In this song, Rihanna comforts her partner by singing about how she will be there for him in good times and bad. She knows there will be some rough times, which she articulates in the lyrics:
Baby 'cause in the dark you can't see shiny cars
And that's when you need me there
With you I'll always share
The umbrella is a metaphor for her support, which she promises to provide.
"An umbrella is protection, it protects you from rain," Rihanna explained. "The rain in this case is negativeness and vulnerability."
"Umbrella" was undoubtably the song of the summer in 2007. In America, it hit #1 in early June and stayed at the top for seven weeks.
Jay-Z, who signed Rihanna and was her label boss at Def Jam, does the rap at the beginning, adding some serious star power to the track. Jay kicks off the action with some weather metaphors to set the stage:
No clouds in my stones
Let it rain, I hydroplane in the bank
His verse also introduces Rihanna with a sly movie reference:
Little Miss Sunshine, Rihanna, where you at?
The movie Little Miss Sunshine, released the previous year, was a surprise hit and picked up a bunch of awards.
"Umbrella" was written by Terius "The-Dream" Nash, who co-wrote "
Me Against The Music" for Britney Spears as well as several songs for B2K and Nivea. Jay-Z and the track's producers, Kuk Harrell and Tricky Stewart, also got songwriting credits.
The-Dream didn't have anyone specific in mind when he wrote it. "I felt in my heart at the time that I needed a friend like this," he
told Billboard. "I wanted to also be that person for someone else."
He added: "It took maybe 15 minutes to get out the song, it began like a rap freestyle and it just never stopped pouring, metaphor after metaphor. I was in a zone and in a feeling that wasn't going to end until I finished what I had to say."
Rihanna was just 19 in 2007 when "Umbrella" was released as the lead single from her third album,
Good Girl Gone Bad. She had a track record of exceeding expectations at every turn, dating back to when she was singing at talent shows in her native Barbados as a trio with two friends. Evan Rogers, a singer and producer whose wife is from the island, was there on vacation in 2003 when he agreed to audition the trio. The other girls were nothing special, but he could tell Rihanna, 15 at the time, had singing chops and star power. Rogers and his partner
Carl Sturken (they had some hits in the early '90s with their group Rythm Syndicate, including "
P.A.S.S.I.O.N.") flew her to America when she had breaks from school and worked up a bunch of songs with her that they used as a demo. This led to a 2005 audition with Jay-Z, who had just taken over as president of Def Jam Records. He signed Rihanna on the spot, and her first album,
Music Of The Sun, filled mostly with songs she worked on with Rogers and Sturken, was released later that year when she was 17. Her first single was the hit "
Pon De Replay."
Def Jam worked her hard; her next album,
A Girl Like Me, was released less than a year later and contained her first #1 hit, "
SOS." "Umbrella" made her a much bigger star, and the hits kept coming. By 2014, she had a remarkable 13 #1 hits, and she was still in her 20s. This was also when her Def Jam contract expired. Jay-Z had left the label in late 2007, but in 2013 he signed her to his new one, Roc Nation. Rihanna finally took a break, waiting until 2016 to release her next album,
Anti. She then went six years without releasing more music, during which time she had her first child.
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"Umbrella" went to #1 in most countries it was released, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal and Spain. It was particularly popular in the UK, where it debuted #1 on the strength of download sales and stayed at the top for 10 weeks, the longest run since "
Love Is All Around" by Wet Wet Wet made a splash with 15 weeks at the summit in 1994.
"Umbrella" was also the first single to stay at #1 in both the UK and US for at least five weeks since Elton John's 1997 update to "
Candle In The Wind.
Some listeners find the "Umbrella... ella... ella... eh... eh... eh" refrain rather cloying and were tormented for months when the song took off.
Rihanna offered her thoughts in a 2008 interview with Q magazine. "A lot of people didn't really understand it," she said. "They thought the repetition was annoying. But I knew that was what people would catch on to right away, because that's what stuck in my head. People didn't get the lyric either."
Britney Spears, Taio Cruz, and Mary J. Blige all had a crack at "Umbrella" before it went to Rihanna. Cruz, who later had a hit with "
Dynamite," was part of Tricky Stewart's Redzone production team. He told
The Daily Telegraph they submitted the song for Spears'
Blackout album, but it was rejected. Cruz then made a demo, but his record company didn't think it was a hit.
The song was then pitched to both Mary J. Blige and Rihanna. Blige loved the song, but Rihanna wanted it more. She told the
Guardian that at the Grammy Awards in 2007 (where Blige won three awards and Rihanna was a presenter), she cornered The Dream and told him, "Umbrella is
my record."
Blige didn't know they were also shopping the song to Rihanna, but has no hard feelings. "She's such a beautiful lady, and I love her to death," she told MTV. "I was so glad that she caught it and knocked it out of the park, and it's still one of my favorite songs to date."
England was pounded by rain during the summer of 2007 when this song was a huge hit. The London newspaper
The Sun suggested that "Umbrella" might be the cause, as clubgoers could have been doing an unintentional rain dance when it played. They suggested a ban on Rihanna and an effort to download songs like "
In the Summertime."
Rihanna told
Q she thought the weather contributed to the song's success. "People hate the rain, but here was this song that speaks about the rain and makes you feel great, even if the weather is horrible," she said.
The eye-catching music video for "Umbrella" gave the song lots of exposure, earning heavy airplay on MTV, BET, and many other outlets around the world. It was directed by Chris Applebaum, who helmed Rihanna's "
S.O.S. (Rescue Me)." He's really good at shooting beautiful people; Applebaum has also made videos for Usher ("
Dive") and Mariah Carey ("
I'll Be Lovin' U Long Time") and has shot commercials for beauty and fitness products.
He pitched Rihanna and Jay-Z on the idea of putting Rihanna in body paint and using lots of rain imagery. They loved the idea, and Rihanna asked to incorporate a dance routine with an umbrella, a nod to Gene Kelly's famous dance sequence in
Singin' in the Rain. Applebaum worked that into the treatment and came up with the glittering rain at the end, inspired by motocross videos he used to watch that used lots of pyro.
"Umbrella" was the most-searched song on Google in 2007. This owes partly to the song's sheer popularity, but it's also because Rihanna was a relatively new artist at the time and many people weren't sure who was singing it.
Chris Brown, when he and Rihanna were still a couple, recorded
his own version of this song, changing the chorus from "you can stand under my umbrella" to "you can be my Cinderella."
Opening an umbrella indoors is considered bad luck, but this song caused mass outbreaks of umbrellas on dance floors, which rid Rihanna of that superstition. "I believed that when I was younger, but after all the rehearsals for videos and live shows it kind of fell away," she told the Daily Mirror. "People bring umbrellas to the show and you see them opening - it's the most amazing sight."
"Umbrella" won the Grammy Award for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration at the 2008 ceremony, where Rihanna performed it with The Time. It was nominated for Record Of The Year but lost to "
Rehab" by Amy Winehouse.
Rihanna and the British band The Klaxons performed "Umbrella" in a mash-up with the Klaxons' "
Golden Skans" at the 2008 Brit Awards ceremony. She told BBC 6 Music: "It was really different, very cool, unexpected. But when I hear it, I just want to hear it more. It makes it so much more rock and roll. It's a different tempo and everything. But I actually want to release a version like that. Maybe the same version. I really, really liked it."
Rihanna was busy with touring and promotion so she wasn't part of the creative process for this or any other song from her Good Girl Gone Bad album and didn't receive any songwriting credits. She has a few credits on her first two albums, mostly on tracks written by Evan Rogers and Carl Sturken, who looked out for her; Rihanna lived with Rogers and his wife when she moved to America, and putting her name on some credits made sure she'd stay on solid financial footing. She took a big risk leaving Barbados, and her success at Def Jam was no sure thing. The label had a lot of other young artists on their roster as well. Some, like Teairra Mari, didn't make it past their first album.
Rihanna had more influence on Rated R, the follow-up to Good Girl Gone Bad. She has credits on nine of the 13 tracks.
The Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers recorded "Umbrella" for an album of covers by various acts for the New Musical Express. Released as a digital-only single, it climbed to #47 on the UK chart. Their bassist Nicky Wire told the New Musical Express: "This was my favorite track of 2007. It's just so razor-sharp. And who'd have thought a song called 'Umbrella' would be #1 all over the world? It's such an un-pop word. I love it when a record seems to come from another universe. I just wanted us to have a stab at it!"
The Totes company teamed with Def Jam to promote this song and sell more umbrellas. As part of the deal, Totes supplied 10,000 Rihanna umbrellas that were given away on Memorial Day weekend 2007 as the song was climbing the charts. Totes then launched a line of Rihanna-branded umbrellas, with the limited edition models selling for $50.
Rihanna changed lanes for her next single, "
Shut Up And Drive," which is more of rocker. She stayed at the top by constantly mixing up styles and recording songs with an array of producers.
Mandy Moore
recorded a new version of "Umbrella" that was used in a 2007 episode of MTV's
The Hills. Other artists to cover the song include All Time Low, Marie Digby, and JLS.
Taylor Swift did a live version for iTunes as part of her Live From SoHo session that was released as a single and reached #104 in America.
Gwyneth Paltrow sang "Umbrella" in a mash-up with "
Singin' In The Rain" on the TV series
Glee in the 2010 episode "The Substitute." Released as a single, it went to #18 in the US.
Rihanna strikes an impressive pose in the artwork for this song. Her modeling talents served her well over the next few years as she became a fashion icon and partnered with a number of designers, eventually launching her own line of apparel and beauty products, Fenty. This line of work proved much more profitable than music, making Rihanna a billionaire.
The video won for Video Of The Year at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards. It took the same prize at the inaugural VH1 Soul Presents: Vibe Awards Special.
Tricky Stewart wasn't sure at first if Rihanna was right for this song, but when she nailed the "ella" refrain, he knew they were onto something. He told MTV: "When she recorded the 'ellas,' you knew it was about to be the jump-off, and your life was about to change if you had anything to do with that record."
In the same interview Stewart explained how Jay-Z altered his guest verse. He said: "There was actually another version before that one that he did. And the first one was perfect. And right before they were about to press it up, he went and changed his verse. And nobody even knew he changed his verse. At the time when he did, I didn't really understand. But now, when I go back every once in a while and listen to the old rap, what he wrote [instead] makes so much better sense. And from a songwriter's standpoint, he just really made it more about the song, with the metaphors about umbrellas and about the weather versus what he had before."
We don't believe him, but The-Dream claims he pocketed $15 million for writing this song. Speaking with BBC Radio 1Extra's Tim Westwood, he joked that every "ella" is worth half a million. We're guessing he's exaggerating for effect or using some very creative accounting. Top songwriter/producers usually earn somewhere around $300,000 for a hit.
The video is popular among Illuminati conspiracy theorists who believe a shadowy organization pulls the strings of the government and the media in a bid to establish a New World Order. Sharp-eyed viewers have spotted lots of the organization's symbols in movies and music videos, including this one, where Rihanna sits inside a large triangle - one of the group's most favored symbols. Sorry guys, you've been Punk'd.
"I freely admit to having placed symbols of imagery in music videos, just to f--k around with people, all throughout the 2000s," director Chris Applebaum said. "Every time I put something on air on MTV, there's a shrunken down image of the devil or some kind of odd symbol. For just a single frame. Nobody's stopping me and nobody has stopped me."
According to Applebaum, the video made about $10 million through iTunes, and he didn't see a penny of it. He had already successfully transitioned into directing TV commercials, such as the notorious Carl's Jr. ad campaign that features models seductively eating junk food, so he didn't mind doing a freebie. "I fought all the way down the line to make it exactly the way I wanted to be, the way Rihanna wanted it to be. That's the symbol of something good: would you be willing to do this for free?"
Rihanna told Men's Fitness magazine about filming the silver scene in the song's video: "It was actually fun doing it because it's probably something that I'll only do once in my lifetime. Two women painted me, spraying coat after coat. Then I stood in a big black box so that no one could see me in the nude while they filmed. There were only, like, eight people in the box including the director and my manager. The body paint was really oily. I couldn't wait to get it of my face. That was the worst part about it - getting it off. I was in the shower for two and a half hours! My best friend had to come and shower with me, because after I tried to do it myself, the silver would just go back to where I just washed myself. She was just like, 'Take your hands off and let me do it.' Days after, I still had some in my hair, ears, even my belly button. It would not come off. [Laughs]"
In The Office episode "Weight Loss" from season 5, Andy sings this to Angela, changing "Umbrella" to "Angerela."
Rihanna sang "Umbrella" at the Super Bowl halftime show in 2023 along with another Jay-Z collaboration, "
Run This Town." The show included fireworks, floating platforms, and 80 dancers dressed in billowing white. It did not include any surprise appearances, which was kind of surprising considering Rihanna's long list of big-name co-conspirators.
The performance was a return to the stage for Rihanna, who last sang at the Grammy Awards in 2018 and hadn't toured since 2016. Soon after the show, she confirmed that she was pregnant with her second child.
After the Super Bowl, the song returned to the Hot 100 at #37.