In an interview with Shannon Sharpe on his Club Shay Shay podcast, singer/songwriter Ne-Yo talked about the time he first met Jay-Z, and how the meeting didn't go quite as he expected. Instead of greeting him, Jay-Z immediately wondered why Ne-Yo gave the 2004 hit song, "Let Me Love You" away instead of keeping it for himself.

“Shortly before the Def Jam situation happened I leaned on songwriting,” Ne-Yo explained. “I was just a songwriter so I wrote a song for Mario, [‘Let Me Love You’], so this song goes on and stays at number one for 12 or 13 weeks, something like that, becomes one of the most played songs in radio history.”

He said Jay-Z wondered why he let the song go.

“The first time I got to meet JAY-Z, I’d been signed for a couple months at this point," he recalled. "I walk into the room and he’s in there. It’s in L.A. Reid’s office. I walk in, ‘Hey it’s nice to meet you.’ He like, ‘Man, why you give that damn song away?’ Nice to meet you too bruh, cool. I’m Ne-Yo. ‘Why you give that damn song away?’ To this day, he yell at me about giving that damn song away. But I was just a songwriter when I wrote it, I didn’t write it for myself.”

Ne-Yo is one of the most successful, prolific songwriters in history, having penned hits for everybody from Beyoncé ("Irreplaceable") to Jennifer Hudson ("Spotlight"), Rihanna ("Take a Bow"), and more.

When Sharpe asked if he thought the song, which became the eighth most successful single of the decade, would've been as big if he'd kept it for himself, Ne-Yo said, probably.

“I’ll be the first to tell you that Mario got chops that I don’t,” Ne-Yo admitted. “I ain’t got no shame in that, but I know that I got chops too. So yeah. I feel like it woulda worked either way.”

Check out a snippet of the interview above.