among the guests was the theme. Created as a solo track, Brandy originally recorded the song alone. After listening to the result, however, she and Jerkins thought it would work better as a duet, an idea which was further inspired by Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson's 1982 hit duet "The Girl Is Mine". At Brandy's request, her label Atlantic Records approached fellow R&B teen singer Monica to collaborate: The pair had seen each other in passing at award shows and other live events, and Brandy thought a duet would help combat ongoing rumors that the singers were rivals. With the permission of Clive Davis, who headed Monica's record company Arista Records, Monica eventually signed on to the project. Originally, the two artists recorded their vocals for the song together with Jerkins and his production team at the Record One studios in Los Angeles. However, the joint recording was felt to be a failure so Monica re-recorded her vocals separately at the DARP Studios in Atlanta, Georgia with longtime contributor Dallas Austin and turned the song into a more mature pop sound. (Thus, Austin would later share the main production credit alongside Jerkins.) Though both Brandy and Monica repeatedly denied the song reflected any actual rivalry between them, tabloids began writing the opposite. There were claims that Monica was upset when Brandy performed the song solo on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and Brandy was reportedly miffed when Monica opted to take the name of the duet for the title of her second album. Following reports that the pair came to blows during a rehearsal for a performance at the MTV Video Music Awards in September 1998, talk of the rivalry became so loud that the singers' managers released a joint statement in which they called the press out for its "disturbing behavior" and called the "ongoing negativity [as] totally unfair." However, Jerkins later claimed that both singers "didn’t get along" during production and that he and Dexter Simmons remixed the track seven times to keep everything even. In a 2012 interview with WZMX, Monica spoke about her past relationship with Brandy: "We were young. We could barely stay in the room with each other. By no means was it jealousy or envy. She and I are polar opposites and instead of embracing that, we used our differences as reasons not to be amongst each other." Composition "The Boy Is