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RS: Let me ask you, are you a black girl or a white girl?
Heather Leigh West: I'm a little, blonde white girl.

RS: Oh, it's sort of funny because usually a white girl's lip-synching a black girl's songs, so for a black girl to be lip-synching a white girl singing, that's a unique concept.
Heather Leigh West: It is, and what's so funny is that there's now two girls and both of them are trying to claim it's their voice.


Somewhere that's actually a compliment, but it doesn't really work out that way in the wash. I'm not going to say it's fine with me because obviously it's not fine with me, but the reason that I'm even out here talking about it is to make sure that people know is because my fans are angry. They want to know who the hell I am and they have brought the heat to me about it so many times that there was no way that I couldn't actively pursue making sure that the whole world knew the truth. Whether it meant a dollar or not was irrelevant, it was more about the history of it all. Because one thing that I learned about audience members is that they want to know who it REALLY is that they are loving, not someone claiming to be. They HATE that! Milli Vanilli, anyone?

RS: Did you ever contact the people in Italy, the Tamperer people who did the record?
Heather Leigh West: You know, it's so funny, I didn't contact them intentionally, but somehow we did connect. Somebody that I know was in touch with their camp and told them the story and they didn't believe it and then they denied knowing anything about it.

But my whole feeling is this, you don't even have to be a musician or someone in the industry to be able to hear plainly that this girl whose name is on the other track is not the same voice as my voice. So they were already working with her on "If You Buy This Record" and other stuff in the studio and it's just impossible to me that they didn't know that it wasn't her? As a vocalist, I wouldn't have cared at all if she would have just rerecorded it, the issue is that how can the entire world be dancing to my voice and nobody lets anybody know that that's me? Just go back into the studio and rerecord it and then it is you, and there's no beef. I don't have any rights to the actual song itself but I do, if that is my actual voice then why are you getting credit for it? So I think what happened was that even if she had tried to go in, she just wasn't able to deliver it the same way that people want to hear it. She doesn't have the same type of voice, she has a very light, airy voice in comparison to my big-assed, blow you away vocal that's up in this little, blonde body.

RS: So now in 2007, to set the story straight, you rerecord the song. Tell us about that.
Heather Leigh West: Everybody in the world had been nudging me to make sure that I let it be known. So I decided that since nobody that's involved wants to be honest about the situation, if I rerecord it nobody can deny my voice. People know my voice so well because they know the song so well and it means something to them, that if I open my mouth and I rerecord it, then historically whether anything else happens, I could die and the world can go back and investigate and go yup, it was her, and listen to the different versions back and forth and they'll realize that it's me. So I decided to do it and put my name in the song and released it as a promo, it's not for sale. I worked with DJ Liza and she was fabulous to work with. I didn't release it to make money; I released it to make history and to make a point. What's so funny is about two months later, Maya Days also came out with a new "Drop A House 2007," and it sounds like The Love Boat. I think that by doing that she actually did me a favor because it's going to help me legally prove that she had nothing to do with the original recording.