NEW YORK -- It's unanimous: the "oohs" have it. That's the name of Mary J. Blige's next single from her Love & Life LP, and that's what some of the most respected people in the industry said when they first heard the song.

" 'Ooh!' is a record that came about because there's this Ed O.G. & Da Bulldogs track [called 'I Got to Have It'], and [executive producer] Puff kept saying, 'I want you

to write to it,' so I finally went home and I started writing," Mary said last week.

"Puff heard it and he sat there with his mouth open. He was [nodding his head], but he never said anything. He later said that ' "Ooh" was fire!' so we let Jimmy Iovine hear it and Jimmy was like, 'I like it.' Dr. Dre heard it and was like, 'That's the joint right there.' Then we played it for [producer] Kay Gee and he just lost his mind. We played it for people all over the world when we went on the promotional tour and everything kept coming back 'Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.' "

The Queen of Hip-Hop Soul had no choice but to put the record out. On the song, she sings, "In the middle of the night, you hold me tight/ Say it's all right, I'm yours forever," before the chorus "Ooh, what you do to me/ Ooh, you're my everything/ Ooh, I'm so glad I found you/ Ooh, I can't live without you."

Mary's hoping to shoot the video for "Ooh!" in two weeks and is eyeing Chris Robinson, who helmed "Love at First Sight," to once again direct her. Another possible single off of Love & Life is "Not Today," which is produced by Dr. Dre and features Eve.

"The first day Dre gave us the track, we went and laid it down in a studio," she recalled. "We didn't even know the song was going to make the album, because Dre was trying to do something else. We brought the song back and played it for him, and he was bugging out off the fact that we did it the same night. So a couple of weeks later he sends it back to us, mastered with Eve on it, killing it. She's just destroying somebody. I don't know who, but she sounds really pissed off. The good thing is she really murdered the track."

"Ooh!" and "Not Today" are among the songs you'll hear in the first half of Love & Life, and from there the LP gets a little more pensive as M.J.B. starts cleaning out her closet.

"The consistency and the texture is Puffy's doing," she said of the LP's flow of songs. "He's good at sewing the whole thing together. As far as the songs are concerned, in loving yourself these are the things that we don't want -- we don't want fake friends, we don't want cheating boyfriends. We do want to be free. We do understand that Mary believes in God. That's my thing, and I have to have that there just for me so that people understand. These are the things that [Love & Life's second half] mellows out into. It mellows out into life. At the beginning it's all love."

Fans will get to see M.J.B. and P.D. put together Love & Life on a limited-edition DVD that will come with the first 500,000 albums. Love & Life hits stores on August 26 and features Jay-Z, Method Man and 50 Cent.

—Shaheem Reid, with reporting by [article id="1453175"]John Norris[/article]