“My thing was, at the end of the day, if I call you and you say you ain’t got it, you just ain’t got it,” Nash, known to the world today as The-Dream, said while sitting in a quiet area during a listening party for his recently released debut LP, Love/Hate. “I went through six years in this business messing my credit up.” “I was on my way to work and stopped to play golf, and I was like, ‘Man, [making music] is what I really want to do full time,’ ” he remembered.

“So I just had to let God step in and kind of balance out what I could not cover. I played golf that day, called into work and said, ‘I’m out.’ ” “My mama died when she was 35 years old. … That is, like, eight years from where I am right now, so nothing is promised,” he said about how he has stayed levelheaded. “When it popped off, I just got harder at it and made sure I understood that things that I can’t control, I just can’t control.

I can’t control when somebody likes my song or they don’t. I just need to write it, and that’s what I did control.” “I was going down [Atlanta highway] 285 in a ‘92 Cadillac DeVille,” Dream said. “He called me and was like, ‘Man, you got a record on [Spears' album].’ I was like, ‘What?’ I was so happy, because at the end of the day, there is a lot of things we can say about Britney, but what we can’t take away is that she is a pop icon and so is Madonna.

You got two of the biggest pop stars on the record like, that’s crazy for anybody. I don’t care if you ‘hood [or] you not, that was crazy to me. I was just fortunate and blessed that that happened to me.” Understandably, though, the star power on the song overshadowed the newcomer’s writing contribution. So he honed his craft, working on less-publicized songs with his wife, Nivea; Lil Jon; and fellow A-towners the Youngbloodz. “I learned the craft and I got it down,” he said.