Justin Timberlake Talks Super Bowl, ‘Personal’ New LP Inspired by Wife, Son
For Justin Timberlake, his Super Bowl halftime show is a success before it even happens – because he’s already earned the approval of his son.
“I was at rehearsals a couple of days ago,” he told NBC Sports’ Dan Patrick in an interview set to air Sunday. “You start off with these start-stop rehearsals, and my wife [Jessica Biel] brought my son – he’s almost three. And seeing him run all over the field – when certain songs would come on, he’s dancing on the field – I mean, that’s when you feel like this has already been a success.”
At an NFL news conference Thursday, Timberlake noted that his son Silas “will never play football.” (He later clarified that his primary aim right now is that his son becomes “a great person. … right now we’re working on our manners.”)
Timberlake’s latest album, Man of the Woods, dropped Friday, just ahead of his Super Bowl halftime performance. The former boy bander has said that the album is largely inspired by “my son, my wife, my family, but more so than any other album I’ve ever written, where I’m from, and it’s personal.”
On the Today interview, Timberlake added that his main hope in his Super Bowl performance is to take his fans along for a wild ride.
“It’s always been my ethos as a performer [to] want to share the moment with everyone,” he said.
Timberlake last performed on the Super Bowl stage back in 2004, alongside pop superstar Janet Jackson. Their performance was memorable for a number of reasons, not least of which was that Timberlake seemingly exposed Jackson’s breast on national television, leading to the wildly proliferate term “wardrobe malfunction.”
The incident led to a half-million-dollar fine slapped on CBS by the FCC and stricter regulations regarding live events.
“I stumbled through it … to be quite honest, I had my wires crossed,” Timberlake recently told Beats 1 host Zane Lowe of his reaction to the headline-making moment. “It’s just something that you have to look back on and go, ‘OK, you can’t change what’s happened, but you can move forward and learn from it … It’s just one of those things where you go, like, ‘Yeah, what do you want me to say?’ We’re not going to do that again.”