Monica and Brandy reunited onscreen earlier this month for Ariana Grande’s music video “the boy is mine,” her take on their hit 1998 song of the same name.
The former artistic collaborators reunited once again on Grande’s “the boy is mine (Remix),” which was released on Friday. The updated version of the song features Monica and Brandy’s vocals and helped the singers come back together.
“The process of the new collaboration did a lot of closing the gaps,” Monica told Entertainment Tonight about working with Brandy again. “When you properly communicate something, you can find not only the resolutions and solutions to problems. But sometimes you find that there weren’t ever problems, just consistent miscommunications,” adding, “It made it a lot easier just to talk.”
Since working together on Grande’s remix, Monica noted she and Brandy have talked more in recent weeks than they had in in the last two decades.
“We recognized that the key was to keep other people out of our relationship, both business and personal, and let it be between she and I, and that has changed everything,” Monica told the publication. “It’s changed the trajectory of it in its totality. My son was in the hospital the other day, and she was who I was speaking to while he was there, so I think that is what Ariana has done that she may not even realize.”
Now that Monica and Brandy have worked together again, there’s no stopping them from continuing to collaborate on music after all this time, with Monica noting there’s certainly a chance.
“It’s team ‘The Boy Is Mine‘ today, tomorrow, and for the last 25 years,” she added. “We have a lot of catching up to do in the sense of giving the audience what they really wanted from us even back then. We didn’t find a way to do it then, but we’re finding a way to do it now.”
Prior to the release of the remix, Monica had been very vocal about not wanting her and Brandy’s 1998 track to be touched or remade by anyone but them. However, she revealed that when she heard Grande and producer Max Martin’s version, she immediately fell in love with it. She and the “we can’t be friends” singers even had FaceTime sessions while they were working on the song, which ended up including their families.
Despite rumors that Monica and Brandy were at odds, Monica previously told The Hollywood Reporter that she and her former collaborator were “more than good” and had been for quite some time.
She noted that a lot of what people may have heard about them was from when they were teenagers but as a grown woman now, she has nothing but love and admiration for Brandy. She also admitted she wished the rumors would go away.
“I wish people would stop putting the two against each other,” she told THR during a conversation celebrating the 25th anniversary of “The Boy Is Mine.” “I wish people would stop attempting to compare who sings better, who looks better, who outdid the other one, because I never came into the space with a spirit of competition anyway. … I wish people would just let it be that and not even compare the two or create any animosity, even within our fan groups.”
