Jermaine Dupri Tells All: The Stories Behind His Classic Records (Part 1)

From Biggie to Mariah Carey, JD shares the details of his biggest hits.

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Jermaine Dupri might not have a distinct production signature like his contemporaries The Neptunes, but that might also be the reason for his monumental success. On a recent trip to New York to promote the So So Def reunion show, the legendary producer stopped by the Complex offices for a short visit to discuss the production behind some of his landmark releases.

In person, Dupri is a restless presence. He stays in constant motion, switching between his phone and iPad without losing the train of conversation. He was soon off for another interview, so as a result, we only captured around half of the rapper-producer's hits, which is as much a statement about the breadth of his catalog as it is about time pressures.

Jermaine Dupri didn't just produce great rap music; he produced great R&B and pop music, as well, and a few times, songs that qualified as all three.

Bounce with us and the man behind the hits. These are the secrets to Jermaine Dupri's biggest records.

As told to David Drake (@somanyshrimp)

RELATED: The 30 Best So So Def Songs
RELATED: #DeepCuts: So So Def's Best Under-the-Radar Tracks

Kris Kross "Jump" (1992)

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Producer: Jermaine Dupri
Album: Totally Krossed Out
Label: So So Def/Ruffhouse/Columbia

"It was a record that probably took like 30 minutes, once I got the idea of what it was. It was an idea to try to create a call and response record, something that everybody could be a part of. They were kids, and I knew that it needed a thing to attach to it. It was an overall idea. I saw everybody jumping at most of the concerts at this time of me going to concerts. It was like, I should make a song about what I see.

"I met Kris and Chris actually walking through the mall; they were shopping. And the people were paying attention to them, which made me say, if they had a record, they would be crazy. They could turn into something. [It was] just an idea from there, and my mind just started racing. 'Jump' is what got So So Def, because at that point, if you create one artist, the labels started looking for you, and they start trying to court you to do more."

Xscape "Just Kickin' It" (1993)

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Producer: Jermaine Dupri
Album: Hummin' Comin' at 'Cha
Label: Sony

"I saw Xscape singing at my birthday party, and it was just in my mind that I was going to sign them. So from that point it was like, what's next? What's the next thing to do? ["Just Kickin' It"] was just my vision of what I felt like the girls should be singing. I wanted a record that actually was a hybrid between hip-hop and R&B, so I wanted the hook to say something that was hip-hop but I wanted it to be a song. The hip-hop people would not ignore it—because at this time, when I made this record, hip-hop and R&B wasn't living together the way they do now. It wasn't the normal thing to have rappers on R&B music. So it's like the first time I thought, without putting a rapper on the song, let's just make a song that infuses both of those things.

"I wasn't really paying no attention to [competition at Uptown Records]. As a young person, you don't pay attention to competition, you pay attention to the fact that you got an opportunity."

Da Brat "Funkdafied" (1994)

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Producer: Jermaine Dupri
Album: Funkdafied
Label: So So Def

"She was introduced to me by Kriss Kross. They saw her while they were on tour, and they came to me and said, "We got this female rapper you should check out." And when they did it, I didn't want no female rapper. But I thought that since they said I should check her out... I'm like, what does she do that made them want me to look at her? So I at least decided to give it a listen.

"[When it came to make beats for the record,] each time there's a new artist, there's a time for that artist. There's a time for me to make music with that artist. What am I going to do for that artist to make them special? It's just a timing thing, for the most part. I've been making beats since I was like 12. I seen people do things on the drum machine and I used to...There was one point in time where I wanted to be an artist, a fully-fledged artist, and I was taking ideas to these producers and they didn't do what I wanted them to do with these ideas. That basically forced me to become my own producer.

"My idol is Quincy Jones. If you pull up his resume you can't trace nothing to what he's done. You listen to "Ironside" and you listen to "Billie Jean," you can't tell me that's the same person. If you listen to "Sanford and Son Theme (The Streetbeater)" and you listen to "Roots" you can't tell me it's the same person. That's where I get that from. When I listen to his records and I listen to George Benson and I listen to "The Secret Garden" or something like that, you can't tell it's the same person. You could say somebody musical did these records, they're a very musical person, but there's nothing about it that's traceable. I think that was my whole thing."

Da Brat "Give It 2 You" (1994)

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Producer: Jermaine Dupri
Album: Funkdafied
Label: So So Def

"That was the beginning of people throwing cameos in their videos. That was probably one of the videos with the most cameos in it, that actually started that trend of cameo-videos. It's exciting to be able to say that. But at the same time, we were finding her niche, whatever was Da Brat's sound and what could possibly be the thing to make her stand out amongst everyone else."

Kris Kross "Tonite's tha Night" (1995)

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Xscape "Who Can I Run To" (1995)

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Producer: Jermaine Dupri
Album: Off the Hook
Label: So So Def/Columbia

"I was just trying to make sure these kids had a place in music. I felt like we had to keep making the biggest records possible. I never felt like it was a challenge as far as to top what we did. I was just trying to get to a place within the industry to make people say, 'Okay, I'm paying attention.' That's all I was trying to do.

"It was more or less anything to just come back with music, and make bigger records. I think we started at a small spot with them as a smaller group, and then we continued to keep making bigger records to grab more radio space too. That was the thing with them, to get them on every station. With that, Xscape was becoming more famous for vocals, but at the same time we felt like we had dominated r&b. So it was like, what's next? What can we do to keep making them bigger? So we were like, let's get a Diane Warren song, because at this time big songs were like the thing for r&b groups.

"I remember that was the first single. That was to try to spread their wings and get bigger, because they wanted to be on like national anthem type of stuff. Like the stuff you see Alicia [Keys] doing now, we wanted to try to take them to that place. The only way to do that was to get a bigger record and break them into bigger audiences, as opposed to just being a straight R&B group. I was just trying to do things that would elevate that group to another level.

"Still, out of that album, the big records became like 'Who Can I Run To' and 'My Little Secret,' R&B records. I never changed my path as far as...I kept thinking about, what would Quincy do? That's always my thing. 'Who Can I Run To' was a remake. Like you said, I don't think people even knew I did that song. That doesn't sound like no other record I've ever did. Because it was a remake, I had to make it sound as close to the original as possible, but it still was reproduced. The producers I was paying attention to were so far ahead of me and they were killing it. That's all I was paying attention to, the fact that they were way out there ahead of me and I had to make up for a lot of work and just catch them."

The Notorious B.I.G. "Big Poppa (So So Def Remix)" (1995)

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Mariah Carey "Always Be My Baby" (1996)

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Producer: Mariah Carey, Jermaine Dupri, Manuel Seal Jr.
Album: Daydream
Label: Columbia

"We were all on the same label. She was on Columbia. She was basically the queen of Columbia. Funny, it was Grammy time, about the same period of time. It was Grammy period, and we always had a Columbia Grammy party. We basically saw each other at the Grammy party, and Tommy Mottola was basically like, 'Ya'll should work together. We're all in the same building.' He did the executive thing and hooked it up.

"[Working with Mariah in the studio is] your chance. Every time you go into the studio with the best, especially for me, it was like the first time I had ever been in the studio with a person that was considered the best. All my artists [before that] were new and we started from scratch. That was the first time I was in the studio with people that actually were considered the best."

Dru Hill "In My Bed (So So Def Remix)" (1996)

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Producer: Jermaine Dupri
Album: Dru Hill
Label: Island

"The president of the company at the time was like, 'I want you to remix the Dru Hill record.' When they did that, I said, 'That song is too slow for me to just put a beat under it. Let's change the whole song. Come to Atlanta, we'll remix the record.'

"They came, and when they got there I was thinking about that 'Gimme What You Got' sample. Redman actually was the only person that used that beat, and I was like, okay, let me find a rough beat to put these guys over. Sisqó came to the studio, I played the beat for him and he was like, 'Let's go.' He just started re-singing the song. My idea was to take the same lyrics, sing the same lyrics, but sing them to this beat. You already kind of got the melody; the melody is there. Just speed the melody up over the top of this beat. So it's kind of just writing itself out, but it was my way of making a remix."

Lil Kim "Not Tonight" (1997)

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Producer: Jermaine Dupri
Album: Hard Core
Label: Atlantic

"I wasn't in the studio when that record was done, but B.I.G. wanted that beat bad because he loved everything I was doing with Brat. That beat was created because I think he wanted something that sounded like 'Live and Die for Hip Hop,' a Kris Kross record. He loved that and he wanted a record that had the same type of feel. I went back and actually made 'Not Tonight' for him. It wasn't called that, but the next thing I know it was on the Lil' Kim album and it was her song."

Usher "You Make Me Wanna..." (1997)

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Producer: Jermaine Dupri, Manuel Seal
Album: My Way
Label: LaFace, Arista

"LaFace came to me after Kris Kross [happened]. Usher wanted to be on So So Def at one point in time. He had a manager named A.J. that brought him to me. I was catching so much flack about doing young artists that I didn't want young artists. So I was pushing people away from me. I didn't take Usher, and he went to LaFace and did his first album. And then I did a remix for his first album, which was like his third single, 'Think of You.' On the remix, I made Usher sing his bridge over, because his voice changed, and we just did something different with the remix that made people say, "Maybe ya'll should go in the studio and work."

"That's what led to me working on the My Way album. 'You Make Me Wanna...' was the beginning of who you know Usher to be now, so it's hard not to talk about it. [Laughs.] But yeah, 'You Make Me Wanna...,' 'Nice & Slow,' all of those records were the beginning of an era that you hear now. Like the way I had him sing on all of those records is the way most R&B artists sing today.

"I was just trying to make sure the music sounded like it was fitting the time that it came out. That was it. I didn't really know, I mean it's hard to know...He didn't have a sound at that point and time. That's why the album was called My Way, because we were trying to make a point about getting it done his way. And creating his sound, that's what the whole album title was."

Jagged Edge "I Gotta Be" (1997)

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Producer: Jermaine Dupri
Album: A Jagged Era
Label: So So Def/columbia

"Kandi from Xscape actually brought Jagged Edge to my house. She was like, 'This group is good, you should check them out.' At first I didn't really have no idea what I was going to do with them. In my mind, I was like, 'I'm going to make this a male version of Xscape.'

"So the first time we started going to the studio and started doing stuff like that, that didn't really work. We had to find their thing, just go in the studio and work out what their niche was. Find out what was special about Jagged Edge, and what was the thing that I could get out of their project that was going to be different. I found their sound.

"When we started making ballads I found out that Jagged Edge was basically the definition of 'thug love,' because they were guys that looked like rappers, but they were singing songs that were like the nicest records in the world. Being super nice to women. Girls were looking at them like, 'this is the guy that I want.' They're thuggish, they got tattoos, they were wearing braids. They were doing everything that looked like they weren't supposed to be, they didn't look like they were supposed to be singing these songs. But that was defined by them as opposed to me defining it."

Jermaine Dupri f/ Jay-Z "Money Ain't a Thang" (1998)

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Producer: Jermaine Dupri
Album: Life in 1472/Vol. 2 ... Hard Knock Life
Label: So So Def, Roc-A-Fella

"I didn't know what I was trying to do. But yeah, Life in 1472. When I did the 'In My Bed (Remix),' I did this thing at the top of the record. And the way I did the intro, Jay-Z took that on a mixtape and he did something else, but he took the same melody of what I was saying. I heard it. I don't know why I heard it or how I heard it, but for some reason I did. At this point in time, if somebody like me from the south hears an artist from New York like that, you know people are paying attention and giving more credit to incredible artists. You think, 'okay, I struck a chord,' because this guy is paying attention to me. I'm getting deeper, I know people are looking and understanding.

"I saw him when we did the 'A Great Day in Harlem' photo shoot. It was me and Kris Kross, and they did this picture that they tried to reproduce 'A Great Day in Harlem' with all the jazz musicians. This time, they did all the rappers out there. So that day we did the photo shoot, that was like the first time I met a majority of all these New York rappers, and Jay-Z was one of the guys that I met that day. We talked, and I said, 'I heard you took my little thing.' He was like, 'Yeah.' The conversation that me and him had was really weird. It wasn't like a whole bunch of dialogue. It was just like, 'Let's do something.' And from that point, I took that conversation and held onto it, and then once I got my album I was like, I'm going to do a song with Jay-Z.

"I was going to the airport to pick him up, and on my way to the airport I was listening to Reasonable Doubt. On a song he says, "Deep in the south kicking up top game." That line right there is the line that prompted me to use in that next line, because he said 'deep in the south.' If he didn't say that, I probably wouldn't have used 'Money Ain't a Thang,' but the fact that he said 'deep in the south,' I'm like, okay, he's talking about he was out here. It just seemed like that line jumped out to me. As soon as I heard that I was like, we're using that. So he got off the plane, he got in the car. And when I got to the studio at my house, I had the beat up already. I played the beat and the song just came out.

"['Fresh' with Slick Rick, from Life in 1472] was one of my favorites. [Slick Rick] was my idol growing up as a kid, and just wanting to be a rapper, he was my all-time favorite rapper. The Great Adventures of Slick Rick is probably one of my top ten favorite albums of all time. The fact that I got a chance to make a record with him, I was just blown away. But pretty much every song. This whole album has some kind of history that a lot of people probably don't know about.

"I think the Jay-Z record was like his introduction to the south, of people knowing him out in the south. A lot of people weren't really up on Jay-Z. The intro, Kanye [West] produced with Nas on it. That was the first beat that Kanye ever got contracted to do [ed. note—he means nationally]. The whole album was fun to make. I didn't feel no pressure from none of the records that came before it. I felt like I was going somewhere else, and making a record that was separating me from what I had already made with So So Def.

"I felt like I was making a darker record than what my image was as a producer. People knew that I made popular music, and records that get on the radio instantly. When I made 'Money Ain't a Thang,' that was my first single. Columbia was like, 'We should put the Mariah record out first.' I was like, 'No, I want to put out this record.' They wanted to put out 'Sweetheart' because they wanted a bigger song that would go mainstream, and a song with Jermaine Dupri and Jay-Z wasn't mainstream at that time. It's funny."

Mariah Carey "Sweetheart" (1998)

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Producer: Jermaine Dupri, Mariah Carey
Album: #1's
Label: Columbia

"'Sweetheart' was after 'Always Be My Baby,' so it was always like we had to do it because it was a hit record. 'Always Be My Baby,' at that time, was like the biggest song I ever had. The biggest song that I ever worked with and the biggest song I ever produced, [so] I got to get her on my album. I was like, 'What song are we going to do?'

"She gave me that song, actually. That song was her idea for us to do. I wasn't really up on the song, she gave me the record and was like, 'We should do this song. You don't remember this song, Jermaine?' I was like, 'No.' But once I heard it I was like, 'I feel you.' She's the same person to this day. She knows all these singers and records that these big vocalists sing. I was like, 'We definitely should do this.' So I put a beat on it to make it my version and make it a rap version."

Jagged Edge f/ Rev Run "Let's Get Married (Remix)" (2000)

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Producer: Jermaine Dupri, Bryan-Michael Cox
Album: So So Def Presents: Definition of a Remix
Label: So So Def

"Just with my remixes, people started saying 'Jermaine's remixes changed.' The way I started making remixes, I would actually redo the song. Today when people do remixes, they don't do nothing to the beats, they just put ten rappers on a record. That's supposed to be a remix. You got to change the whole track. You got to go into a world that remakes the song.

"I was just starting to go deep into what remixes were. The challenging part was that I had just done the 'In My Bed (Remix)' for Dru Hill, and that wasn't a So So Def group. It felt kind of crazy that, here I am, I create a remix for a group that's not So So Def, and it's a male group. They're in direct competition to Jagged Edge, and they get a number one record. So now it's like, here's your group, what are you going to do with them?

"So I had to go into the studio and really come up with something. We got to come up with something that is amazing. Being a DJ allowed me to understand that if I put a faster beat on a slower record, it'll work. Only a DJ would know that. It just automatically went with the words."

Usher "U Got It Bad" (2001)

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Producer: Bryan-Michael Cox, Jermaine Dupri
Album: 8701
Label: Arista

"I learned from 'Nice & Slow' that people wanted that. 'Nice & Slow' was a big record, but we only made one. We went into that album saying, we got to make another 'Nice & Slow.' What I did with 'U Got It Bad' was take it to the next level, make another version of that. 'U Got It Bad' was basically just another version of 'Nice & Slow' with me trying to repeat and just make a better version."

Jagged Edge "Where the Party At" (2001)

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Producer: Jermaine Dupri
Album: Jagged Little Thrill
Label: So So Def

"I wanted to make the best R&B album that I could possibly make when I made J.E. Heartbreak. I was like, 'Yo, it's time. People like you, girls love you.' And male groups were at an all-time high at that time. Jodeci was still around slightly, Dru Hill was still there, Boyz II Men were going heavy. They were probably the biggest at that time. There were a lot of male groups, but I wanted Jagged to really take over that slot of the thugs of R&B. I went into that album remembering that we had to make the best record possible.

"We got really close. They came to me with 'He Can't Love U' and they came to me with a couple other records. And when they came to me with those songs I was like, okay, I know what I got to do. We got to come up with something. We just tried to make as many good ballads as we could make. Well, what happened was the remix of 'Let's Get Married' messed my chemistry up with Jagged Edge. It's funny that I have to say that because it did, because it got them off of thinking that they should make ballads. It made them start thinking that they were an uptempo group. 'Let's Get Married (Remix)' was on radio stations all across the nation, even hip-hop stations that they couldn't get on regularly.

"So they started hearing themselves on all these radio stations and they were like, 'We got to make uptempo records, we got to push the tempo.' And the label started thinking that, everybody started thinking that. So it was like, okay, let's make the uptempo record be their first single. Everything else had always been a ballad, and it just seemed crazy to go from an uptempo record to go back down to a ballad. Nobody wanted to do that. But my mission was to make an uptempo record for Jagged Edge, and 'Where the Party At' was the first song that we created. I knew that that was it.

"The guitar situation, if you listen to my production at some point in time, there was a guitar that just showed up in the studio and we started using it on every song in some kind of capacity. Nelly's been my homie since before he got signed, but we were thinking about who we could put on the record that would make it as big as possible, and at this point in time Nelly was as hot as fire. Our whole thing with Jagged, we were never getting commercial success with Jagged Edge before then. We were trying to shoot for the stars, and that was it."

Lil' Bow Wow "Bounce With Me" (2000)

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Producer: Jermaine Dupri
Album: Beware of Dog
Label: So So Def

"'Bounce with Me' was like an introduction record again. I had to go back and introduce a new artist, so what song do I introduce this artist with? 'Bounce with Me' was that song that I introduced, an opportunity to introduce a new artist to the marketplace. I knew it had to be as sparse as possible, and knew that it had to be brilliant at the same time, to the point that you could look at him and get what he was and understand what you were dealing with. I had to face the fact that he wasn't Kris Kross; he was completely different, so I couldn't really use the same thing that I used for Kris Kross with Bow Wow. And I didn't want to, either, so I was trying to come up with his own little thing and his niche.

I tried to make him be as relevant to what was going on with radio at that time, but in a little kid's body. That's where 'Bounce with Me' came from. I used a format that was still what people were doing. Everybody was saying, 'Bounce With Me' or 'let me see you bounce.' So I was just like, let's make a record that basically had the same ingredients as 'Jump.' Like, what is hip-hop doing right now? In '92, hip-hop was jumping. In 2002, hip-hop was bouncing. I used that same mentality."

Destiny's Child "Jumpin', Jumpin' (So So Def Remix)" (2000)

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Producer: Beyoncé Knowles, Chad Elliott, Jovonn Alexander
Album: This is the Remix
Label: Columbia

"Yeah, it just came out of nowhere. They asked us to do the remix and I was like...I think it was a Columbia thing, once again. We were all on the same label, Destiny's Child had a hit and they wanted Bow Wow to break. The label was actually thinking, 'Put Bow Wow on this Destiny's Child song, and JD, you do the remix. Come up with it.' So we just branded it out with So So Def and did what we had to do."

Jermaine Dupri f/ Ludacris "Welcome to Atlanta" (2002)

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Producer: Jermaine Dupri
Album: Instructions
Label: So So Def, Disturbing the Peace, Def Jam South

"'Welcome to Atlanta' was a song I wanted to do on my first album. The idea was for me and Outkast to do it, but I could never come up with a beat for us to do it. Outkast beats and my beats were very different. Every song on Life in 1472 that I did a beat for with an artist, the beat fit that artist. That's what I was trying to do with this song, but I couldn't come up with a beat that fit Outkast, that I heard Outkast rapping on when I made the beat. So it never actually happened.

"Going into my second album I was just like, I'm going to make this 'Welcome to Atlanta' song. Atlanta was at a place where we needed a theme record. I felt like it needed a theme song, and I wanted to scream out my city's name as loud as I could possibly scream it. Ludacris had a video out for 'Southern Hospitality,' and in that video there's a floor mat that says 'Welcome to Atlanta.' When I saw that floor mat in his video, I knew me and him needed to do this song."

Murphy Lee f/ Jermaine Dupri "Wat Da Hook Gon' Be" (2003)

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Producer: Jermaine Dupri
Album: Murphy's Law
Label: Derrty Ent./Universal Records

"Yeah, me and Nelly, we knew each other for a while. He was like, 'This is my new artist, Murphy Lee. I want you to produce for him.' I was like, 'I don't really know what to do, I don't really know him like that.' That's a song where I didn't really get the opportunity to work with the artist to form a working relationship and get to know who the artist was. It was just like, pull up beats and try to see if it works. We made a couple beats, and then the third beat that I made was 'Wat Da Hook Gon Be.' He was like, 'Yeah, that's it.'

"Every time somebody says to me 'that's it' and they're writing the song, my question for them is, 'what's the hook going to be, though?' Because he had a rap, and he was saying the rap and it sounded right. But where I came from, with rap records, they're not going to make it if they don't have a hook. They're not going to make it if they don't have something that people can catch onto in their rap record. For some reason, I didn't want to have none of those in my life. I wanted to have a rap record, I wanted records that had a hook. So I was like, 'What's the hook going to be?' He didn't have no hook at that time when I said that. So I left out the room and when I came back, that's what he said. He said, 'Say that again.' I said, 'What? What's the hook going to be?' He said, 'Yeah, that's it right there.' It was real weird because it just happened like that. It literally happened because I was asking him what the hook was going to be for the song."

Usher "Confessions Part II" (2004)

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Producer: Jermaine Dupri, Bryan-Michael Cox
Album: Confessions
Label: Arista

"Well, the 'Confessions Part II' single was really interesting because the real song 'Confessions Part I' is called 'All Bad.' The first version of the song is called 'All Bad.' The remix of the song was called 'Confessions Part II.' It was like 'All Bad (Confessions),' 'these are my confessions, all bad,' or whatever. That was the first song, and then 'Confessions Part II' was the remix.

"Once again, we were sitting in the studio and we had the record, and Usher was just like, 'When we remix this song, it's going to be crazy. It's going to do more. We need to take it further.' And once again I was thinking about me as a remixer, what would the remix sound like? We actually remixed the song before the song came out. 'Confessions Part II' became better than 'Confessions Part I' in some people's eyes. He only put part two on the album and left part one off. You all heard part two of the story off top and didn't hear part one until the bonus [album] came out. It's crazy."

Mariah Carey "We Belong Together" (2005)

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Producer: Mariah Carey, Jermaine Dupri, Manuel Seal
Album: The Emancipation of Mimi
Label: Island

"I wasn't really paying attention to what was going on in Mariah's life at that particular point in time. I just knew her as my friend, and we had a hit, and we had hits before that. Like, if I come to the studio, I'm going to make a hit record with you. And that's it. She came to the studio, and that's all we did. I was trying to make a record that I felt like she should make, and I also had a blueprint that she wasn't making this type of music. So I was like, 'If you make a song like this, I believe this is what people wanted to hear from you.' That's what a producer is supposed to do. They offer that information. I kept pulling a fine line, saying, 'Listen, if you make a song like this, this is what they want to hear from you.' Truly, that's what it was. [They wanted to hear] her sing.

"They consider her 'the voice,' they consider her what American Idol is, basically. Singers, a bunch of people trying to sing, they consider her the top of the food chain. American Idol is not a rap show, it's about singers. You can't be a rapper and win on American Idol, nobody has done it. You have to be a singer, that's what it is. It was either Mariah Carey or Whitney Houston. At the time before we made that, she wasn't making those songs that symbolize who the people think she is. That's the conversation I had with her."

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