Hold up, Mario did what because of what? You can’t make this up. Okay, Mario recently sat down with Drink Champs and looked back on a career moment he still shakes his head over. In the early 2000s, when his hit single “Just A Friend (2002)” was starting to explode, the singer received an invitation that most new artists would never pass up: performing with JAY-Z at Madison Square Garden.
“I was living in Jersey at the time, around the time ‘Just A Friend’ came out,” Mario recalled. “Jay had two shows at Madison Square Garden and he wanted me to come out on his set and would meet me and all that.”
But wait. Instead of joining Hov on the MSG stage, Mario chose to stick to a date he had already planned. “At the time, I was dating this girl in Jersey, and the night they wanted me to come out, I already had plans with her,” he said with a laugh.
His manager tried to persuade him to reconsider, but Mario remained committed to his evening plans. “I was like, ‘Shh, ahh, I can’t.’ I passed up on that, and I don’t know if Jay took that some type of way, but I was young, having fun,” he admitted.
Here’s the thing, Mario never quite confirmed whether JAY-Z felt slighted, Mario noted he has never received an invitation to the Roc Nation Brunch. He also mentioned an interesting side note: Ne-Yo revealed that Jay still questions his decision to hand Mario another major hit, “Let Me Love You.”
“Shortly before the Def Jam situation happened, I leaned on songwriting. I was just a songwriter, so I wrote a song for Mario, ‘Let Me Love You,’ so this song goes on and stays at number one for 12 or 13 weeks, something like that, becomes one of the most played songs in radio history,” Ne-Yo shared during his 2023 appearance on Club Shay Shay.
Mario added, “The first time I got to meet JAY-Z, I’d been signed for a couple months at this point. I walk into the room and he’s in there. It’s in L.A. Reid’s office. I walk in, ‘Hey it’s nice to meet you.’ He like, ‘Man, why you give that damn song away? […] Why you give that damn song away?’ To this day, he yell at me about giving that damn song away. But I was just a songwriter when I wrote it, I didn’t write it for myself.”
That’s a wild story. Like who does that? Mario does, ha.