When Ayra Starr found out she would headline halftime at the NFL London Game, her first thought was a setlist problem. “What am I going to sing? What song? How can I pick?” she told Complex UK in August.
This afternoon at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, at halftime of Eagles v Jaguars, the answer included “Rush” and “Heaven Baby.” Fan clips posted within minutes of the set, going by their captions, have her singing both, along with “Hot Body” and a medley of “Santa” and “Dangerous.”
Those first two have a backstory. “Rush” is the song that, in her words, sent everything “from zero to one hundred,” and it did not feel like a win at the time. “After my first album and ‘Rush’, I had a lot of imposter syndrome,” she told Complex. “I started going back into my shell. I didn’t want people to see me.” It took a move to New York, and some distance from everything she knew, before she could look at what she had built. So the song that once sent her into hiding was the first song fans clipped in a stadium built for football.
“Heaven Baby” carries a different kind of nerve. ZAYN picked it himself from the Starrgirl sessions and recorded his verse remotely, and she says she heard it in her room in Lagos and cried. “I was also scared of it, because it felt so vulnerable and intimate,” she said. “Am I ready for this? Am I ready for the sound?” On Oct 5 it got a video with ZAYN. Today she sang it in the middle of an American football game, and AlbumTalks was among the accounts passing it around. None of the clips or captions we’ve seen show ZAYN on stage.
She had told Complex who the show was for: “the Nigerian and African girls.” On Oct 7 her own account called it the first time an African artist has headlined an NFL International Games halftime show.
Before the show, she had already told everyone what to expect: “Just expect Ayra Starr.”