Monica is steadily climbing the charts with her first single “Everything to Me,” and she credits two people with helping her get there; one being her friend and producer Missy Elliott, and the other being the song’s writer Jazmine Sullivan.

Once they met, Monica and the “Lions, Tigers, & Bears” songstress soon learned that they shared more in common than just being signed to the same label. “She’s not afraid of her own feelings,” Mo tells staging-rapup.kinsta.cloud. “And I think that I have to work with writers that are like that because I speak so much about life and about being hurt and finding love again. If I had impersonal songs, nothing would connect.”

Monica hit the studio with Missy and knocked out the record in a matter of hours. “As soon as Missy played [‘Everything to Me’], she said, ‘I don’t know what you’re going to think.’ She played about seven seconds of it and I went into the booth. And I did the song in three hours.”

The track, along with the Jim Jonsin-produced “Mirror” and Ludacris-assisted “Still Standing,” will appear on Monica’s sixth studio album, due March 23.

–Reporting by Rajul Punjabi