Ashlee Simpson Dispels Rumors About Upcoming LP: No Robert Smith or Pete Wentz

No, Robert Smith did not work on Ashlee Simpson's still-untitled November album, but Timbaland, the Neptunes, Kenna and Travis McCoy from Gym Class Heroes did. "That was never true," Simpson says of the rumored Cure collaboration. "I was like, "Oh my God, that is so not true and so embarrassing." I am a huge fan, but would never expect to write with Robert Smith from the Cure. I mean, that would be a dream, but nothing that I would ever say. I was dying when I read that. I was like, "No! He's gonna think I'm crazy." Other folks who didn't wind up on the "fun, dance-y record" with a "club and Eighties feel": Jenny Lewis (plans for a singer-songwriter-feeling record were scrapped early on) and Simpson beau Pete Wentz ("We both keep our music separate from each other," she says).

Simpson says the beat-heavy tracks cover happy and darker moments of her emotional landscape, and that lines like "you ain't got no beef" shouldn't be taken too literally. "I think everything is personal in your own way. And for me, it's fun to listen to a record and not fully know exactly who they're talking about or what they're talking about or what point it was in their life. You gotta keep people guessing. I listened to a Fiona Apple record and I had no idea what she was talking about."

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Song Stories

“Too Close”

Next | 1998

Next was formed in Minneapolis when the uncle of Terry "T-Low" and Raphael "Tweety" Brown, who was a gospel choir director, introduced the brothers to Robert Lavelle "R.L." Huggar. Sounds of Blackness singer Ann Nesby groomed the R&B group before handing them over to Naughty by Nature's KayGee, who wrote and produced "Too Close." The idea for the song was sparked "from a conversation we had with several girls at a nightclub," explained T-Low. "It's talking about the club scene, with guys getting out of hand and the female telling him to back up, asking, 'What are you doing?'" 

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