Taylor Swift once paid Nelly $50,000 — discreetly placed in a McDonald’s bag — so that he would perform with her in Houston during her Speak Now tour in 2011.
“I’ve been knowing her for a long time,” Nelly, 51, said of his friendship with Swift, 36, during an appearance on The Breakfast Club on Thursday, October 29. “She’s popped out at some of my shows.”
Nelly then recalled receiving a strange call from Swift 16 years earlier.
“That woman called me one night, just out the blue, and said, ‘Yo, Nelly, listen, me and my friends, we made a routine to ‘Hot in Herre’ last night, right?” he said, adding that Swift asked him for a “really big favor.”
“She said, ‘I got two shows in Houston, tomorrow and the next day. Can you come down to Houston and just perform [the song]?’” he recalled Swift telling him. “‘I don’t want to disrespect you. I don’t really have a budget like that.’”
Nelly then shared that Swift offered to pay him $50,000 and to send her private jet to bring him to the concert.
“You know, I just said, ‘Can you put that in a McDonald’s bag?’” the rapper quipped.
Though Nelly said he would have performed at the show for free, Swift delivered on her promise.
“Picked up me and the kids. Flew us down to Houston because she was doing, like, three to four nights at the baseball stadium,” he recalled. “56,000 people. Her father … comes out, tosses me a McDonald bag, $50,000 cash.”
In addition to “Hot in Herre,” Swift and Nelly performed “Just a Dream” at one of her Houston shows in 2011. The pair reunited on her Red and 1989 world tours in 2013 and 2015, respectively.
Nelly and his wife, Ashanti, then discussed Swift’s wedding to Travis Kelce at Madison Square Garden in July. About 1,000 guests attended the nuptials, with some surprising faces in the mix — from Tom Cruise and Olympic gymnast Simone Biles to Shark Tank star Barbara Corcoran.
“They know mad people, but it was so many different type of people,” Ashanti, 46, pointed out on Thursday, although Nelly said he wasn’t too surprised by the diverse guest list.
“She’s been in this business for a long time, and at the top of it,” he said. “And when you’re like that, you make a lot of friends. You know what I’m saying? And her husband is [a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs]. He might go down as the greatest tight end of all time. So, he knows a lot of people.”
