Ray J’s career is taking off, thanks to his mother’s goose

Brandy‘s little brother won’t say that he was propelled against his will into becoming the singer/actor/mini-executive he is at age 24.

“I don’t feel I was pushed at all. Maybe Brandy was pushed a little more than me,” Ray J was saying in a phone interview.

Click. Uh-oh. Ray J was gone.

His showbiz-Svengali mom, Sonja Bates-Norwood, had set up the interview and had been listening in.

They called back a few minutes later and I began with “Where were we?” A minute later, the line again went dead.

Another call. Ray J apologized, saying his cell phone battery had died.

Could it also be that “pushy parent” territory was off limits?

Yet it’s a major part of Willie Ray Norwood Jr.‘s life story – with his mother’s attention once lavished on a sibling and now more so on him.

Bates-Norwood is his adviser at Knockout Entertainment, which independently released his “Raydiation” CD in September.

It has sold 78,000 copies – not terrible for an independent – and its lead single, “One Wish,” climbed during the past month from No. 83 to No. 13 on the Billboard R&B/hip-hop chart.

While Ray J has the title of CEO at Knockout, he also appears on UPN’s “One on One” and hosts a BET.com video countdown show.

So mom, naturally, makes the key decisions.

“She’s really controlling the whole business side of everything,” he says. “I definitely trust her in helping me make the right decisions, as far as business and lawyers and contracts. It can get real dangerous out here.”

But when it comes to danger, Ray J says he was once threatened by more than just expensive producers and questionable dotted lines.

He joined the cast of Sinbad‘s sitcom when he was 13, around the time Brandy debuted with a self-titled album featuring “Baby” and “Wanna Be Down.”

When the show was canceled, mom concentrated on big sis. So though he came from a good family in the working-class L.A. suburb of Carson, it was easy for Ray J to fall in with troublemakers.

“I got with a crowd that just took me into the underworld, the gang-bang world,” he says. “I wanted to do different. I felt that at that time, that’s where all my love was at.”

When he was outside the family home one day, he says, a car pulled up and a man pointed a shotgun at him. The stranger didn’t shoot; it was a warning.

“At that moment I just felt like things had to change, that I was in too deep, doing the wrong things,” Ray J says. “I called my mom, called my sister, and everything changed from there.”

He was back in the game – touring with Brandy and steadily pushed toward making his own records.

“If Brandy didn’t go into singing and my mom wasn’t doing what she was, then I probably would’ve been in management or behind the scenes somehow, probably acting,” he says. “I probably wouldn’t have been a singer.”

The birthday bunch

Singer Mary Travers (Peter, Paul and Mary) is 69. Actor Barry Newman is 67. Singer Johnny Rivers is 63. Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell is 62. Actor Christopher Knight (“The Brady Bunch”) is 48. Actor Jeremy London (“Party of Five”) is 33. Actor Jason London (“The Rage: Carrie Two”) is 33.