Songwriter

Static Major

Stephen Ellis Garrett

Louisville, Kentucky·b. 1974-11-21

Static Major — Stephen Garrett — was a Louisville, Kentucky songwriter and member of the R&B group Playa, best known for writing some of the defining late-1990s and 2000s R&B records: Aaliyah's "Try Again" and "Are You That Somebody?," Ginuwine's "Pony," Lil Wayne's "Lollipop" (which became a No. 1 single after his death in 2008), and many others alongside producer Timbaland and the Da Bassment collective. He died in February 2008 at age thirty-three from complications related to myasthenia gravis. His connection to the Drake catalog is posthumous — his compositions and vocal performances appear via samples and interpolations on Drake-adjacent projects rather than via new co-writing sessions. The "Lollipop" credit in particular ties him to Drake's Young Money era; the Lil Wayne record was a defining 2008 moment that overlapped with Drake's pre-fame rise. Within an encyclopedia of Drake writers, Static Major represents the previous generation of R&B topline writers whose compositional language — melodic, conversational, hook-first — informs the modern OVO writing style even where his name does not appear on the Drake publishing splits directly.