Check The Credits: Crystal Nicole Tells The Stories On Writing for Rihanna, J.Lo, Mariah Carey & More

“Side Effects” – Mariah Carey feat. Young Jeezy

That’s my favorite song that Mariah and I did together. I came up with the concept when I was watching this commercial one day about this pill and it was like “If you have this it’ll clear up that, but the side effects are this, this, this and that, and possible deafness, blindness, and death.” I was like nobody notices that if you have a headache you could possibly die just trying to get rid of the headache, so it came about as a funny concept and when I get little moments or little key notes that God just kind of drops me I jot them down in my phone, so I just jotted down “side effects.” I was in Miami working with Mariah for the E=MC² album. Mariah is very vulnerable in her music, especially when it comes to her life and what she believes and who she is as a person. She likes to put all of that in songs she writes. We wrote everything together. What I love about that record is that we were able to take real situations that really happened to her and put that into the song and talk about how in real life she feels as if she’s overcome a lot of things, but there were a lot of side effects that came a long with jumping over those hurdles. I thought it was so amazing, because so many people can relate to that. You overcome a bad breakup, but at the same time now you have baggage. You’re suspicious of every other man or woman that comes along, because of what happened in the past and you’re still living with those side effects. I really love that song and Jeezy being on it really took it to a whole other place.