Currently at No. 50 on Shazam’s most-tagged chart, Mohombi‘s collaboration with Shaggy, ‘I Need Your Love’, is putting him firmly in the spotlight and emerging as a big summer hit.
Written by Australian-Lebanse artist Faydee, and featuring Romania’s Costi alongside Mohombi, the track was originally released in 2014 as ‘Habibi (I Need Your Love)’, reaching No. 66 on the Billboard Hot 100 and finding success across the world. The new English-language version has given the track a major new lease of life.
Shaggy met Faydee when they worked together on Bob Sinclar’s ‘I Wanna’, and the duo also collaborated on Pitbull’s ‘Fired Up’ and Kat DeLuna’s ‘Dame’. He recently spoke to Idolator about the genesis of ‘I Need Your Love’: “I heard the track. It had both Faydee and Mohombi on it. I didn’t know either of them. I just listened and I was like, “Wow, this is a smash!” So I cut a couple of vocals for it and let it go, and he hit me up later and asked if we could do a video. I’m like, “Sure.” I was on tour at the time and I was like, “I ain’t got no time, you’ll have to figure it out.” He said, “We’ll meet you in Spain.” So when you see the part of the video where we’re hugging each other after I walk off the plane. That was literally me walking off the plane after I landed in Spain.
“When they put it out, we got 900,000 hits in the first week. It just so happened, at that time, I was doing a deal with Sony and Brooklyn Knights. These guys were the only guys that were willing to give me the opportunity to come in and do a couple of singles and not take a piece of that. So we were doing the deal. By the time we finished negotiating the deal, we’re at about six million views on this record. It’s blowing up. So Costi started getting a lot of offers from independent labels to license it, and they were huge offers.
“At the same time, I brought it to the attention of the head of Brooklyn Knights, and he was like, “Dude, that’s the record! Let’s jump out with this, the work is already done, you don’t even have to do a video, everything is done.” That’s how it ended up on Sony.”
Watch the video below.