Justin Timberlake’s Instagram account has been wiped clean, a trend among musicians to suggest a new beginning. The 42-year-old singer has been keeping a low profile for the past few years and new solo music has been missing, until now. He has released Selfish, a song through which he wants to say that he is a bit self-centred when it comes to love. The single will feature on his upcoming album, Everything I Thought It Was.

Timberlake wants us to believe that are many “incredibly honest” moments on his next album for which he recorded 100 songs and eventually curated down to 18.

Speaking to Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1, the singer said: “I think that's where I came up with the album title, with everything I thought it was. I was playing it for people around me. They're like, ‘Oh, this sounds like everything we know you for.' And then another friend of mine was like, ‘Oh, this sounds like everything I thought I wanted from you.’ It was like that sort of phrase, in one way or another, was in the air. And I thought to myself about how some of the songs are more introspective and some of them are more what I think people know me for.”

Tinge of melancholy

Selfish is co-written by Timberlake, Louis Bell, Cirkut, Theron Thomas, and Amy Allen. The music video to Selfish, directed by Bradley Calder, begins with Timberlake finishing a performance in front of a crowd before he starts to sing the melancholy-tinged tune by himself in an empty studio lot.

Melancholy, of course, is nothing new to the man as his past few years have been embroiled in controversy. This, in fact, is his first solo single in six years.

Britney Spears and Timberlake dated for several years, starting in 1999 and their relationship went through public highs and lows. Spears’s 2023 memoir, The Woman on Me, offered a brutal look at their time together. She wrote she had an abortion because Timberlake didn’t want to be a father and that he dumped her through a text message. She also wrote that Timberlake cheated on her during their relationship. It’s something Timberlake had previously accused Spears of.

In 2021, Timberlake apologised to Britney Spears (and Janet Jackson) in an Instagram post. It had much to do with the way he treated the pop star after their breakup. The apology to Jackson had to do about the infamous live Super Bowl halftime performance in 2004. A closing duet between Timberlake and Jackson ended with Timberlake singing “Bet I’ll have you naked by the end of this song” as he tore away more of her costume than had been planned, uncovering her breast.

But the new song seems to put all these thoughts in the past. At the moment Timberlake is simply happy to be back with new music. “It just really feels good, the thoughts, and emotions, and feelings that came to me in writing these songs and the people I collaborated with and got to share these moments with. And so how I feel like I was able, on some of the songs, to look back at the past and have a real, not a refracted perspective of what it was because they always say... you always hear that thing about, well, there's never any truth, there's just everybody's perspective of what happened, but to really look at it and be able to metabolise and verbalise my perspective on it, I don't think I've ever really done that before,” Timberlake told Lowe on Apple Music 1.

The beauty of music

As a solo artiste, Timberlake has five number-one hits on the Billboard Hot 100, as well as 19 songs in the chart’s top 10. To his name, there are 10 Grammy Awards on 39 nominations, including best pop vocal album for 2002’s Justified and best music video for the 2013 single Suit & Tie. Plus, he has been featured in several feature films, including the Oscar-winning film about Facebook’s early days, The Social Network.
His 2018 album, Man of the Woods, didn’t hit the right notes with listeners, so plenty depends on his latest effort.

“That's the beauty about music... It's such a vessel within itself to help us, as humans, express ourselves. Even if you didn't write it, you find that relation to that emotion, which led me to the first single. And in writing that song, the moment that it happened was two in the morning…. It just felt like a really honest song. The lyrics just started to come out honestly. And when I listened to the whole album, I felt like it's probably, of all the songs on the album, production-wise, probably the most straightforward, and I don't want to say simple because it's complex within its simplicity to me,” the singer told Apple Music 1.