You have to go and research and see where music has come from, especially the type of music that you want to do. When I started writing, I went back and listened to Luther Vandross.

I had to find a format of songwriting because I was an MC and I was used to 16 bars a verse, but when I listened to R&B songs it is 8 bars a verse and then it was 8 bars a hook….So it was like now that I know the basic format of how it’s done is normally 8 8 8 8 8, then we can go 8 4 8 or 8 8 8 or 16 8 8, we can change the format but first I had to learn the fundamentals of what songwriting was based upon.

“Don’t Change” embodied all of that, the quality of the record feels like any of the great producers before us would have made those records. Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Gamble and Huff. Us studying what they did in the past with our flair is a record that embodies that.

Make a song that the common person relates to. That’s how we’ve been able to have success and have so many people come up to us years later saying, “That record that you guys wrote on such and such artist changed my life – or I was going through some stuff and you helped me get over a hump. We’ve never been the type of producers or songwriters to date a record by following a trend or fan. We make records for the common man and woman, we write about real life situations. We call our music the soundtrack of life and that’s why I think we’ve had the kind of success we had. Especially with the kind of artists we’ve worked with in the past, we make sure to bring out the relatable qualities in them.