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![]() AllPop.com; July 27, 2001 Willa Ford the "bad" girl of pop Nobody tells Willa Ford what to do. Willa is the latest pop diva to hit the stage with her album, "Willa Was Here" and her single "I Wanna Be Bad". But unlike some female pop stars, she doesn't pretend she's naive, innocent or chaste and she most definitely does not allow herself to be compromised. "The reason I got out of my deal is because they were kind of like pushing me around," says Willa about her departure from MCA to Atlantic. "I had the single, 'I Wanna Be Bad'... they were like 'We're just not sure if it's first single material. It's a little too racy for a first single. Radio Disney won't play it. ' And my exact words were 'F***' Radio Disney. Like God bless them but that's not my image. And then my record company guy came at me and like, that's it, I unleashed, I was like 'You wanna manufacture me? You wanna run my life? Go find somebody else, 'cause you're not going to run my life' and basically got into it to the point where my attorney had them agree that, if somebody would buy me out, that I could leave." Willa, who wrote most of the album herself, says the record is: "just me, honest to God". So who is Willa? Well, here are a few things that Willa is against which might give you a better idea about her personality: 1. She's very anti-lip synching. Another interesting fact about Willa is that she, as most pop fans already know, is the ex-girlfriend of none other than Backstreet Boy heartthrob Nick Carter. Willa's high-profile romance earned her a nasty reputation and dozens of hate websites like one online petition dedicated to thwarting her career. "We don't want Willa Ford to be famous!" reads http://www.petitiononline.com/clnwf/petition.html (which boasts 827 signatures). "That means her being on television, radio, or on tour. She doesn't deserve to be respected. Sign this if you wouldn't purchase her album, and you don't support her." "That stuff that was started by somebody who didn't really like me and just wanted to see how quickly they could turn everybody against me," she says about the anti-Willa website. "Congratulations, I'll shake your hand, if that's what you call winning." But Willa says she's now learned to ignore the anti-Willa world and has proved them all wrong by finding success. She's even recently started talking with Nick again. "It's one of the happiest times of my life right now," she says, "getting everything cleared up and just talking." And Willa wants her enemies to hear her message loud and clear. "A lot of pop fans think that I'm this evil person that's out...honest to God, at the end of the day, I'm a normal person," she says. "The whole bad girl thing...I like to speak my mind and if that makes me bad then call me bad, whatever."
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