Justin Timberlake sits in front of a plain dark backdrop for OWN’s “Oprah’s Master Class” in 2014, and within a minute he’s back on a phone call from the early 2000s. Michael Jackson is on the other end of the line. “I’m on the phone, I’m literally punching myself in the face,” Justin says.
To understand why, you have to start with a song. Justin was the lead voice of NSYNC, the biggest boy band in America at the time, and he’d begun writing his own material. One of those songs was a heartbreak ballad, and he didn’t write it for the band. He wrote it for Michael.
“It was one of those songs where, it felt a little more personal to me, because I had written it for the biggest artist of all time,” Justin told Oprah’s network.
The answer came back no. Billboard reported in 2014 that it was Michael’s team that turned the song down. So Justin brought it to NSYNC instead.
The song was “Gone.” The group put it on their third album, “Celebrity,” and released it as the second single in the summer of 2001. Photographer Herb Ritts shot the video in black and white. “Gone” climbed to No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 and earned NSYNC a Grammy nomination.
Justin tells the whole story on “Oprah’s Master Class”
This is a fan’s upload of the clip from OWN, not an official copy. Justin tells it himself from the very first second, starting with the song he wrote for Michael. Michael’s phone call comes at about 0:48, and the punching line lands at about 1:01.
Then the phone rang. “I guess Michael did hear it, and called me on the phone and said that he wanted to cut the record,” Justin said. Michael Jackson wanted his song after all. But he didn’t want to sing it with NSYNC. He wanted “a duet between himself and I,” Justin said. Just the two of them, with the rest of the group left out.
Justin had to tell Michael Jackson the truth. “Well, it’s already out, we’ve already cut the song as an ‘N Sync record,” he remembers saying. Michael was asking for the song, and it was already playing on the radio with four other voices on it.
He tried to find a way to make it work. “Could we do, like, an ‘N Sync featuring Michael Jackson, or Michael Jackson featuring ‘N Sync?” he asked.
Michael didn’t move an inch. “And he was very absolute about the fact that he wanted it to be a duet between himself and I,” Justin said.
The duet never happened. What stayed with Justin was who Michael had asked for. He hadn’t called for the band. He’d called for Justin alone.
“I think it’s the first idea that I ever got about doing something on my own, because it was the first time I ever really felt the confidence to do it,” Justin said.
In November 2002 he released his first solo album, “Justified.”
NSYNC’s official video for “Gone”
This is the song Justin wrote for Michael, sung by all five members of NSYNC in Herb Ritts’s black and white video from 2001.
Justin did end up on a Michael Jackson record, years after that call. In May 2014, the same month his Oprah interview aired, a version of “Love Never Felt So Good” from Michael’s album “Xscape” came out with Justin singing next to Michael. It wasn’t the song from the phone call, and it wasn’t the duet Michael had asked for. But it put the two of them on one record at last.