Raise Up

Southern hip-hop artist Petey Pablo reps his native North Carolina on this Timbaland-produced track. The song was released in August 2001 as the lead single from his debut album Diary of a Sinner: 1st Entry.

Pablo felt uncomfortable when he first received the music for this song from Timbaland. He explained to Billboard magazine: "It didn't sound like a Timbaland beat at the time. People that knew Timbaland knew him for his signature sound, and that was a sound I had never heard before from Tim. I was like, 'Tim didn't give me the normal Timbaland beat, so I guess he's trying to see if I'm worthy of a Timbaland beat.' So it took me like a day or two to put the song together."

Though it took Pablo a couple of days to put the song together, he came up with the hook within a space of a few hours, riding down the highway. He recalled: "I remember riding down the highway coming from New York to Washington, D.C. playing the instrumental over and over again. Then it seemed like a helicopter was following me all the way from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., and I just kept thinking, like, 'North Carolina, come and raise up, take your shirt off, twist it 'round your hand,' like this helicopter that kept flying over my head. It started as a joke that turned to, 'Wait a minute, that actually sounds good.'"