http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/arts/music/08maer.html?ref=music
Not Content Just to Write the Hits
By MELISSA MAERZ
Published: March 4, 2009
THE songwriter and R&B singer Terius Nash has worn $2,000 worth of rolled-up bills on a chain around his neck, but he would like to cultivate a much more expensive habit.
“Mariah Carey took me up in her private jet last week,” said Mr. Nash, who records under the name The-Dream. “It was like: Ooooooh! I’ve got to get me one of these. Because now that I’ve got a taste, I’m never going back. I’m going to fly this thing everywhere — to L.A., to Atlanta, to New York. I’m going to fly this thing down the street and park it outside your apartment.”
Mr. Nash, 30, was sprawled on a couch at Power 105.1, a radio station in New York, dressed in limited-edition neon sneakers and a new black Armani jacket so crisp that it would probably crunch if you touched it. But “Love vs. Money,” his second album as The-Dream, which is out on Tuesday on Island Def Jam, explores the ways luxury living can destroy a man’s relationships, like his marriage to the R&B singer Nivea.
“Money affects everything, from who I’m with to what label I’m on, so everything I do now is about protecting it,” he said. “But I didn’t understand how powerfully that would affect my home life.”
He and his songwriting partner, Christopher Stewart, known as Tricky, are one of pop’s most inventive and in-demand hit-making teams. (Mr. Stewart writes the music, Mr. Nash the lyrics.) After scoring their first major break in 2003 with Britney Spears’s “Me Against the Music,” Billboard’s best-selling dance single that year, the duo churned out a string of No. 1 smashes, including Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” Mariah Carey’s “Touch My Body,” J. Holiday’s “Bed” and, most famously, Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” which earned a Grammy nomination for record of the year in 2008. Mr. Nash has often said that they wrote the song in 15 minutes.
Over the past year they have composed more than 200 songs, working with artists as diverse as Usher, Jesse McCartney, Sting and Celine Dion, at a rate of $110,000 to $165,000 per track, Mr. Stewart said.
But while Mr. Nash is one of pop’s most reliable hit makers, he’s not yet a pop star. As The-Dream he had hit singles with “Falsetto” and “Shawty Is a Ten,” and his acclaimed, Prince-inspired 2007 debut album, “Love/Hate,” sold 537,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. He has been criticized for an uncharismatic stage presence, however, and when he opened for Mary J. Blige and Jay-Z on their blockbuster “Heart of the City” tour, his set was largely ignored by critics. When the Grammy nominations for 2009 were announced, he was upset that his solo work was overlooked.
“Even though in my mind I know I should have beat everyone, I also know that some people missed the first album,” he said. “So now it’s about marketing. Now I’ve got the Mariahs and the Kanyes and the Jamie Foxxes of the world saying, ‘I’ve seen The-Dream write four hit songs in 40 minutes.’ Soon the pop world will be like, ‘O.K., we see you now.’ ”
With “Love vs. Money” he’s ready to do whatever it takes to make himself a boldface name. He has been showing up at parties with the R&B singer Christina Milian, sparking rumors that they are dating — gossip conveniently timed to mesh with the release of “Us Against the World,” the new single he wrote for her. He also upped the star power on the new album with cameos by Kanye West, Lil Jon and Ms. Carey, who also appears in the video for “My Love.”
Antonio Reid, known as L.A., chairman of Island Def Jam Music Group, said he believed that “Love vs. Money” would be a bigger hit than its predecessor because it showcases Mr. Nash’s crossover appeal. “He’s that rare combination of high art like Kanye West, but also ghetto-friendly like R. Kelly,” he said. “That’s part of what makes him one of the great undiscovered talents of our time.”
Written during Mr. Nash’s divorce from Nivea in 2008, “Love vs. Money” offers an emotional, confessional take on the ways wealth can make personal relationships feel empty. The interlocked, three-song mini-epic that anchors the album — “Love vs. Money,” “Love vs. Money Part 2” and “Fancy” — finds Mr. Nash admitting that all the Bentleys and trips to Paris he bought to show his affection ended up just making him feel used.
He sings sadly on “Fancy”:
They say you can’t buy love
Man, they lyin’
If Christian LaCroix brings a smile
I’ll buy it
as if he’s having trouble convincing himself it’s all true. With music written by Mr. Stewart, Mr. Nash has made a lush headphones album, pulsing with new wave and funk melodies, synth-fueled ballads, thundering 808 drum machine beats and little electronic details that occasionally sound like R&B’s answer to Radiohead.
“ ‘Love vs. Money’ is music as theater, and no one does that better than The-Dream,” said Stephen Hill, president for music programming and specials for BET. “But he also knows how to give a young, black audience what they want.” Mr. Hill pointed to “Sweat It Out,” a song about a woman who has just perfected a slick hairstyle, only to see it frizz up when things get steamy.
The songwriting duo caters to that audience, said Mr. Stewart, because urban music fans are more loyal than pop fans. “The urban audience follows us from pop to R&B because we always keep the hood in our work,” he said. “Even when we’re writing about what it’s like to be in Paris, we’re doing it from the perspective of someone who flew there from a strip club in Atlanta.”
Mr. Nash grew up in Atlanta while the city was becoming a bastion of hip-hop and R&B. He attended Grove Park Elementary, where he remembers seeing the rapper T. I. roaming the halls. In high school he took night classes with André 3000 of OutKast, which had just released its debut album. Mr. Nash played in a band during middle school, but decided to go solo around the time Mr. Reid started LaFace Records and got local R&B acts like TLC on the pop charts.
Around the same time Atlanta’s annual Freaknik gathering was building momentum as a street party. “Every time you hear an 808 drum machine beat on one of my songs, it comes from Freaknik,” Mr. Nash said. “I remember it was 1993, and I was riding around in my car — I didn’t even have a license yet — listening to bass music. We’d play it so loud you could drive down the block and make somebody’s pictures fall off their wall.”
His mother died of ovarian cancer when he was in eighth grade, and he credits the experience with enhancing his ability to write for female artists. “Watching her as the months went by, knowing that she was going to pass, that dialed my emotions right up,” he said. “The corniest things in pop songs about life and love and loss, I was thinking about them on a very real level, from my mom’s perspective.”
Mr. Nash said he first imagined “Umbrella” from a mother’s point of view. Back when rumors started circulating that Ms. Spears was headed for a rehabilitation center, Mr. Nash wrote the song for her to sing to her two sons. “Everyone was beating her up real good, so I was thinking how, if anything really bad was to happen to her, her kids would always have this song to tell them she’s still with them: ‘When the sun shines, we shine together/Told you I’ll be here forever.’” (The song went to Rihanna when Ms. Spears passed on it.)
If for some reason the new album isn’t a hit, his day job isn’t too shabby. He’s currently working with Ms. Carey on her next album, and he has just finished an album for the new R&B girl group Electrik Red, which will be released on his Radio Killa imprint this month. And Mr. Nash said he and Mr. West have talked about doing a collaborative album in the spirit of R. Kelly and Jay-Z’s “Best of Both Worlds.”
Essentially Mr. Nash is always working. “I call my attorney three times a day,” he said. “The other day I came up with this phrase, ‘That’s Jesus!’ That’s a combination of saying something’s hot and it’s also a blessing. So I called my attorney and asked him, ‘Can we get “That’s Jesus!” copyrighted just in case it shows up on a T-shirt?’ ”
He credits his grandfather, who was a concrete mason, with his work ethic. “He basically built the city I grew up in,” he said. “He came out of a bad time for blacks in the South, but even though we lived in the hood, we had a boat, some cars and a house that was paid for. So I’ve always had a different outlook on life. There’s nothing I can’t do. My uncle used to say, ‘You’ll go on and become the dream of the family.’ That’s how I got my name.”
Mr. Nash shook his head, smiling. “He was probably thinking that I’d become a doctor or something. But if he was here right now, I think he’d say I’ve done all right.”
― wow heaven is cool (J0rdan S.), Sunday, 8 March 2009 20:41 (fifteen years ago) link