December 20, 2007 @ 11:52 am

The-Dream

Julianne Shepherd

Hooks from Heaven. From our November 2007 issue.

On a sweltering August afternoon, The-Dream removes his Louis Vuitton shades and remembers how he turned 18 holes into Billboard Top 10 hits. "I always had a job," he says. "Six Flags for a summer. Checkers. In 2000, I was at a collection agency. One day, on my way to work, I stopped at the golf course to hit some balls. I called in and said, 'I don't think I'm coming back.' Three months later, I had a placement on B2K's [2002 song] 'Everything.'"

Ambitions realized, Terius "The-Dream" Nash, 30, now sits at Def Jam's Manhattan headquarters waiting to meet with Jay-Z to discuss his first album, Love Me All Summer, Hate Me All Winter. But when his cell rings to the tone of his biggest hit yet — Rihanna's recent "Umbrella" — it's a reminder that while hard work helps, talent inks the deal. "I'm a walking melody box," he says, bragging. "They just bleed out of me."

Growing up in Atlanta, Dream learned his work ethic from watching his single mom pull double shifts to keep the clothes on his back. When she died at 35 from cancer, he moved in permanently with his grandfather, a carpenter who taught him how to create, literally, from the ground up. "Most of the things he showed me, he built," he says. "You know that old country thing: If you ain't got it, they can make it."

The-Dream is building a career by writing unfussy, brain-sticky hooks for vocalists like Britney Spears, R. Kelly (and Dream's wife, R&B singer Nivea [with whom a divorce was announced in December 2007]), Mary J. Blige, Usher, and Sting. But his ingenuous hooks conceal deeper meanings. "Umbrella," he says, is on some levels about the war in Iraq, and that his own heavenly single, "Shawty is a Ten," is a glorification of females — "because just being a woman is hard."  Still, he knows what keeps them coming back. "I write in the dumb parts — like the 'ella, 'ella, 'ella' in 'Umbrella' — because I know that when somebody's drunk, that's the only part they're gonna sing."

Article tags: J. Holiday, Nivea, R. Kelly, Rihanna, The-Dream 

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