Check The Credits: Jermaine Dupri

06.18.2013

MUSIC

“Burn” – Usher

“That was Usher’s idea. He told me that he wanted a song called “Burn” and he wanted it to be about a relationship where you gotta let it go and how bad it hurts when you let it go, but how good it feels when you let it go. “Burn” being the burning of it going away and the burning of it hurting still, so it was another record that had a double meaning to it. I had to just sit there for a minute and just think about it. He left the studio again to go chase some girl [laughs]. When he came back I had pretty much most of it written. It was all based on his concept, so it didn’t take him long to fall in love with it. As soon as he started singing the song I knew this record was a hit. It’s certain songs that when you get into this pattern you just start knowing and this was just that one. I remember I called Big Jon and told him “Yo we got this one song for Usher album that’s crazy!” That song became the second number-one song off of that album. The simplicity of that song and then the fact that it sounded like “U Got It Bad” or “Nice & Slow,” I knew that’s what people wanted to hear. They wanted to essentially hear an extension of those records. I knew if I pulled it off it would be great. We pulled it off where it sounded nothing like those two songs, but it felt like it came from those two songs and that was really one of the things that I was trying to do. I felt like “U Got It Bad” was so big, so we had to give the people another one of those. That one took probably about a day for me to finish, because he came back to the studio and me and him wrote some more, but for the most part the blueprint of the song was finished in like a night.”

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