Rihanna distances herself from her own back catalog

Few artists have had a pop-chart run like Rihanna in recent years. But now the singer has told MTV that she hopes to step back from her previous hits on future performances.

“I wanted to kind of just get back to... not that they weren’t real music, but I just wanted to focus on things that felt real, that felt soulful, that felt forever,” she said describing how she’s changed since some of her biggest previous hits, which include “Umbrella” and “We Found Love.”

“I wanted songs that I could perform in 15 years,” she said. “I wanted an album that I could perform in 15 years, not any songs that were burned out. I find that when I get on stage now, I don’t want to perform a lot of my songs because they don’t feel like me. So I want to make songs that are timeless.”

She made the remarks in the run-up to the release of her eighth album, widely rumored to be titled “R8.” Her most recent tour, a double-headline bill with frequent collaborator Eminem, came to the Rose Bowl last August, where the Times’ Mikael Wood described them as “channel(ing) dramatically different energies as they moved through songs that covered just as much stylistic ground.”

If she’s looking for career longevity, she’s been hanging out in good company -- she performed her recent collaboration with Paul McCartney and Kanye West, “FourFiveSeconds,” at this year’s Grammy Awards.

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