Rihanna Super Bowl 2023 Performance: Singer Changed Her Setlist 39 Times

Rihanna is going all out for her highly anticipated Super Bowl LVII halftime show, her first live music stage in nearly seven years.

During an Apple Music press conference Thursday, the 34-year-old superstar teased details about her upcoming performance and revealed that she's been focused on preparing for the big show at the State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, Sunday.

"I've been so focused on the Super Bowl I totally forgot my birthday is coming up. I totally forgot about Valentine's Day," Rihanna said. "[There's] a lot of preparation, a lot of moving parts. And this week is the week that everyone is being tested. We're just tightening up everything, everybody's dialing in, everybody's tuning up."

The singer, born Robyn Rihanna Fenty, also revealed that she and her team encountered several challenges, the biggest of which was choosing the songs to include in the 13-minute show.

"The setlist was the biggest challenge. That was the hardest, hardest part, deciding how to maximize 13 minutes but also celebrate. That's what this show's going to be. It's going to be a celebration of my catalog in the best way we could have put it together," she said, adding that they had to cram her 17-year career into the limited time.

She continued, "Some songs we have to lose because of that, and that's going to be okay. We did a pretty good job at narrowing it down. There [have] probably been about 39 versions of the setlist right now. We're on our 39th. Every little change counts."

Rihanna has been thriving in the music industry since the early 2000s, releasing eight banger studio albums, including "Music of the Sun," "Good Girl Gone Bad," "Loud," and "Unapologetic." She took a long hiatus after releasing her eighth studio album "Anti" in 2016.

The halftime show will mark her return to live performance for the first time since the 2018 Grammy Awards, where she performed "Wild Thoughts" with DJ Khaled and Bryson Tiller.

The singer said representing her home country of Barbados was a huge factor in her decision to do the show.

"[Caribbean culture is] a big part of why it's important for me to do this show. Representation. Representing immigrants, representing my country, Barbados. Representing Black women everywhere. That's really important," she said.

Rihanna also said that she wanted her 8-month-old son, whom she and boyfriend A$AP Rocky welcomed last May, to see that kind of representation in "one of the biggest stages in the world."

"When you become a mom, there's something that just happens where you feel like you could take on the world, you could do anything," she shared during the press conference.

"The Super Bowl is one of the biggest stages in the world. As scary as that was, because I haven't been on stage in seven years, there's something exhilarating about the challenge of it all. It's important for me to do this this year. It's important for representation, it's important for my son to see that," she added.

Last year, Rihanna released her first new song in six years, the ballad "Lift Me Up" from the original soundtrack of "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever," which earned her her first nomination at the Academy Awards for best original song.

When asked by Apple Music Radio's Nadeska Alexis, who hosted the press conference, if she has plans to release new music, Rihanna said, "I'm feeling open to exploring, discovering, creating things that are new, things that are different, things that are off, weird. Might not ever make sense to my fans... I want to have fun with music."