It was Terius Nash’s mother who taught him to feel music: Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, and Michael Jackson, of course—“Man in the Mirror” was the one he’d always come back to. Some fans had never considered MJ’s mortality until the day he died; but for Nash, that was exactly his appeal. “I’d completely seen all the stars, growing up, as human beings,” he remembered in a career retrospective last year, “and the first person I made human to me was Michael Jackson. If I would have ever seen him, I knew in my heart that I would treat him like a person.” Artists, to Nash, were not untouchable beings whose lives were confined to the stage or the screen; where would the soul fit in all that? It was not Michael’s death, but his mother’s—in 1992, when Nash was 15—which drove that point home. “That just kinda changes your idea about human beings an just living, period: and what you can touch, and what you can’t,” he said. “I’m never going to get her back, the same way we can never get Michael back... These are people.”

Nash had never really dreamed of being the star himself; he just wanted to write perfect songs. He did that best with Christopher “Tricky” Stewart, an already-established writer and producer Nash had met through his brother, Laney—a ’90s R&B veteran who’d worked closely with Babyface, Jimmy Jam, and Terry Lewis. Laney had given Nash his first publishing deal in 2003 when Nash was 26 years old, but it was Tricky who taught him how to produce, how to use an MPC, how to do everything himself. Throughout the early 2000s, the two developed a signature style that, by the end of the decade, would dominate a significant chunk of pop radio.

Most music fans would consider “Umbrella” the essential work Nash (and Tricky) released in 2007, and through the lens of cultural relevance, they’d be right. The song redefined Rihanna as an icon in the making; it spent seven straight weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100 (and ten on the UK Singles Chart), had the biggest debut in iTunes history, won a Grammy. All this from a prefab GarageBand loop—“Vintage Funk Kit 03,” which immediately implanted in Nash’s conscious a single word: “umbrella”—and some “ella”s and “ayy”s, “the most insidiously catchy string of nonsense syllables this side of a-wop-boppa-loo-bop, a-wop-bam-boom,” according to Blender’s 2007 “Song of the Year” designation. Those strangely endearing ad-libs would become the signature of Nash’s search-engine-optimized stage name that he would soon create: The-Dream.

The best thing about “Umbrella,” though, was that its commercial triumph finally gave Nash the freedom to develop his vision—start to finish—through a new outlet. He was tired of the process of shopping his songs around and creating strictly in the context of singles, so he met with L.A. Reid to float the idea of The-Dream as a solo artist. Two days later, Nash was signed to Def Jam; “Shawty Is a 10,” his debut single, was on the radio within a week, and, according to Nash, he’d completely written and recorded his first solo album Love/Hate in just nine days.

“Shawty Is a 10” is the polite name, but in spirit, Nash’s first single—and Love/Hate’s opening track—belongs wholly to its uncensored title, “Shawty Is Da Shit!” Perhaps Nash’s solo turn seemed like a quick post-“Umbrella” spotlight-grab; as if to preemptively squash that idea, the song immediately launches into a charmingly dorky Fabolous verse, with Nash merely providing a safety net of background “ayy”s. (These trademark ad-libs play different roles, depending on how Nash sings them: here, they come in punctuative little bursts—“eh, eh”—and screwed-down, stretched-out layers— “ayyyy!”—) Still, it’s a thorough introduction to Nash’s aesthetic: that plinky, two-note doo-wop piano and the sweet, approachable falsetto. His voice is by no means what you’d call “powerful” like R. Kelly’s; rather, it is a luxury vehicle for his purposefully replicable melodies to which most listeners could easily sing along.

But the most charming part of “Shawty Is Da Shit!”—and the most essentially “The-Dream”—is Nash’s built-in meta-commentary on his own writing process. The hopeless romantic’s answer to JAY-Z’s “No Hook,” Nash’s chorus goes the Magritte route: “Man, I don’t need no hook for this shit!/‘Cause shawty right there is the shit!” It’s my favorite recurring theme in Nash’s writing: these winking gestures that direct a song’s themes reflexively back towards the song itself. It’s a glimpse into Nash’s worldview, a dissolution of boundaries between life and art, where writing a melody is as intuitive as falling in love, and great sex is its own creative triumph. (Moments on Love/Hate remind me of a passage from Eve Babitz’s memoir Slow Days, Fast Company, where she invites a date to a notoriously vibey restaurant: “I thought that going there with Shawn with the rain outside would be an opportunity for high art, if you believe, as I do, that sex is art.”) And in that sense, songwriting isn’t something relegated to the background so that the entertainer might better entertain; to Nash, the presentation is glued to the process.

If Nash’s earliest musical influences were his mother’s soul and R&B records, by the mid-’90s he’d come to idolize Tupac and Biggie for their wit more than anything else. And he’d taken note when Jodeci’s lead songwriter, DeVante Swing, produced Pac’s “No More Pain”, a song that sounded nothing like New Jack Swing—it sounded gangster. Not that the second track “I Luv Your Girl” sounds particularly gangster, with its wispy finger-snap percussion and tender Rhodes chords. But it’s a song that captures, even in its delicate form, the essence of the rap in Nash’s hometown of Atlanta in 2007: an impressionist take on snap&B, straight out of Bankhead. And while the melodies on “I Luv Your Girl” sound angelic, Nash’s lyrics grow more out-of-pocket with every Patrón shot—and more hilarious too. “Part of me feels so bad, but (oo-oooh) not that bad!” he hums to himself as he strolls out of the club, hand-in-hand with your girl. On her birthday, no less.

There’s another seemingly simple line on “I Luv Your Girl” that gestures towards Nash’s broader convictions. Eyes locked with another man’s girlfriend from across the club, he exclaims, in half-rapped melodies: “You might wanna rap, but she’ll make you sing.” You could read that as a straightforward reinforcement of Love/Hate’s blend of R&B and hip-hop, in form and attitude—a development that was still a few years ahead of the game, T-Pain aside. 2007, bear in mind, was a strange year for both genres, sandwiched between the mid-’00s run of hyper-regional ringtone rap breakthroughs and that retrospectively cringey late-00s phase of blog-era electro-pop hybrids (think “Low,” “Lollipop,” and one million Akon features). Like Timbaland or the Neptunes before him, Nash felt completely of this moment in spirit while standing apart from it in sound, coyly incorporating what was happening on the charts in a way that felt built to last—it took me a decade to hear the hints of Yung Joc in his “I Luv Your Girl” delivery.

However, using “influence” as a value metric—placing the focus not on the point of innovation, but the after-effects—can obscure what made the original work so special. In the case of this hugely influential album, it was not just the merging of classic R&B with Atlanta rap, but the way Nash did it—thoughtfully, with constant consideration towards what each form brought to the table. When he raps, it is to set a tone; the rapped third verse of “She Needs My Love” is a defensive squaring of his posture. When he sings, his voice is a piano, hitting notes with the perfect clarity of an idea brought precisely into reality.

In 2013, the Grammys introduced the Best Urban Contemporary Album category to the awards; it’s a purposely vague title, but it’s also a way to make room for records that follow in the wake of Love/Hate—records that sound like what modern R&B sounds like. Although, as Love/Hate’s influence has bled into the fabric of popular R&B, a bit of its thoughtfulness has been lost. “The gatekeepers now don’t know the difference between what R&B is and what rap is—that’s my disservice,” Nash has said. “Every night out the week can’t be fucking hip-hop night at every club.” And so “You might wanna rap, but she’ll make you sing” becomes more than just a fusionist manifesto: It is a testament to the distinct meanings behind both forms, corresponsive but never interchangeable. It may be thanks to Nash’s influence that today’s rap and R&B overlap to an indistinguishable degree.

But it might be Love/Hate’s sense of ambition, more than anything, that’s had the most profound effect on what R&B sounds like today. “I Luv Your Girl” kicks off a fully integrated five-song run—each song transitioning seamlessly into the next. These transitions were by no means afterthoughts; they’re a function of Nash’s writing process that forms a unified composite. As if to further delineate his songwriter résumé from his solo artist ambitions, The-Dream was here to bring you a full-on, carefully curated album experience. “I Luv Your Girl” fades into the sounds of dusk—evening crickets, stilettos clicking down a driveway, the engine rev of a little red Corvette—and we are launched into “Fast Car,” the most brazen Prince pastiche in Nash’s catalog to date. For Nash, creative influences are points of pride—something to honor, to wear on your sleeve: synthesized within his work is the quick wit of Atlanta rap, the heady sensuality of Prince, the melodic precision of MJ.

As “Fast Car” wanes into “Nikki,” its harmonies shift from euphoric to desperate; Love/Hate’s opening suite of fun, sexy bops has ended, and shit has gotten real. After three years of marriage, Nash left his wife Nivea, whose third album he’d executive produced; she filed for separation the day before Love/Hate’s release. On “Nikki” (another unsubtle Prince nod), Nash’s melodies slant downwards, the kick drums land with angsty thuds, and he is insistent that he’s totally over the breakup and has moved on. The tempestuous layers of sound suggest otherwise. “You’ve died in my heart, so g’on ’head and live in his arms,” he spits, hardened. “She Needs My Love” continues the icy mood, even in the bloom of new romance. Territorially defending his relationship against interlopers, the hook’s Jodeci-style vocal harmonies are scuzzed up by martial drums and synths covered in static, and Nash’s allegedly love-sprung lyrics land as paranoid. It’s a post-breakup song whether or not Nash intended it to be—a vulnerable document of navigating the world with your heart smashed.

The final piece of Love/Hate’s breathless five-song run might be the most essential. “Falsetto,” on paper, is a straightforward sex jam—simpler in composition than the dense songs that precede it. But it’s also the slyest example of Nash’s reflexive mode of songwriting, where love and sex and music blur indistinguishably. The song’s basic concept—that Nash’s stroke game can make his partner hit high notes—isn’t exactly groundbreaking creative territory. But the brilliance lies in the interplay between the lyrical themes, formal structure, and the way Nash delivers it all: his ability to make his girl hit a falsetto is as much a hook construct as it is a callback to his own vocal register, which he modulates on the fly to emulate a gently-exaggerated female tone, playing his own voice like an infinitely variable instrument. “It’s all over now, you can come back down, we can talk in this key right here,” he sings playfully on the outro in a satisfied lower register. Stuff like this could easily come off as deal-breakingly cheesy—as could “Luv Songs,” later on the album, an R. Kelly homage that presents its “sex as songwriting” concept with surprising grace. “Let me get that 808 (ayyy!), then a snare, then a kick, then a cymbal,” Nash coyly requests, mid-sex session, and as he does, those elements come stuttering into the track itself. He pulls it off wholeheartedly—a holistic celebration of passion.

Love/Hate’s intensity fades a bit for a pair of cute, crisp love songs, Atlanta-centric and pro-woman: “Playin’ in Her Hair,” a mid-tempo homie/lover/friend anthem that sounds like something Nash might write for Ciara, and “Purple Kisses,” which essentially goes: “You look bomb without makeup, but when you put that M.A.C. lipstick on…” The most fascinating part of Nash’s songwriting career has been his uncanny ability to write not just capably but empathetically from a woman’s perspective. He’s better at it than he is at writing songs for men (see: Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies”; Mariah’s “H.A.T.E.U.”; Kelly Rowland’s “Dirty Laundry,” a song that relives, in painful detail, a physically abusive relationship.) It’s a perspective Nash didn’t know he was capable of until he started writing songs, but in retrospect, he knows where it came from. “My mother gave birth to me when she was 19,” Nash described. “All her friends, were there at the house, talking about women problems—with men, usually. But I was just previewed to a lot of conversations and a lot of sensitive points, from a woman’s standpoint.” But his desire to understand more fully how a woman might see the world goes beyond growing up surrounded by women. “I felt like I lost my best friend, in one way,” he said of losing his mother so young. “In another way, that was the love of my life.”

After 11 tracks of love, lust, and heartbreak, Love/Hate closes with a tribute to Nash’s late mother. “Mama” is not just a necessary element of Nash’s debut but the album’s emotional core. “This is an interpretation of what a mother tells her son—her only one,” Nash sings on the piano ballad’s intro, his voice aggressively modulated unlike anywhere else on the album, an effect that sounds like being choked by tears. (It’s just ahead of the 808s & Heartbreak curve, stylistically and spiritually.) He sings from the perspective of a mother to her child, echoing his own words with his human reverb: “Sometimes, this road will bear no signs of direction, so rely on your heart to lead the way.” This is the crux of his creative empathy, the driving force behind his songwriting ethos at large: through music, he is trying to remember his mother, to speak through her, to speak to her, in the language she first taught him.

In the voice of his mother, Nash tells himself: “You know that it will be okay. Don’t wander off.” And he tells her back, speaking as himself now, singing through tears: “I wanna let you know how I’ve been thinking of you. Always thinking of you.” And then: “If I could bring you back, I’d do it in a split second.” But in that moment, he already has.