But despite Rated R’s generally positive reviews, some who have been with Rihanna from the beginning have had a hard time coming to terms with her new independence. “I have to admit, it was a bit of a shock the first time I heard all the songs,” says Evan Rogers, the producer who discovered Rihanna (born Robyn Rihanna Fenty) in 2003 while visiting family in Barbados. A mutual friend set up an informal audition for the young singer, who was then part of a three-girl group, and soon after that, Rogers brought her to live with him and his wife in Connecticut. She stayed two years, during which time they cut her first album, and the two have worked together ever since. “When I first met her, she was painfully shy,” says Rogers, who co–executive produced Rated R but did not write any of the tracks. “This album was sort of like hearing your daughter using profanity for the first time. I’m not going to lie and say I didn’t have concerns about how her core audience would react.”
“When I first worked with her, on her second album, she was very—I don’t want to say obedient, because it sounds like you’re describing a dog—but she would take my suggestions without question,” says Ne-Yo. “She trusted me, which was cool, but I told her that I ultimately wanted to get to a point where she would give me input, where she’d be a collaborator and not a puppet. And now I think we’ve gotten there. She’s showing parts of herself that she didn’t show before because she didn’t want to scare anyone off. She’s experienced some pain now, and it’s helped her grow to a point where she’s able to explore it.”
Whether or not her fans accept this new side of Rihanna, making the album was a cathartic experience for her. “I started to go crazy after about a month in the house,” she says of the time after her split from Brown, “so I went back to work, and the mic was my therapist. With the mic, there were no negative comments, no negative energy.”
It wasn’t that she had no one to turn to. While she has a strained relationship with her Irish-Barbadian father, a former drug addict who was abusive to her mother during Rihanna’s childhood, she talks warmly of her mom, a retired Guyanese-born accountant, and her two brothers, 20 and 13, who she says are unimpressed by her fame. “This whole lifestyle—they want no part of it,” she says, laughing. “My younger one, he’s really smart, like a science nerd, so he’s so not into this.”
