Songfacts®:

• Add Rihanna to the list of superstars Diane Warren has written for. She wrote "Music Of The Sun" along with Rihanna and her producers, Evan Rogers and Carl Sturken. It's a warm, breezy tune that plays to Rihanna's Caribbean heritage. She invites us all to dance to the music of the sun.
• This is the title track to Rihanna's debut album, released when she was 17. A few years earlier, the American producer Evan Rogers met her in her native Barbados when he was on vacation there, and he arranged for her to make trips to New York where she recorded a demo. Rogers and his songwriting/production partner Carl Sturken got her a meeting with Def Jam records, who had recently hired Jay-Z as president. Jay was on a signing spree, and after meeting Rihanna, he signed her to the label.
  
  Along with Ne-Yo, Rihanna was Def Jam's shining star from this era. She became one of the biggest pop stars in the world, with songs that got a lot more risqué but held international appeal. Jay left the label in 2007, but in 2013 he signed her again, this time to his Roc Nation label.
• If you hire Diane Warren to write a song, you're probably going to release it as a single - she's a reliable hitmaker whose CV includes "Love Will Lead You Back" by Taylor Dayne and "Rhythm Of The Night" by DeBarge, a song that shares some similarities with "Music Of The Sun." But after releasing "Pon De Replay" and "If It's Lovin' That You Want," Def Jam stopped issuing singles from the album and pushed forward with a new song from next album called "SOS," Rihanna's first #1 hit.