Justin Timberlake really needs no introduction, but Justin Richmond did such a great job with his for the recent episode of Broken Record we feel obliged to share.
LISTEN NOW: Broken Record - Justin Timberlake
One of the most high achieving pop phenomenons of the past three decades, in 1993 Justin Timberlake helped relaunch the Mickey Mouse Club where he sang and danced alongside Rylan Gosling and other now luminaries. He then broke records and sold over 70 million albums worldwide with *NSYNC. And if that weren’t enough, he followed that up with an incredibly successful solo career in the early aughts where he found a musical soulmate in Timbaland.
With all that hard earned success behind him, Richmond noted how it’s been interesting to see the online drubbing JT's taken the last couple of years. Curious as to how he might respond musically, it turns out, his new album Everything I Thought It Was, is everything you’d hope to hear from JT, including a surprise *NSYNC reunion.
While discussing the album and dissecting key tracks, Justin shared how “making this album was different for me than any other album.” Offering up details about how he went about working on a project unlike what he’s done before, and how despite landing on the final songs he wanted on the album, out of the 100 he had written and recorded, he followed his rule, “when you think you're done with album, write one more song.” Which he thankfully did, and then some, because it resulted in the album’s concluding track “Conditions.”
Justin also shared why he felt now was the right time to reunite with his boy band brothers.
Revealing that ahead of the *NSYNC reunion on “Better Place” for the Trolls soundtrack, “‘Paradise’ was actually the first song that we got together to record.” Justin shared. “I finished writing it, and I recorded my own version of it obviously with less harmonies, you know less stacked vocals.”
“But as I was listening back to it,” he continued, “there was something in the ether again, I don’t know sometimes these decisions get made, and you feel like there’s like somebody tapping you on the shoulder to say like, ‘what if you did this?’ and I feel like, when it’s so loud, it’s a moment to say, ‘what if we did.’”
"When you break down some of the lyrics, there’s some of it that I think could be interpreted as how we feel about the fanbase that supported us from the beginning and even up until now, how we feel about each other. We’ve been down a long, long road now. Look at where we are. We were chasin' after hopes and dreams and we're still under the stars.”
Shouting out his co-writer, Kenyon Dixon, JT said, “when that lyric came together, sitting back listening to it, for some reason I felt like I was having a conversation with my four brothers from *NSYNC.” So Justin knew what the next move had to be.
“It just felt like this amazing homecoming for us, and like it’s an amazing reunion,” Justin went on to express. “It’s like a perfect representation of how we should sound now, in my opinion, and that’s why I pitched it to them. But also even deeper than that, to have another moment with them.”
Also during the episode Justin recalled how Micheal Jackson helped inspire his solo career, broke down the motivation behind each one of his solo albums, and so much more.
To hear the entire very interesting conversation, listen to episode above.
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