JUSTIN THE LEGEND

WHEN Justin Timberlake released his highly-anticipated third solo album (and first in seven years), The 20/20 Experience sold almost one million copies in its first week of release, marking the best single sales week of Timberlake’s career and the best sales week for any album since Lil Wayne’s blockbuster 2011 release, Tha Carter IV.

Timberlake took some time to talk a bit about his new album, his forthcoming Legends of Summer Tour with Jay-Z and what it feels like to be back in the music mix.

How have you felt about the response of the album so far?

Honestly, I don’t read reviews all that much, but you hear through your team and everything, Oh, this person liked the record, this person didn’t care for the record, but for the most part, I’m hearing that people appreciate that I did something different. That there was a different approach, and I think that if you have the platform, and you actually do come up with something different, then it’d be a shame not to put it out. But it’s not like that was the effort. I didn’t write these songs like, “We need to make this sound different from the first album or the second album.” These are just the songs that we did. There wasn’t that much thought put into it.

( Saturday Night Live creator) Lorne Michaels said something to me that was very valuable, like the second or third time I hosted SNL. Something happened, I can’t remember what it was, but something didn’t work in the dress rehearsal and so I adlibbed something else (on-air) and the joke went over to thunderous applause, not just laughter. So I was talking to him at the after party and he’s like, “Look, we don’t go live every Saturday night because we have a great show. We go live because 11.30pm rolls around and we have to put something on the air.” And so for this (album), I waited long enough, obviously. That’s an understatement, but I feel like I would have taken the break regardless of any other involvement with Myspace or any roles I may have been lucky enough to have in movies, or I probably would have waited this long again, just because you want to be this excited about it. If you’re going to get sick over it,

you know touring, doing the promo for it and having to talk about it, make sure you’re excited about it.

But I guess the point I was making was I wasn’t trying to do something different. These songs just started lengthening themselves and I just thought, when vinyl was the only way you could get music, the songs faded out because there wasn’t enough available space. But when you don’t have to do that, I just felt like these songs would transform themselves into something else. And I thought this is something really special.

When you think about the legacy of FutureSex/LoveSounds, what do you think? Do you think about that at all?

I don’t know, man. Artists tend to dwell on everything negative, and I become a victim of that all the time. And you have to understand, to me, I find it hilarious that people would even associate the word “legacy” with FutureSex/LoveSounds because when I put it out, everybody was laughing at me – critics, radio programmers and to their credit, I understand why. But I wanted to do something different at that time. I wanted to do something that was like, “This is like nothing I hear on the radio. That was my effort with that one. I got like terrible reviews on that record, and so to talk about it now… I just think that Tim and I were on to something different and I just think that anytime you put out something different, it’s polarising. And polarising is good, I think, because polarising starts a conversation. I don’t think we appoint ourselves those roles, by any means. We just kind of

go into the studio

and we don’t even really talk about it. We start messing around with stuff and like, sometimes he’ll come in the studio and he’ll leave his keyboard on and I’m banging out a beat on his keyboard, and he’s like, “Oh, I like what you just did with that, but what if you flip it here?” And then I’ll go over to the keys, and I’ll say, “Oh, I like the way you were hitting that beat. It makes me want to play the progression on this rhythm, and then the next thing you know,

you start writing a song.”

Can you talk a bit about the Jay-Z relationship and the tour and everything?

Yeah, Jay-Z and I have known each other for a while. And Tim and I were in the studio working on some stuff, some potential stuff, for Beyoncé, and Jay came in and we started messing around with stuff, and we worked on a handful of songs together. It would be fun to find a way to put them out.

But, we just kind of have that… what’s the word I’m looking for? I think we’re just kinda the same type of guy. He’s very relaxed. Easy-going. Suit & Tie came out of that – we were just having fun. We had an extra room in the studio in New York, and I said, I want to do a dance record, but not like a 120bpm dance record. I want to do like a Marvin Gaye Gotta Give It Up, Curtis Mayfield, Move On Up.

And I was talking to Tim about it, and we started messing around with the track and it turned into that, and then Jay came in and was like, What is this? And then we found the little trap thing where Tim took the beat and played it halftime and found the trap to it and Jay was like, “If you don’t use that on the song, I’d like to take that and make a whole song out of it.”

So I was like, Well, do a verse! And then it just was like, 20 minutes later, he’s got the whole thing done. And then the tour. Yeah, well, Jay approached me about it because I think the opportunity was coming up for him. I think he likes to do things for his fanbase that are special, as do I, and we just thought, we share the same producers (in) Pharrell and Chad (Hugo) and Tim. We share a lot of the same style, actually. I bet we share a lot of the same fans, you know what I mean? So it just became this idea, and we just started pitching the idea around and I just said, “Yeah, man, I like that. I like that. That could be fun.” And I remembered artists like Billy (Joel) and Elton (John) went on tour together and you just see them mash up their songs together, and I said, “That’s what it has to be. We have to just go out on stage for two hours and just non-stop, kill it and then go have a beer or whatever.”

The album is pretty trippy at times. Was that something you were shooting for?

Well, I’m a big Nigel Godrich fan and I’m a big Radiohead fan and I don’t think I’ll be brave enough to fully go where those guys (go). I don’t think I’m capable of it. (Laughs) But there’s some sounds on Strawberry Bubblegum and there’s some sounds on Blue Ocean Floor and things like that, where they remind me not of them, because I think it would be sacrilegious to compare anybody to them, but remind me of the same feeling I get sometimes when I listen to In Rainbows or Kid A or OK Computer or even The Bends sometimes – just the ambient guitar that Jonny Greenwood does so well. I don’t know. I think it does go trippy. It’s definitely appropriate for many different occasions (laughs).

Does it mean anything different to you?

I have not been able to do the festival circuit yet. So for me, it’s my first big festival show, and I’m kind of excited that it’s such an intimate thing because I think it will be a special evening for me and the fans (and) everybody who’s in the room. At least I hope so. I mean, I can’t remember the last time I played to 1 000 people, so I’m really excited to do it.

I saw Radiohead play a benefit at a theatre for Haiti relief in a theatre in LA and there were probably only like, 1 800 people there and it was like, one of the coolest shows, I mean, they just came out on stage and it was unbelievable. Thom sounded amazing, and there was just this thing that you felt. It’s very inviting. You don’t get, like, agoraphobia from the whole thing because that will be the battle with the stadium gigs.

When you go to a music festival, do you go to check out other bands?

I’ve been to Coachella many times, on many different, um, substances. I’ve been to Coachella many times but not remembered a lot of it, I’ll leave it at that. But I remember I used to go to Coachella a long time ago. I remember Coachella when there wasn’t like, paparazzi and stuff there. Like, I stood in an open field and one year I saw Nine Inch Nails and the next year I saw Weezer and I was standing in the middle of the field, you know, like tripping my mind out. – MySpace