Willa Was Here

Willa Ford was 20 when “I Wanna Be Bad” made her famous, and the song has outlasted almost everything around it. Willa Was Here, her debut, came out on Lava/Atlantic on July 17, 2001. On the Billboard chart dated August 4, the single reached its peak of No. 22 on the Hot 100 and the album entered the Billboard 200 at No. 56, as high as it would go. The second single, “Did Ya’ Understand That”, was released on September 11, 2001. As Ford put it later, anything launched that day “kind of got canned”. A second album was nearly finished when it was shelved, and she left music.

The single came before the album. Ford, born Amanda Lee Williford and raised in Florida, had trained in opera as a teenager and was signed to MCA, which asked her for more wholesome songs. She did the opposite. With Brian Kierulf and Josh Schwartz she wrote a song about wanting to be bad, and when Lava’s president heard it, he signed her and made it her first single. Kierulf played the instruments, Schwartz added guitar, and the two produced it at The Dojo in Jackson, New Jersey, and Battery Studios in New York. The opening lines are run through Auto-Tune, there are vocoder lines, and the single version carries a verse from Royce da 5′9″.

The rest of the record was built by committee. The booklet credits a dozen producers or production teams and ten studios in New Jersey, New York and Los Angeles, with Ford as one of three executive producers. She has a writing credit on nine of the eleven songs, and the most pointed is “Tired”. In a 2019 interview she quoted its line about being tired of the clones that look like her and of people saying “Britney”, and said she meant the comparisons, not Spears herself. She had been signed for two years before her record came out, she explained, and as a blonde she was measured against Spears from the start. “Somebody Take the Pain Away”, one of the two songs she didn’t write, interpolates Eurythmics’ “Here Comes the Rain Again”, with strings arranged by Kierulf.

“I Wanna Be Bad” is still the reason to come back. Its narrator wants to be bad because the man she is with makes it look so good, a premise Ford has tied to her own fight with the label over who she was supposed to be. It spent 20 weeks on the Hot 100, and it found a lasting audience in the LGBTQ+ community, which Ford has put down to its message of “I’m trying to figure out who I am”. Her own verdict on that period came in 2017: she had written the songs, she told Billboard, but felt “the authenticity wasn’t there”.

The few reviews in 2001 had said much the same. AllMusic gave the album 2.5 out of 5, liking the single’s “post-Britney, Max Martin flair” and almost nothing after it. Billboard’s singles column, like several critics, compared the song to Spears. Glamour, looking back in 2019, called it a stomping anthem.

Twenty-five years later, the album holds one song with a point of view, even if it works in a lane Spears had already opened, and one, “Tired”, that names the problem. The other nine are the work of many hands. Ford returned in October 2025 with “Burn Burn” and released her second album, amanda, on her own label in March 2026. Then she went back to 2001 for exactly one song: a string orchestra version of “I Wanna Be Bad” in April and a re-recording, “Willa’s Version”, on July 17, 25 years to the day after Willa Was Here.