Chris Brown Has Michael Jackson Stories, Three Films on Tap

Earlier this year, Rolling Stone named Chris Brown the "Best New Michael Jackson", so it made sense that Brown told us a story about the King of Pop when he stopped by for lunch last week: "He's one of the most difficult guys to get to do anything," Brown says. "I've done the World Music Awards [with him], and he's called me for my birthday — he did it the superstar way and had his security [call] for him and say 'Yeah, I got Michael on the phone.'"

"[Jackson] was telling me 'Happy Birthday' and I was like 'Thank you, we need to do a record.' He's like, 'Oh, definitely. Will.i.am was telling me about it, so we need to do it.' It didn't actually happen how we wanted it, but hopefully in the future it'll work out," Brown says.

In the meantime, Brown has plenty of other collaborations in the works — he's penned a song called "Disturbia" for current flame Rihanna, has done a few tracks for the Pussycat Dolls and is hoping to work with New Kids on the Block. "I'm just getting my pen wet," Brown says. "And for my new album, I actually got the chance to write a lot more songs."

Brown's next record, Graffiti, is still in the early stages, and he says he's trying "to do stuff that brings all genres of music together" — like a duet with Tim McGraw and another with Sting. "Something different, so you'll be like 'Sting and Chris Brown? Huh?' Because nobody would expect that."

And just to make sure he has all his bases covered, Brown will also appear in a handful of movies. He'll be in the graffiti movie Vandals, play a fresh-out-of-high-school football player who trades bodies with an 11-year-old in the Big-esque Traded and star alongside Common, T.I., Jared Leto and Matt Dillon in The Heist,. "My schedule is booked till about 2011," he jokes.

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Song Stories

“I'm Yours”

Jason Mraz | 2008

Jason Mraz re-emerged after his disappointing second album with this lead single, a Jack Johnson-esque ditty about giving yourself fully to someone else. The success of the reggae-tinged song (it earned two Grammy nods and a spot on the Billboard singles chart for well over a year) was something the folk-pop singer never predicted when he wrote it in 15 minutes at home. "I played a happy-hippie chord progression that would probably work without 50 different Bob Marley songs," he told Rolling Stone. "I thought, 'It's too novelty. This is a nursery rhyme,'" concluding that "you can never guess what's gonna be a hit."

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