Bieber is a month away from launching Justice, his sixth studio album (released on March 19) and his second in 13 months; focus on R&B To alter arrived on Valentine’s Day 2020, just when the world was going through some major changes. Bieber’s two most recent albums ended the most tumultuous year in American history in living memory – but for Bieber, whose life in the spotlight has been strange and tumultuous enough, it was a much-needed reboot. “This is the first time that I’ve been so consistent and predictable,” he says on Google Hangouts the day before, “as always, actually.” He pauses. “It is very good.”
Currently, Bieber stops working at 6 pm so he can spend the nights on the couch with his wife. (“Hailey’s love language is hanging around watching a movie,” he says.) He goes to bed at a reasonable time. He goes up by eight and checks with his manager to find out what happened to Justin Bieber, the pop star, while Justin Bieber, the husband, was offline. He uses an iPad for this communication because he doesn’t have a cell phone, which is not so normal, but it gives him the power to limit who can contact him. “I definitely learned how to have limits, and I just don’t feel like I owe anyone anything,” says Bieber. “It helped me to be able to just say no and just be firm about it and know that my heart [wants] to help people, but I can’t do everything. I do sometimes, but it just isn’t sustainable. “
“Limits” is a keyword in the 2021 Bieber lexicon. When he was a teenage phenomenon, releasing four albums in five years – and promoting them with around 450 tour stops between 2010 and 2017 – not doing things he didn’t want was not really an option. Even the most casual music fan has absorbed the outline of his life story through the osmosis of pop culture – the single mother, the difficult childhood, the origin story of YouTube – just as they are undoubtedly familiar with the moments low that almost consumed it. Last fall, he launched New chapter, a 25-minute addendum to your YouTube document series in 2020, Seasons, in which he revealed that there were times when he felt “very, very suicidal”.
Today, Bieber, 27, is able to look back on difficult times with an amazing degree of Zen. “I can talk about this part of my life and not feel like, ‘Oh, man. I was a very bad person, because I am not that person anymore, ”he says. “I also did the job of knowing why I was making these decisions. I know where this pain came from, which made me act the way I was acting. ”(It doesn’t matter that the documentary has reached the verge of a broader assessment of the trauma of child stardom – he didn’t watch it Framing Britney Spears yet, he says, “but I will.”)
The calmness of quarantined life, his stabilizing marriage and a renewed commitment to his faith put him, as each member of his inner circle attests, “in a really good place”. Promoting and touring an album, however, means that it will have to leave the comfort of its 2020 bubble. Justice, he will find out how compatible the building schedules around meeting nights are, getting along with God and getting a good night’s sleep with keeping a perch at the peak of pop – if that’s what he wants. “At this point, I have reached a level of success so many times that I know that success is not the key point of my happiness,” says Bieber.
To date, the Bieber catalog has won a combined total of 22.6 million equivalent album units in the United States, according to MRC Data. If Justice it becomes another success story for Bieber, it will be a huge victory for his longtime record label Def Jam, where Bieber is the reigning pop prince – and, sources say, his biggest money earner by an avalanche. About 70% of his streams and music consumption come from fans outside the United States, and Def Jam’s parent company Universal Music Group has designated him as one of its global priority artists, an international program that in recent years supported powers like Billie Eilish and J Balvin. This means that all of UMG’s resources – “Every dollar, every door,” says a source close to the company – are available to ensure that it remains on top.