Check The Credits: Jermaine Dupri

“We Belong Together” – Mariah Carey

“We had like two days a piece out of two weeks to do four songs. The first time she came to the studio we did “Get Your Number” and “It’s Like That.” She took those songs back to LA Reid – The Emancipation of Mimi was basically finished they were just trying to get a few more songs – and her and LA then decided she should make one more trip to Atlanta to see what we’d come up with. The second time she came to Atlanta it was for two more days. That’s when we did “Shake It Off” and “We Belong Together.” “We Belong Together” was a sparse, ghetto-ass track. That was me thinking I was gonna put Mariah on some hood shit and it not be a whole lot of music – just let her sing. I knew that people wanted to hear her voice, because it was at that point in time where people were saying “Mariah doesn’t sing no more. She don’t sing like she use to,” so I wanted to make a stripped-down record with her singing on it and the story being incredible. She started writing the story and it really started to sound crazy. I called Johnta over, who helped write the song. We all just started throwing in lyrics to go with it, because it was so many of us that had had this scenario happen to us. It was such a fun session, but it was crazy, because we only had one day and she wanted to finish the entire record in that one night. She had to catch her plane and the pilot had called saying that if they didn’t leave by a certain time they were gonna make her wait until later the next day to leave. We were rushing to get her to the plane, but at the same time she wanted us to be really serious about the lyrics, so it was like we was on a time clock to finish the song. It was crazy, because the very last piece of the record I wrote and I was trying to get her to go into the studio, but she didn’t want to do the demo. She wanted to do it the way that I did it. It’s funny to me, because she tried to mimic me. Every time I hear that song I’m like “This shit is real crazy.” [laughs] She’s mimicking me, but she can sing, so it sounds better. But there was a point where she schooled a lot of us and it became the song of the decade and we wrote that in one day.”