Mama Jan had a showcase for all her acts a couple times a year at Eddie’s Attic, the place where John Mayer was discovered. Mama Jan invited me to sing. So at the end of the program, after all these amazing acts who’d been training with her for years, I got up and sang “Common Denominator.” At the end of it, everyone was on their feet, and I was pretty much in shock. (The video’s on YouTube. Check out that look on my face.)
“I’d never worked so hard in my life – and I’d never had so much fun”
Scooter sent “Common Denominator” up to L.A. Reid, sent it over to Usher, sent it to everybody, saying, “It’s time to record.”
And they were like, “Yeah. It’s time.”
Usually, people record ten songs or so, release them on an album, and follow with another album a year later. Scooter and L.A.’s idea was to do a dozen songs plus bonus tracks and divide them between two albums – My World and My World 2.0 – releasing them only about four months apart. We dove into the studio. I’ve never worked so hard in my life – and I’ve never had so much fun.
One night, Scooter was driving me home, and I was lovin’ on this music he was playing. It was just the skeleton of a song – like a demo the songwriter records just to give you a general idea.
“This is awesome,” I told Scooter. “Who is this guy?”
He said, “It’s Adonis. He’s a writer. An artist too, but he writes for people.”
“Cool, cool. Who’d he write this one for?” I asked.
“You.”
I was totally in shock. Speechless. Because I felt like, if I tried to talk, I was going to start bawling. You have to understand, I was still so new to this and the thought of all these amazing people writing these songs with me in mind was overwhelming. Even now I still feel that way whenever someone I look up to in the music industry wants to work with me. I’m just so grateful. I hope to never lose that feeling. Scooter cranked it up louder, and when we got to my house, he kept on driving so we could keep listening to it again and again.
“Overboard...”
I just couldn’t believe this great song was mine. We laid it down, and I loved it. Later on, we recut it with Jessica Jarrell, and I loved it even more. Finally, we had ten songs recorded. Among them were “One Time,” “Down to Earth” and “One Less Lonely Girl.” I could never tell you which ones were my favorites: I was proud of each and every track.
Now it was time to go back to L.A. Reid and persuade him to get behind us and release My World in a big way.
CHAPTER 6
WELCOME TO MY WORLD
In January 2009, Scooter went to Los Angeles for the Grammys. His first stop was L.A. Reid’s bungalow at the Beverly Hills Wilshire.
“What’s a bungalow?” I had to ask.
“Someday, young Padawan. Someday, you will know the bungalow.”
“Whatever. Tell me what happened.”
“Well, for starters, one of his key people is walking me over to the bungalow – which is like your own little house within this luxury hotel where he always stays – and she says, ‘I just wanted to tell you how proud I am, couldn’t happen to a better group of guys,’ and so on. ‘I’m so happy for you,’ she says. ‘But you have to understand, L.A. is a music guy. He has his own speakers flown out to freakin’ Los Angeles to this bungalow every year. And, if you get to play three records for him, that’s amazing. If he only listens to one, don’t be mad.’ I said okay. She said, ‘How many you gonna play?’ I said ten. She said, ‘You’re not gonna play ten. Pick the best three and play those.’ I said okay.”
“Wait, wait, wait!” I said. Sometimes Scooter gets going on a story and leaves me behind. “Which three did you play?”
“The best three.”
“Yeah, but—”
“No, listen. He goes, ‘This is great stuff. I wasn’t expecting it to be, like, that’s a hit, that’s a hit, that’s a hit.’”
“Which three?”
“It doesn’t matter. Because he listened to all ten. And then he listened to them all again,” he said.
“He listened to ten songs twice?”
“He listened to ten songs... twice.”
“That’s – wow! So what happens now?”
“You get your butt out here and sell this with me tomorrow.”
Shortly after, I was back on the white sofa, listening to my music with L.A. Reid. Crazy. He asked Scooter what we wanted to do, and Scooter asked for a small budget to make a video. Asher Roth had blown up huge on the Internet over the last year with the #1 album on iTunes for ten straight days and #5 album on Billboard Hot 100. Asher was the biggest thing on the Internet. L.A. asked Scooter if he thought I could make it as big as that. Without missing a beat, Scooter said, “He already is bigger, you just don’t know it yet. This kid’s like a sleeping giant.”
We called Usher in to help us out on the video for “One Time.” The storyline is basically me hijacking Usher’s house for a party. We flew my best friend Ryan “Butsy” Butler to Atlanta so he could be in on the shoot. (That’s him playing video games with me at the beginning.) When the rest of the cast showed up the whole party was full of beautiful, nice, fun – did I say gorgeous? – girls our age. Dancing, tossing confetti, swimming in bikinis.
“He already is bigger... this kid’s a sleeping giant”
“Oh... dude...” Ryan seemed to have trouble breathing at times. “This is sick.”
“Just act cool, buddy. It’s going to be a long day.”
The video turned out great, and we had a blast making it. The plan was to put it out there on a Tuesday morning a few weeks after the single was released. There would be promotional banners running for the first few days on iTunes, announcing this awesome new video by a new artist, featuring Usher. Good plan, huh?
But that’s not what happened. Through some kind of mix-up somewhere in the pipeline, “One Time” accidentally went into the iTunes system two weeks early, late on a Friday night, with no banner ads, no promotional page – nada. You literally had to go on your iTunes and type in Justin Bieber to see the icon for the video. If you didn’t search on it specifically, you’d never know it was there. And, since no one knew it was there, no one was going to search on it.
Scooter was so angry it was almost scary. He wrote an irate email to everybody involved in this thing at every level, and they all wrote back saying how sorry they were. He got quiet for a while (which is pretty unusual for Scooter), then he smiled at me and said: “I’m not really angry. We can make this work to our advantage. The kids are going to find it.”
We’d just set up my Facebook page, so we posted a message on that. We’d set up a Twitter account a couple weeks earlier and sent out my very first tweet:
I got on there and started tweeting my brains out. I followed all my followers and friended their friends. I replied and retweeted and commented and tweeted back and forth as the conversation got bigger and bigger.
Monday morning, “One Time” was the #3 video on iTunes, stomping up the list over some of the biggest acts in the world. It was mind-blowing; we’d made it. We’d proved we could do it.
Tuesday morning, it was #2 behind Taylor Swift (and I’d never complain about being a runner-up behind Taylor Swift. She has been supporting me since day one and is still an amazing friend).
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, we hung in there.
“If I can do just one-tenth of the good Michael Jackson did for others, I can really make a difference in this world”
And the following week... the King himself, Michael Jackson, died.
Somebody sent me a text. Feeling like I’d been kicked in the gut, I texted Scooter: “Dude, Michael Jackson died?”
Scooter messaged back that people were always spreading jacked-up rumors about Michael. No way was he really dead. But he was. It was on the news. It was all over the Internet.
I was devastated. One of my greatest idols, and my inspiration, was gone. Of course, everything he ever recorded went straight to the top of the ch
arts on iTunes, because he’s the King, which in turn meant that everyone else was driven off for weeks. “One Time” the single went to #14, hovering in the top 20 with a few big names and all those Michael Jackson songs that had been part of my life’s soundtrack since I was born. It was a weird feeling. “One Time” the video stayed in the top ten with Taylor and all those amazing videos by Michael, one of the great music-video artists of all time.
We have a special moment in the My World 2.0 touring show that works as a celebration of Michael Jackson and a good reminder for me about what matters in this business. To the beat of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” I get to introduce my dance crew and bandmates one by one, so that everybody on the stage gets a good round of applause. My team is my family and they all deserve their time to shine too.
“My team is my family and they all deserve their time to shine too”
We wanted a strong charity component to this tour, and that’s partly a tribute to the example set for us by Michael Jackson. A dollar of every ticket sold goes to Pencils of Promise, an organization that builds desperately needed schools in developing world countries. And it adds up fast. In the second leg of the tour alone, we’re building fifteen schools around the world. Michael Jackson was the most giving artist of all time. If I can do just one-tenth of the good he did for others, I can really make a difference in this world. That’s what this is all about.
MY WOLF PACK
Over the summer of 2009, we released my first four singles, even though it’s kind of unusual to have that many singles before you release an album. We were getting a lot of attention on YouTube and iTunes, but we weren’t getting the radio play necessary for a successful album. So many people were still locked into thinking that someone my age couldn’t get radio play, that you had to be on Nickelodeon or Disney. We had to change that way of thinking. Scooter and two of my champions at Island Def Jam, Steve Bartels and Erik Olesen, decided there was only one way to fight those old ideas: hand-to-hand combat. Basically, we had to go to every radio station on Planet Earth and make them play my records. We were hoping we could do this with our natural charm and charisma, but we were ready to call in CHUCK NORRIS if needed.
This sounded like a great idea to me, but it was hard to leave Atlanta. We’d only just gotten settled. I had a little papillon pup named Sammy, and I was seeing a girl I really liked. I’d also become good friends with Asher Roth and that crew. He was one step ahead of me in the business and had learned a lot of things the hard way. I absorbed a lot of that just hanging out at their house (which was just a block from mine) playing the music video game Rock Band. Asher had blown up pretty big by this time, so he was gone on tour most of the time, too.
“Do what you need to do,” he advised me. “This is the moment.”
What we needed to do, according to Scooter, was go anywhere we were asked to go and do our music for anyone who wanted to hear it. For free. Any time. Any place.
“We were ready to call in CHUCK NORRIS if needed”
Usher felt that I needed another influence to guide me in the industry and develop my look, so we brought Ryan Good on board to be my stylist and temporary road manager. For a while, everyone was calling Ryan Good my “swagger coach” – which he hated almost as much as “stylist,” which isn’t at all what he does for me. Style is such a broad word. Style can be how you carry yourself and how you wear whatever you have on. I like to consider my style as very relatable. Usually I’m in blue jeans and a hoody, and the rest is in my attitude. I don’t know if it’s possible to “style” another person. I mean, a stylist can tell you what clothes to wear, but the attitude is up to you. I don’t know what the word would be, but Ry Good keeps my head on straight so I don’t come off like a douchebag. Mostly he’s a friend who’s honest with me. Everybody should have at least one of those, and I’m fortunate to have several.
It started out with just me and a guitar. Me, Mom and Ryan, traveling all across North America playing for different radio stations. Then we started doing some shopping malls and amusement parks and stuff like that, so Scooter decided we needed dancers. We flew to LA, where a lot of the best dancers reside, and found two great guys, Antonio and Marvin. At first I didn’t know if I wanted them to be part of my wolf pack. But as soon as I got to know them, I definitely wanted them to be part of my wolf pack. We worked up choreography for our first big performance in Kansas City. We were getting more requests to do more shows, so we were able to bring in our DJ, Tay James. He also soon became part of my wolf pack
“Ryan’s a friend who’s honest with me. Everybody should have at least one of those”
We were scheduled to appear at a mall in Toronto, and, when we first got to the store, there were two or three people in there. We sent out a message on Twitter, saying where we were, and ten minutes later about forty people showed up. Mall security kept things in line as long as they could, but pretty soon there were a couple of hundred people lined up to get into the store. They ended up blocking one whole wing of the mall so I could get out.
While we were performing in Canada, we decided to add another guitar player and start doing acoustic performances. That’s how we got Dan Kanter. I was really unsure about hiring somebody else at the time, but Dan is such an amazing musician and a genuinely nice person. Dan and I quickly became best buds, always causing havoc. He is now also a part of my wolf pack.
I depend on my friends like a tour rigger depends on duct tape. You never know exactly when or how it’ll be needed, but you know it’ll never fail you, no matter what the crisis.
“Dan is such an amazing musician”
STRAIGHT TALKING
There’s a huge difference between where I was a year ago and where I am now. We could see where we were and where we needed to be. Ry Good is one of the people who helped draw the line between the two.
That was our little group a year ago, playing for forty people in the rain at the Poughkeepsie Water Park. We got up at three in the morning to be on early radio and TV shows. We sat in airports for hours, jamming and writing songs between flights. We did interviews day after day, hearing the same jokes about my hair and my size and my age.
Just for future reference, here are some of the questions that will get an actual conversation going for me:
I like...
* * *
When people ask about my family and if I have brothers or sisters. (I’m a proud big brother, ready to brag about how great Jaxon and Jazmyn are.)
When people ask what my favorite musical instrument is. (I play trumpet in addition to guitar, piano, and drums, and I’m ready to talk music anytime, anywhere.)
When people ask what’s on my iPod. (I’m always listening to something new and interesting because everyone I meet turns me on to an artist I haven’t heard of. I like everything from Tupac to Canadian bands like Tragically Hip.)
When people ask about where I come from. (O, Canada! I stand on guard for thee!)
When people ask me about my travels. (Nothing cracks your mind wide open like experiencing cultures that differ from your own. I’ve learned to respect cultures that used to seem strange and eat some freaky new foods.)
When people ask me about schooling and how I get it done. (Gives me an opening to tell about the latest prank I’ve pulled on Jenny.)
When people ask me who inspired me. (A long list starting with Usher and Grandpa.)
When people ask me about my religion. (Because I love God, and I don’t want to miss an opportunity to share that.)
* * *
I really like...
* * *
Girls...
...Girls...
...Girls...
...Girls...
...Girls...
...Girls...
...Girls
* * *
Nah, I’m joking. I don’t mean that. There are lots of things I really like besides girls. Like pizza. And pranking. And CHUCK NORRIS. You probably knew I was joking, but not everybody does. Here’s a cl
ue, just for future reference. If you have to ask me if I’m being serious, I’m not. In fact, you seldom get a straight answer from anyone around here. If you ask the tour riggers what they do, TJ will tell you he’s a brain surgeon and Phildeaux will say he’s with the city’s sanitation department. Ask Scooter what his job is, and he’ll say Roadie. If you ask me how tall I am, I’ll say “seven feet.” We kid around. And we love it.
“We kid around. And we love it”
BREAKING GROUND
Last summer, wherever we went, fans followed, and we were always happy to see them. Word would get out on Twitter, and a crowd would gather on the street outside the radio station or the parking lot outside a bowling alley, fairground, mall, you name it.
It was crazy, but by this time Kenny joined the crew as my bodyguard. He was an Atlanta DJ who’d become a good friend. When Scooter was out of town with Asher, I’d get a little bit crazy cooped up in the house with my mom all the time, so Kenny would take me wherever I needed to go or just pick me up to go bowling or to play laser tag. Gearing up for the radio tour, Scooter decided there was no one on this earth we could trust and depend on as we could trust and depend on Kenny, so he sent Kenny off to get trained and certified in personal security.
By the time we’d finished the radio tour it was clear that Scooter’s strategy about how to launch me had worked – we had four consecutive hit singles even before My World came out as an album. First time for any artist – ever.
Justin Bieber Page 7
