From his home studio, Bieber cut the songs he liked and sent them back to this inner circle. When he returned to LA a few months later, his admission was sharpened. With Changes, Bieber was determined to set an R&B record – and went so far as to announce the Grammy Awards because he only nominated him in pop categories last fall, a decision he made on social media “very strange “mentioned. “It can definitely get frustrating,” he says today, before softening: “They are people and they can not do it every time.”
This time, however, there was nothing out of bounds. Justice extends over the beautiful brightness of “Someone” to the No jacket required-era Phil Collins nods from ‘Earn You’, from the R&B-centered pop of ‘Peaches’ to the acoustic ballad of’ Lifetime ‘, which will surely sound like many wedding celebrations in the wedding revival after vaccination of 2021.’ He sings 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 busy Saturday Night Live [last year] and he hit these runs, 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 two months ago. ‘(Kaye, on the other hand, jokes that she had the realization “yesterday, when it was turned on.”)
Changes was by no means a commercial failure: it yielded two top-10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 and earned 1.1 million equivalent album units. But it did not quite live up to expectations. Changes never produced a Hot 100 No 1, even though it looked like Bieber really wanted one when he shared an Instagram post that has since been deleted in which he advised fans to promote the performance of the main song ‘Yummy’ by, among other things, streaming the song while they sleep. (However, he achieved No. 1 last May with the one-off Ariana Grande collaboration ‘Stuck With U’, a charity single that benefited the families of frontline workers.) Then, in March 2020, eight stadium performances on the Changes tour has been downgraded to arenas due to slower-than-expected ticket sales, sources said Billboard at that point. (The tour was later canceled due to the pandemic.)
Changes was hardly unusual in its sound, but members of his team talk about it like a wild stylistic departure facing an uphill battle from the start. There’s Gudwin, who almost describes it as a niche personal project: ‘With Changes, Justin gave what he had to give at the time, and it was an R&B album. [Justice] has a lot more pressure due to the style of music. Or Braun, who describes it as an outlier in his discography that cannot be compared to his other albums: ‘On Changes, he led [creatively] also, but it was R&B – it was a different project. Or Kaye, who says that Def Jam ‘was out of their comfort zone’ when it comes to the release of an R&B album by a pop artist: ‘It was not what they were used to.’
It definitely looked like his team was trying to get a distance from it. Changes last fall, when Bieber started releasing a deluge of singles Justice was even a fully formed album. ‘I can not pretend that there was never a plan for a [deluxe edition of] Changes or any of those things, ‘says Kaye,’ but we’m COVID in and he’s just started cutting all this music. ‘