Jermaine Dupri: how he turned Mariah into a hit machine
 | The current edition of Blues and Soul Magazine includes a detailed interview with Jermaine Dupri. Amongst other topics he talks in some detail about how he approached his work with Mariah on the Emancipation of Mimi. Mariah's not my artist but we're close like she is. I know what it is about Mariah that I can sell to the public. When I went into the studio with Mariah my first thing to do was to change the format of how she'd been singing. Go back to singing songs the way you used to sing. She'd gotten into this whisper mode where everything was soft. It wasn't really singing. She was trying to come up with a new airy sound. I told her "that's not gonna work. You gotta SING these songs." When she did that on We Belong Together it became such a massive record. Now she sees that, she's back to blowing the Mariah Carey way.
She was comfortable so we had the chance to vibe and write and try stuff we never did before. The first record we did was Shake It Off, then Can I Get your Number which was already my song. I had a rap version and I was singing the hook. I kept thinking this is a Mariah track because people are used to her singing over club tracks and the Imagination song was a club record. I always used to like it in the club. She liked the hook so much she wanted me to stay on the hook but I wanted her to sing it. What I was trying to gun for was singles. A producer like me wants singles. (Blues and Soul - Mariah Connection)
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