Rihanna and Chris Brown reunited earlier this week on remixes to “Birthday Cake” and “Turn Up the Music,” their first collaborations since their domestic violence incident in 2009. Speaking with Billboard.com, Terius Nash, who crafted “Birthday Cake,” explained that the remixes were Ri’s idea and that it wasn’t about the controversy to him – it was about the product.

 

“For me, it’s just music — two talented people doing a record together, doing two records together, and that’s what it was,” he said. “It wasn’t  about an incident that happened. The true thing really is to forgive, and… you want to believe in people.”

 

The-Dream explained that Ri came up with the idea, and that the song was only completed a week ago. “It was Rih’s idea,” he said. “Not only do we work together, but [Rihanna] is a friend of mine. And it’s like, ‘You  wanna do something? Then cool, let’s do it.’ I don’t know how she  got the logistics and how it happened — maybe she’ll talk about it  one day. I showed up at the studio, and it was     like, ‘All right,  cool, let’s finish this record,’ which we probably should have  finished the first time we did it.”

 

He continued by noting that the collaborations with Brown must have come about because of Ri’s ability to forgive her ex-boyfriend for putting his hands on her in 2009. Because she was able to forgive him, The-Dream was fine with moving ahead with the collabos.

 

“I think [the topic] that should be more on the tongues is: how do we proclaim to be a nation of forgiving, and we go by     all  of these rules and everything, but we can’t actually do it?… It actually makes you look weaker than your adversary — if  you don’t have the power to forgive, but you lie and say that you  did… Because this is about her… If she can forgive, that’s where she is  mentally. As a friend, it’s like, ‘Okay, cool. Let’s roll.”