Yesterday we celebrated Aretha Franklin’s birthday and I posted a clip on my Instagram of one of the songs I did for her on the album. What’s the best part of writing and producing as part of a team? You’ve always been a big collaborator in your songwriting. I haven’t written anything down since I started working with JAY-Z. If you’re driving in the car, you don’t have the song lyrics in front of you but you hear a song on the radio and memorize it from that. We memorize them tone for tone, without looking at a piece of paper. And then I started realizing, it might be easier than writing it down because we all memorize the songs that we really love. He said, “I wrote it, I just didn’t write it on paper.” I had never seen this done before. He came to the studio and I saw him do that and I was like, “What the hell was this?” And he said, “I had my rap,” and he didn’t write one thing down in the studio. It took about an hour, and the process was me saying the lyrics to him. I stopped writing lyrics down on paper after me and JAY-Z did “Money In the Bank.” They’re something I just hold in my mind. Sounds like the second song came together pretty quickly.

I just had to put it in the right words that would make it fit for being Usher’s story. Those lyrics for part two were something that I had actually gone through in my life they were a reliving of a situation. There’s a part two to this story.” And immediately, as soon as Usher said there’s a part two, my brain clicked and every word of “Confessions Part II” flew out of my mouth. This is crazy.” And then Usher was like, “You can’t stop right there. Once that version of “Confessions” was finished, Usher and myself was all like, “This is it. It’s a guy feeling bad about himself, about what he had been doing to the girl, so he just came out and told her. In that song, I talked about how everything I’ve been doing is all bad. When we did “Confessions,” we really had started with another song called “All Bad” and the “Confessions” part was in parentheses. What’s the story behind the song and the sequel?

Let’s talk about “Confessions” and “Confessions Part II,” both recorded by Usher.

Usher confessions album playlist