MTV: Tell me how you feel about the success of this latest album?

Daron: It has our first #1 ["It's Over Now"] and I'm happy.

Mike: Just goes to show you, man, that if you leave 112 alone...

Daron: It's one of the few records, or the first singles, that we dropped without a featured [singer], you know?

Q: Right, that's all of us.

Slim: It's just straight-up 112.

Daron: The music came from the group, written and produced by the group.

Mike: With the approval of Puff.

MTV: What's "It's Over Now" about?

Mike: It's about how, just being an entertainer, a lot of times you might be in a relationship where the woman has to be able to deal with the fact that you're going out of town and doing your thing. If she's not able to deal with that, a lot of times she tries to find what she's missing somewhere else. In this song, she does find it somewhere else, and you find the numbers in her pocket, and you just basically catch her doing wrong.

MTV: What about "Peaches & Cream"?

Mike: "Peaches & Cream" was really our [1998 hit] "Anywhere" times 10. We wanted a song that was kind of fun and at the same time giving a little sex appeal. We're older now, we can talk about subjects of this nature. "Peaches & Cream" talks about pleasing your woman and using your imagination. It's like that D'Angelo song "Brown Sugar," where he was talking about one thing but made you think he was talking about something else. It's pretty much a nasty song. Ain't no way it's an erotic song.

MTV: What's the third single going to be?

Mike: It's going to be "Player." We definitely knew that we needed a ballad for the third one, because, like Daron always says, what groups are most remembered by are those ballads. Like Boyz II Men, Jodeci, you remember the ballads; you don't remember the up-tempo songs, even though 112 has been fortunate enough to have successful up-tempo songs.

MTV: What's "Player" about?

Daron: It's just redefining what a player is. A lot of times, people think of a player as somebody that might have 50 girls, or 30 women or just juggling women. But to me and to 112, a player is someone who just plays the game correctly. I don't mean to say that life is a game, but it's like playing the game correctly. Being honest. It's about not having one woman and then having five girls on the side, but having six women and letting them all know that you're not ready to settle down, or you're not ready for a commitment. In my dealings with women, I can say that one thing that I have learned, growing up with two sisters in the house, is that women appreciate honesty more than anything — or more than a lot of things. That's really what the song is about: honesty.

MTV: How do you guys collaborate in your writing?

Slim: Sometimes I might come up with a song or a verse, and then I bring it to the rest of the guys and we all come up with the hook, and vice versa. Mike might come up with the whole song itself and he'll just figure out, or we'll all figure out who's gonna sing it, so it could be a lot of things. It's no set formula of how we do it. We just go with the flow.

MTV: What was the most difficult part of recording the album?

Slim: This album was so relaxed and so together as far as we were concerned. We were all on the same page as far as what we wanted to say to the world. We took time off, we moved down to Nashville for a little while and we just got it together and had a meeting of the minds.

Daron: It was one of the first times I felt like we had total creative freedom. There was nobody telling us, "No, you need to sing on this." It was just total freedom. We had a chance to grow and tune into who we are as a group.

Mike: It's us growing from little boys in the game, from 16- to 17-year-olds to young men in their 20s who have experienced what it is like to be successful and not successful in this business. Out of the 12 songs, we wrote and produced nine. For everyone out there that don't know, 112 are not just the singers or the artists, but we are taking it a step further. We are the writers and the producers.

And not trying to dis Bad Boy or Puffy or whatever, but we got to let people know, man, a lot of music that came out of Bad Boy in '96, '97, it was 112 writing it. But we always took the backseat to it because [of] the powers that be. It's our time to shine now.

MTV: Why did you name the album Part III?

Mike: Like a trilogy, like "Star Wars." It also signifies the unity between us and [how] we've grown now in this game. We understand what it takes to be successful. We were friends before, and it really doesn't matter about the money and all this other stuff. Just to let everybody know that 112 is together, 112 is tight.