Entrevista 1 Em Inglês

Enviada por *.*ñ.Í.©.k.å.*._.*.g.í.®.l.*.*

> Willa Ford is a nice girl with a bad reputation. At
> first glance, she's just a tough little pop singer
> who's working hard to release her first album
> next month. But she's also the ex-girlfriend of
> Backstreet Boy Nick Carter, and thats where everything
> takes a turn for the nasty. Thousands of
> jealous 14-year-old girls hate Willa Ford, neé
> manda Williford.
>
> Passionately. They host Web sites devoted to
> despising her. Ironically, they circulate online
> petitions in an effort to "keep Willa from getting
> famous." When Willa was featured on MTV's video
> countdown show Total Request Live, and anti-Willa fan
> called in live to host Carson Daly and
> threatened to blow up MTV's Times Square studios.
> For a girl whose music is just barely beginning to be
> audible behind the booming
> chart-toppers of Britney and Christina, Willa's
> already well on her way to public noteriety, whether
> she deserves it or not.
>
> But at least she's maintaining her sense of humor.
> Sitting across from me at a midtown pizza joint on a
> rainy afternoon, Willa laughs about it all.
> Petite and smiley, she looks about 16, but is
> actually 20, with long straight blond hair andmbig,
> light brown eyes that betray her tough-chick
> image. Still, she talks like a trucker. "If I had a
> Web site," she says, twirling a long strand of
> mozzarella around her fork, "I'd call it Willa Don't
> Care. Or maybe, It's My **** -Kiss It!" She laughs.
> After years of being taunted and abused by the teenage
> girls of America, Willa's ready for
> the ultimate revenge: a first-rate pop album they're
> all going to fall in love with. Or so Lava/Atlantic
> Records hopes.
>
> Her album has been a long time coming. From her
> early performances as a member of Entertainment Revue,
> a local Florida kids' chorus, to her
> lost chance as a member of a now-defunct small-time
> girl group, FLA, Willa's been preparing for her solo
> moment at the mic all along. Even now,
> as we talk over lunch, she slides my Dictaphone
> closer to her side of the table. It's a smart,
> calculated move. She's been in the business for
> almost 10 years, and shes ready to finally be heard.
> Talking to Willa it's hard to think that she hasn't
> known since she was a kid that she would
> one day be eating pizza with a magazine writer,
> promoting the album that could either launch or
> extinguish her solo career.
>
> Her earliest memory of preforming was as a
> third-grader in Ruskin, Florida a small town outside
> of Tampa that she still considers her real home.
> "It was a Christmas-caroling show in the Cash and
> Carry convenience store parking lot," she recalls,
> grimacing. "We called it Cash and Trash, I
> think we preformed infront of a trailer. At the time
> I thought I was hot stuff." Right now she's staying in
> New York indefinitely, as she prepares
> for the release of her album, Willa Was Here.
> Between promotional events, she makes appearances on
> the downtown party circuit as often as
> possible and squeezes in lots of cardio work with
> her personal trainer, whose call she takes on her cell
> phone at lunch. She's a girl with a town
> car, and she knows how to use it. But New York
> doesn't feel like home yet. For now, her record
> company has put her up in a pre-furnished
> corporate apartment on the Upper East Side. "Its
> just a place to stay for now," she says, "but when I
> find somewhere permanent, it'll be in a
> trendier neighborhood. I'd really like to live in
> SoHo. Or even have a house in Jersey and commute in."
> Jersey? She did grow up in the suburbs.
>
> The waiter comes by our table with dessert menus.
> For Willa? "Oh yea, the chocolate mousse cake,
> definately," she says, grinning at him and
> inadvertently flipping her har. He's instantly
> bashful.
>
> Unlike some of her young blond contemporaries, Willa
> actually writes most of her own lyrics, and, while
> they're not particularly deep, they are
> telling. There's a song on the album called "I Wanna
> Be Bad," in which she repeats the line again and
> again, like she's trying to convince herself
> it's time to grow up and quit being a cutie. When I
> ask her what being bad means to her, she replies
> point-blank: "Using your sexiness as a
> weapon against men is the most exciting thing you
> can do." But then she softens and explains, "It's
> about being that awkward 16-year-old girl
> and looking at these older girls on MTV, and going,
> 'I want to be bad like that, but I'm just not there
> yet.' That was me. I was always cute. I
> was always small. I was never **** . I wanted to be
> bad."
>
> Growing up in a two-stoplight town, she had to
> settle for being mischievous. When she wasnt
> practicing her opera singing, she and her cousins
> ran around town on four-wheelers, wreaking havoc and
> raising hell. Her father, who still holds down the
> fort in Ruskin, according to Willa, has
> funded these first years of his daughter's career by
> farming. "First he grew tomatoes, and then
> strawberries, and now he grows grass for golf
> courses, just fields and fields of gorgeous grass,"
> she says.
>
> On the edge of 17, Willa moved in with her now
> ex-boyfriend Nick Carter. After meeting through a
> mutual family doctor, they dated for almost
> three years, crashing at her parents' house for a
> while, adopting five dogs and trying to live something
> resembling normal couple life. In the
> meantime, the Backstreet Boys rocketed to fame,
> leaving Willa with a boyfriend whose poster half the
> girls in America kissed goodnight before
> going to sleep. "When I first met Nick it was
> amazing. He showed up on my doorstep and introduced
> himself. All day long people had made fun
> of these yellow shoes I had on, and he showed up and
> was like 'Hey nice shoes.' I was sold." His career
> took off, she got a gig opening for the
> Backstreet Boys, and the teen taunting started.
> Girls called their house looking for Nick and
> threatening her. They claimed she used Nick. They
> claimed she beat him up. They claimed she kidnapped
> his dog. "I wont lie. I hit him once, but he deserved
> it. He'd called me a ***** ." As for
> the dognapping, Willa laughs and laughs. "I guess
> it's flattering that people care enough to take the
> rumor seriously, but no, all the dogs we
> had were dogs we had together."
>
> The couple broke up last fall. "I still love him to
> death, but nobody else wanted us to be happy together.
> With that drama, it was probably the
> main reason we boke up," she says. They split up the
> dogs. He took two, she took three. She was 19 years
> old.
>
> So now Willa's 20 and finally dating like a
> teenager. "I'm like a girl player," she says shaving
> off little bites of chocolate mousse and licking the
> spoon. "I've been a really bad player lately. I love
> getting dressed up and going out and being a bad girl.
> It's fun! She admits she has a crush
> on Craig David, the talented young British singer,
> but she leaves it at that. They were set up for dinner
> by people at Atlantic, and instantly the
> gossip pages were all over it. Willa insists its
> nothing serious yet. "I think we're both kind of
> players at this point, and we both know each
> other's game, so it's like well, we can't even play
> with each other. I think were both like, OK, lets get
> this out of our system and be friends."
>
> There's a song on Willa Was Here called "Prince
> Charming," and Willa says she's definately in the
> market, but she's tough enough to set one
> hard rule: "For all the guys out there, if you meet
> me, and you don't call me the next day, forget it,"
> she says pointing her finger. "***** you.
> I'm done playing games."
>
> Shes done with caring about the anti-fans, too. This
> girl's got a record to promote, and she won't be
> spending much time on the Web dwelling
> over any of the 65 anti-sites listed at
> http://www.virtue.nu/popskank/links.html. "Hey," she
> says with a shrug and a smile, "Did you know I
> have more Web sites than Barbra Streisand?"

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