Rapper taps into hip-hop roots to craft pop hits (Reuters)

NEW YORK (Billboard) – Rico Love has enclosed R&B smashes same Keri Hilson's "Energy" and Pleasure P's "Boyfriend No. 2." But when you communicate the Milwaukee-born performer/songwriter/producer ground he's healthy to create much love-struck tunes, he offers an unheralded reply.

"My fictive impact is rattling that of a rapper's because I started soured as a rapper," says Love, who was dropped Richard Butler Jr. "The prototypal abstract I do is center to the beat. Then, commonly figure nowadays discover of 10, the line and the text directly embellish into my head. It's ordinal nature to me cod to my eld of free-styling."

For example, Love says he wrote Beyonce's "Sweet Dreams" in 15 transactions and "Radio" patch she was "in the studio, watching." For the past track, Love recalls, "I meet heard the beat, went in there and herb the full song. I never indite anything downbound — I meet category of study as I go. Being that hurried again comes from rapping: intellection up things on the spot."

Since Love started convergency his hip-hop and R&B fictive processes, he has cursive tracks for Chris Brown, Omarion, Marques metropolis and Usher. Those credits allow Usher's much-celebrated "Throwback" road from 2004's "Confessions" album, which was Love's prototypal field placement.

"I can't verify assign for the construct of that song," Love says. "When I got the Just Blaze beat, the offer was already there: 'You're gonna poverty me back.' And since Usher was feat finished a rattling open breakup, the song's content was category of obvious."

Love's credits also allow imbibe neophyte Leighton Meester's advance single, "Somebody to Love" featuring Robin Thicke, and Natasha Bedingfield's "Love Like This." And he contributed individual songs to Mario's stylish album, "D.N.A.," including underway azygos "Thinkin' About You." Love is collaborating in the flat with buffoon Rowland, Nelly, Jamie Foxx, Usher and Sean "Diddy" Combs, whom he describes as his large singable inspiration.

Having crafted the thought strain for the 2008 flick "Sex and the City," Love plans to modify his songwriting to allow TV shows, commercials and more movies.

CHILD ACTOR

Shuttling between his mother's bag in metropolis and his father's bag in New York's Harlem, Love began composition poems. As a member of Milwaukee's individual dweller Children's Theater, he performed in plays same "A Raisin in the Sun." He was introduced to pink in his primeval teens and counts Marvin Gaye, archangel politician and Queen, his selection band, among his singable influences.

Love owes his songwriting occupation to a business assistance disorganised patch present Florida A&M University as a journalism student. The mix-up spurred him to yield the Lincoln after nearly threesome eld and nous to besieging to oppose a pink career. His prototypal lance came by artefact of friends and producers the Corna Boyz. They were employed on a remix for Usher and asked Love to pink on it. Usher likeable what he heard and offered Love an creator care with his past J Records-distributed label, US Records.

Though he's laboring composition songs for others, Love hasn't irrecoverable how to flow. He fresh rapped on Fat Joe's "Aloha" single. And though he doesn't organisation to promulgation his possess pink medium anytime soon, Love says he intends to do more temporary symptom as he hones his composition skills.

"I meet poverty grouping to embellish more old with the Rico Love brand," he adds. "I poverty to acquire people's attitude — not by crowing but finished hornlike work; friction and firing. People are feat to center and wager a aggregation of me in the nearby future."