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The-Dream Featured In New York Magazine.

It’s a late afternoon at the London hotel in midtown, and singer-songwriter-producer Terius Nash, a.k.a. The-Dream, a.k.a. the guy who put the “?’Ella” in Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and articulated the frustrations of millions of Beyoncé-loving single ladies, is taking high tea in the hotel restaurant. He’s 31 years old, soft-faced, and dressed in a black V-neck T-shirt, jean shorts, and a black baseball cap emblazoned with the logo of the Atlanta Falcons, his hometown team. He butters a scone and samples the tea, but after a few polite sips, he switches it up and orders a Patrón and a Sprite. As he drinks, baffled power-lunchers make shark-circles around the table, staring at The-Dream, his shiny Rolex, and his even shinier iPad. Should I know this guy?

Though casual music fans might not recognize his name, they probably paid for his scones. The-Dream is among the top pop draftsmen of the last three years, right up there with self-branded superproducers like Dr. Luke and Diplo. With his partner, Christopher “Tricky” Stewart, he’s crafted more than 200 songs, including “Umbrella,” Mariah Carey’s “Touch My Body,” and Justin Bieber’s “Baby”—all of them clingy, expansive, impossible-to-shake hits. The bill for each? Enough to make The-Dream and Tricky very rich men (it costs around $150,000 to get the two into the studio), though not household names. And that’s why The-Dream is here today.

He moved to Atlanta from Rockingham, North Carolina, when he was a few years old. After his mother died in 1992, he started writing songs; he hoped to create work as indelible as Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” or DeBarge’s “Rhythm of the Night,” but it took meeting Tricky (not to be confused with the British rapper), in 2002, to accomplish that. The pair shopped tracks to the likes of Madonna (“Me Against the Music”) before finally topping the charts with “Umbrella,” which was downloaded tens of millions of times—sometimes even legally. Like many of The-Dream’s biggest hits, it celebrates tough-cookie feminism. “I’ve always had a soft spot for women because of my mom,” he says. “Just their power. Man’s biggest enemy is a woman who has it in for them. I just like being around them, watching, soaking up the information, being cursed out, being put out.”

While The-Dream was peddling tunes, he was working on his own music. He released his first solo album, Love/Hate, in 2007, and his third, Love King, last week. An aurally lavish document of bedroom politics, Love King veers between potential hits with deft Top 40 hooks (the supple anthem “F.I.L.A.,” and the eighties-indebted “Yamaha”), as well as floridly intricate song suites loaded with electropop Easter eggs, demanding multiple listens. It’s these more ambitious exercises that drop the jaws of his most passionate fans—the sort of headphone-tripping, baby-making (though one hopes not at the same time) compositions that got his second album, 2009’s Love vs. Money, on The Village Voice’s and Rolling Stone’s year-end lists. “He’s one of the most creative and honest minds working in music today,” says collaborator T.I.

Click here to read the rest of this interview on the New York Magazine website.

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