Ne-Yo says that he took a break from the music business because he felt "underappreciated".
The singer has been on hiatus for two years now and it's because he felt the need for more recognition for his pioneering sound.
While out of the spotlight he was happy to realise people still "cared" about him and his music.
Speaking to BBC Newsbeat about the reasoning behind his break he explained: "You want to give people the chance to miss you, especially if you're in a place where you feel underappreciated, which I gotta say is something I dealt with.
"Because I'm not this super-boisterous guy who runs around telling people [what I've done], people forget.
"Before 'Closer', there was no R&B cats doing EDM or dance music, it just wasn't happening, 'Closer' was the first one.
"I didn't get any credit for that, I'm not crying or complaining but when you don't feel like people are paying attention in the way they should, you go away to see if they care - and people cared, so I'm back."
His latest music video for 'She Knows' is set in a strip club, but the singer says he did so in a bid to show that pole dancers could be "athletes" that do things "average women" cannot.
"Everybody has seen a strip club video.
"The track, when I first heard it, I was like 'This is something I have to hear in a strip club'. So we knew we wanted to go down that route, but we didn't want it to be typical.
"And on top of that, we wanted to show the art form that is pole dancing, it is not as easy as they make it look, those women are athletes, the average woman can not get up there and do that."
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