Rita Ora is currently serving as a judge on the Australian singing competition series The Voice alongside celebrity judges like Keith Urban. Ora is now far along enough in her career that she rarely gets starstruck when she meets fellow celebrities, but the same cannot be said of the time she met Madonna. Ora recounted her first encounter with Madonna on Tuesday’s episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and she said it was “very awkward.”
Ora fist met Madonna when she was just starting out in her singing career and was assisting with a campaign for the pop icon’s clothing line. After they chatted for a bit, Madonna apparently had an odd request: The singer wanted them to sit on the floor. Ora said:
“The highlight of my life is obviously Madonna, that’s one of the biggest idols of all time. I had an amazing moment with her. Very awkward but also unbelievable. She really just made me find my light, and by doing that, we had to kneel on the floor. I thought it was ‘Like A Prayer’ in real life that was happening. I had to go breathe in the bathroom before I actually did meet her, I mean this was earlier in my career. I was doing a campaign for her clothing line and so then she came to meet me and I loved it, I couldn’t breathe. She was like, ‘This is not my light. Let’s get down.'”
Elsewhere in their conversation, Ora talked about her recent EP Bang and how it was truly a global effort. “I wanted to do a project that felt like there was no pressure that a bunch of my mates could just jump on,” she said. “We did it all virtually, actually, like this. I actually collaborated with a producer Imanbek, who is from Kazakhstan and doesn’t speak a word of English. I know this might sound corny, but really, music has no language because it was proved with this EP. We really just connected through music and I wanted it to feel like a global phenomenon.”
Watch Ora’s interview on The Tonight Show above.
Bang is out now via Atlantic. Get it here.
Rita Ora is a Warner Music artist. .
