At the very top of Rihanna's 2011 hit "Cockiness (Love It)", you can hear the voice of Greg Kinnear as he prepares to launch into a cover of Billy Stewart's "Summertime." The clip, of course, is taken from the existential exploration masterwork Stuck on You.
Kinnear dropped by Monday's Tonight Show to promote his episode of Amazon's new Philip K. Dick sci-fi anthology Electric Dreams, and the appearance naturally resulted in an in-depth discussion about being sampled on a Rihanna classic. "I have three daughters," Kinnear said. "I think my kids are a little older than yours. They're at that stage where if, when dropping them off at school, I could just keep the car moving, they would opt for that or a bag over my head. Anything. Just a very awkward stage." A chance for bonding popped up, Kinnear explained, when Rihanna's team reached out about the Bangladesh-produced Talk That Talk cut.
"I thought the coolest moment of all time, it happened recently, when Rihanna—RiRi—she called me up and wanted to use a song that I had recorded in a movie a few years ago, the Academy Award–winning Stuck on You," he said. "We had a song in there that I had actually recorded. It was based on Billy Stewart's 'Summertime,' and she had heard it, the only person that's ever heard it, and Rihanna calls—okay, you caught me in a lie—her lawyer called my lawyer and asked whether or not they could use a piece of the song in a song she was doing."
Suddenly, Kinnear added, he didn't know if he was "the loser dad" anymore. "I was really excited about it and said 'How much is she willing to pay me?' and my lawyer said 'Nothing!' and I said 'We got a deal.'" There's a bit more to the story, but I'll leave it to you to watch the video in full up top.
