necessarily want to keep growing from here?” Or is it just see where this thing takes you, and kind of go on the rocket ship until you can’t go any higher?

I just want to create the biggest stuff that I can. Whatever happens with it — I just want a budget. Whether or not anyone cares, I just want to make the thing, and have it exist. Because that’s the fun part for me. And obviously, letting that live on a stage in a room full of people is its own battle. But I don’t really care — I just want to keep the relationship going where I get to make what I love and my audience loves what I make. And whatever ceiling that has is okay with me.

Does the timing feel good, in terms of all these other things happening in pop music, and you being at a point in your life where you’re comfortable with both who you are as a person and who you are as an artist — and the pop internet actually kinda making stars out of their favorite pop stars these days?

Maybe, yeah. I mean, I love to see the way people have redefined what it means to be a pop star. It feels awesome to see everyone who is really putting their all into it — and this includes, like, the Addison Raes — it’s really awesome to see everyone get their flowers. It’s just awesome to see people not write someone off immediately because they don’t understand the first thing that you did. Because, if you did that with any of your favorite artists… you wouldn’t have any of your favorite artists.