Here Are 7 Hits You Didn’t Know Were Written by Muni Long

While everyone may know Muni Long as the Grammy-award winning R&B star, she actually got her start in the music industry as a prominent songwriter.

As told in a sprawling interview with Billboard, the singer known as Priscilla Renea struggled to get her solo career off the ground when she started in 2009. She dropped her Jukebox debut that didn’t chart at all, and before returning to her own music for a second album in 2018, dipped heavily into her songwriting bag. While she’d eventually rebrand herself as Muni Long and strike gold with her swooning love song “Hrs and Hrs” in 2021, Grammy-winning executive producer Christopher “Tricky” Stewart described her as “a professional song assassin” during her time penning other people’s tracks.

“I started writing songs to make money because I bought into the [idea of] ‘Well, if you write enough hits, then you can be an artist,’ ” Muni Long told Billboard. “I gave it my all… I did so much free work, got stolen from and taken ­advantage of so many times, so many bad deals. I’d also been the only Black person in the room writing all these pop songs for years. So I quit to focus on me… keeping these songs for myself.”

It turns out, describing her as a writing “assassin” was putting it mildly. The truth is Muni Long is responsible for some seriously massive chart hits — one of which she admitted she wrote in a mere 10 minutes. From songwriting credits with Rihanna to Chris Brown to Pitbull, here are a few of the songs you may not have known were written by the great Priscilla Renea.