(From MTV News)
No more asking the Neptunes to make carbon copies of their previous hit songs(pardon me if I don't suspend disbelief-mister X): The famed production duo are commanding and receiving leeway to approach each project with their own distinctive perspective.

"Everybody is letting us do what we wanna do," half of the squad, Pharrell Williams, said last Wednesday in New York. "The most important thing is not having any real constraints and making sure something works for the artist and not doing something just to do it or to make money and just to have a song for an artist." (Stop it, stop it---you're killing me!-X)

Justin Timberlake is on the long list of performers giving the team elbow room. They got together for his debut solo LP, Justified, which is due out in November (see "Preview Of Justin Timberlake Album From Neptunes' Hugo").

"We did seven joints on there," Williams said. "Justin's album is incredible because of the amount of musicality he gave us the room to bring to the project. It's a whole other level."

"The new Jay-Z stuff, I got some crazy beats, man," he said about hooking up in the studio again with Jigga for the upcoming Blueprint 2 LP. "It's crazy material, man, it's gonna be classic, classic material. I can't really talk about what the songs sound like or how many I produced, but it's incredible."