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From his home studio, Bieber cut the pieces he liked and sent them back to this inner circle. When he returned to Los Angeles a few months later, his recording intensified. With Changes, Bieber was determined to make an R&B record – and went so far as to call the Grammy Awards for nominating it only in the pop categories last fall, a move he called “very strange” on the networks. social. “It can certainly get frustrating,” he says today, before softening, “They’re humans, and they can’t do everything right every time.”
This time, however, nothing was off limits. Justice covers the beatific luminosity of “Someone” until No jacket required-era Phil Collins nods to “Deserve You,” from the R&B-centric pop of “Peaches” to the acoustic balladerie of “Lifetime,” which is sure to be sure to resonate many nuptials in the post-vaccination marriage boom from 2021. “He’s singing the best I’ve ever heard,” says writer-producer Benny Blanco, who has worked with Bieber since his debut in 2010, My world 2.0. “When we were doing Saturday Night Live [last year] and he was hitting these tracks, I was like a little kid sitting there like, “Wow”. “
The team did not plan to follow up Changes so soon, says Gudwin, “but once you see a list of songs in front of you, it’s like, ‘Oh, shit. We have a fucking album. I think Justin realized we had an album maybe two months ago. (Kaye, on the other hand, jokes that she realized “yesterday, when it was delivered.”)
Changes was by no means a commercial failure: it spawned two Top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 and earned 1.1 million equivalent album units. But it didn’t quite live up to expectations. Changes never produced a Hot 100 # 1, even though it looked like Bieber really wanted one when he shared a since-deleted Instagram post advising fans to boost the performance of the first single “Yummy”, among other things, playing the song while they slept. (It did, however, secure the # 1 spot last May with Ariana Grande’s unique collaboration “Stuck With U,” a charity single that benefited families of frontline workers.) Then, in March 2020, eight stadium shows on the Changes Tour has been downgraded to arenas due to slower-than-expected ticket sales, sources say Billboard at the time. (The tour was later canceled due to the pandemic.)
Changes was hardly unusual in its sound, but his team members refer to it as a wild stylistic departure that faced an uphill battle from the start. There’s Gudwin, who describes it almost as a personal niche project: “With Changes, Justin gave what he needed to give back then, and it was an R&B album. [Justice] has a lot more pressure because of the style of music. Or Braun, who describes it as if it were an outlier in his discography that really can’t compare to his other albums: “We Changes, he led [creatively] too, but it was R&B – it was a different project. Or Kaye, who says Def Jam was’ out of his comfort zone ‘when it came to releasing an R&B album by a pop artist:’ It wasn’t what they used to. to do.”
It certainly looked like his team was trying to get away from Changes last fall, when Bieber started releasing an avalanche of singles, long before Justice was even a fully formed album. “I can’t claim that there was never a plan to release a [deluxe edition of] Changes or any of those things, “Kaye says,” but we headed for COVID and he just started cutting all that music. “
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