Justin Timberlake received the ire of the Internet when it was announced he’d be performing at the Super Bowl Halftime show. Many, still upset about Janet Jackson’s 2014 Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction, thought it wasn’t fair Timberlake received a second chance to return to the stage and not Ms. Jackson.
Taking sometime out before Sunday’s match up between the New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles, Timberlake sat with Beats 1 host Zane Lowe to discuss his upcoming album Man of The Woods. When Lowe asked the 37-year-old about the title track, Timberlake said a lot of the album came from two years of conversation with album producer, collaborator and friend Pharrell Williams. It was during those conversations that Williams asked Timberlake a question that would spawn the album’s title.
“We were talking about where do we start, and we were talking about parenthood and he said ‘What’s your son’s name?’ and I said Silas. I named him after my grandfather and my great-grandfather. My parents divorced when I was young, [and] my grandfather was very much a father figure to me,” Timberlake explained. “But obviously from two generations removed, just tough as nails and he said to me, ‘So what does your son’s name mean?’ I was like you know, I’ve never, I don’t know. I literally just went on Google like, the meaning of the name Silas. It sent me to this site and it said of Latin origin meaning man of the woods. ”
As Lowe and Timberlake discuss how the record came together and the album’s different collaborators including Alicia Keys, and Raphael Saadiq, Lowe asked Timberlake about his song “Say Something” co-written by Chris Stapleton in which he addresses the backlash that came from his tweets after Jesse Williams’ BET Humanitarian Award speech.
“You feel terrible, like oh man that is not what I meant. Why did I do that?” Timberlake said. “Well you realize too that patience really is a virtue. You have to learn that. Chris and I were having this whole conversation about like people don’t really care what we think, they just want to hear our music. It’s like well we care what we think. You really have this internal struggle with it. People can just say a bunch of sh** and then people go, well I believe that.”
Watch Zane Lowe and JT chop it up below.