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It feels like Jay is really inspired on this album, in a way that maybe he hasn't been in a while. Would you agree with that?
Yeah. I'm even inspired. I'm a hip-hop purist at heart, and I'm learning to appreciate things that I never appreciated before; I don't say what's real hip-hop and not real hip-hop. [But] I didn't expect him to be going in the direction he was going, so when I came and heard it, I was pleasantly surprised, and it really inspired me to want to work on hip-hop again. It really made me say I want to get in with Nas now, I want to get in with Common on his next album. I want to get in with hip-hop artists and take a lot of the things that I've learned doing commercial music to enhance the hip-hop that I grew up on.

Tell me more about that. What have you learned?
When [Common and I] were doing our first two albums, [1992's] Can I Borrow a Dollar? and [1994's] Resurrection, we weren't thinking about commercial singles. It was really a creative battle to prove that we were good. We made an album that we felt was a really good album and picked the best song to be a single. Maybe doing the third album [1997's One Day It'll All Make Sense] we started thinking ''single,'' and then, ''Okay, let's put Lauryn Hill on this.'' But it was still from a pure place, in my eyes. After a while, when we were both frustrated with not having the success we felt like we should have, that's maybe even the true reason we went our separate ways. From that point, we both made our personal journeys to find success. I ended up in Atlanta, working with Jermaine Dupri. From a hip-hop purist's standpoint, I never really understood his success. And I just was like, ''Man, I really gotta humble myself and quit acting like he doesn't know what he knows.''

When did you link up with Jermaine Dupri?
That was a couple years ago, but it took us a while to really comfortably get in and work. He's one of the coolest people I know in the business, period. I began to get a lot of respect for what he does, and it made me a better producer. It made me learn how to make a Bow Wow record, or hone in on an R&B or pop record. A lot of people are giving the hip-hop market what they already had, but they're not taking what we already had and going up with it. One person who does [broaden hip-hop's horizons] the most right now is Kanye — he might be elevating it to a whole 'nother thing now.

Do you still talk often with Kanye?
Oh yeah, definitely. We never really changed our relationship. When he was absolutely nobody and I was No I.D., it wasn't a different relationship from when he's Kanye West and I'm No I.D. When we talk, we talk like we've been talking every single day. A lot of our conversation has been either life issues or music. He's younger than me, so it was never like he was my peer. Maybe he was 14 and I was 20, so he was the kid to me. I helped him out. And now he's not the kid, but it still kind of feels like it when we talk. But I definitely respect everything he's accomplished. I'm proud of him.

How did you feel when you heard him say your name on the ''Big Brother'' hook?
I didn't get a real moment of reaction, because an engineer who was working on it when he was cutting it called someone I knew and he said, ''He's saying your name on the song!'' I said, ''Okay. He said my name on [2004's] 'Last Call'!'' When he finished the song finally, [West] was like, ''Yo, you gon' be famous!'' Come on, man, what does that mean? He was like, ''Man, I said your name all through the song, and this is my moment.'' He did the Kanye thing, where he explains to me how important the song is to his career. I'm like, ''I'm no more famous than I was on your VH1 special.'' A lot of that stuff don't matter to me. Thanks for the shoutout. We're still just living life. I didn't realize how much it meant to other people — I literally got a call every day from when that song first came out. I get approached every day with the ''mentor'' word. Man, that's big! If you know a person half your life, you don't see it that way. You just see the person you've always known.

You said you wanted to work on Common's next album. Have you talked to him about that at all?
I'm not going to discuss it with him, because I know due to our history, it's not a discussion — it's an action. I want to bring him the music. Maybe in my more prideful moments, I was like, ''He ain't asked me; I never went anywhere.'' But I really, deep down, wanted to see him and Kanye achieve what they were going to achieve. Music needed that, and I needed to do other things. But I'm at a moment where I know he's going to appreciate what I have to offer. I don't believe he's peaked yet.... [Certain] combinations of people create certain things. I did the Jay song, it made me realize that I want to get back to the people that I can create certain things with. I took a breather, and I'm back with all this energy.