Check The Credits: The Messengers Speak on Producing For Justin Bieber, Pitbull & More

“Crawl” – Chris Brown

Nasri: “Crawl” happened pretty quickly. I met this kid Luke James at a studio. One day I said we should call him cus he seemed like he had some swag, so we called him over and we just started writing. He had this unbelievable voice. We ended up in the kind of soulful, Coldplay meets R&B place. We were the first to really do that too, but we just started writing and within 30 minutes it was written.

Adam: We didn’t think it was for Chris at all, but then we came back for a second session just to wrap up, because there was a little bit undone and at that point Nasri realized Chris was really open. We had sent a few other songs over that Chris was really responding to, so we had this open door. We figured the lyrics and the concept seemed kind of perfect based on the timing and what was going on with Chris’ situation. We recognized that we could kind of steer it to be even more perfect for Chris and that’s what we did. At the time everyone was trying to come up with a record like that for him.

Nasri: What’s interesting about Chris is that we only do one song on his albums, because we are really only focused on giving him a special song. “Crawl” is one of my favorite songs we’ve ever done, because it has that honesty to it, but it’s still cool and fresh. That’s really our goal as The Messingers – to always have a level of honesty, but in a kind of modern, cool, rhythmic way, so it really reaches the masses.

Adam: That’s the goal. It can’t always happen with certain projects and certain artists, because of certain politics with the label or whatever – but with Chris, he’s so talented that he almost enhances the cool factor right away. As soon as he gets on one of our records it sounds younger, it sounds cooler, so I think we’ve definitely gone for that with him. We know that we could kind of stretch it a little bit, but he’ll help make it still feel like it’s current and hot.