Try your best to forget the video. The remixes. The parodies. The corny Super Bowl commercial. The time Trump danced to it, the time Jimmy Fallon did whatever he did to it, the hydrant of thirsty covers. Where were you the first time you heard Drake’s “Hotline Bling”?

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Paul Jefferies was in his car, driving around Toronto, futzing with the radio. But Jefferies, who produces pop songs as Nineteen85, didn’t hear the same song you and I did. This was months before “Hotline Bling” would be released. Rifling through station presets, Jefferies stumbled onto Timmy Thomas’ “Why Can’t We Live Together,” a chintzy soul hit from 1972. The track is thin and demo-y and a bit like old elevator music. But Jefferies heard a song within the song. “As soon as I heard it, I knew exactly what to do,” he says to me over the phone. He sped it up, threw some light drum programming behind it. Mostly though? He tried to stay out of the way.

Jefferies is not a very public person. “I think I have like one follower on Snapchat,” the 30-year-old says. That’s unusual for big-time hip-hop producers, who are often as popular as the artists they service. It’s particularly unusual when you consider some of the songs Jefferies has been behind: last year’s “Hotline” (quintuple platinum), 2013’s “Hold On, We’re Going Home” (triple platinum), and “Truffle Butter” for Nicki Minaj (merely platinum). If you’re one of the 9,758 people who follow Jefferies on Instagram, you’d think his biggest accomplishment was the time he sat courtside at a Raptors game and gave Kobe Bryant a pack of gum. “True story.” Even in our interview, he seemed genuinely grateful (and a little surprised) that I was asking him about himself.

