Justin Bieber (14 page)

Now it was time to get down to business.

Usher set me up with Jan Smith – Mama Jan – who also happens to be his vocal coach. She only takes on big acts, but she took me on because Usher pleaded my case. She’s one of the greatest people in the whole world, like a second mom to all of us, and she’s become one of the most important people in my life. She doesn’t mess around, and I don’t even think about pranking her or pulling any kind of crap.

Another question people ask me all the time is if my career will fall apart if my voice changes.

“There’s no if about it,” Jan said right from the start. “Puberty happens. We’ll work through it.”

I’m not worried. She got Usher through it, too. And she brought him back after he’d completely lost his voice.

Scooter says she’s our secret sauce.

The next important member to join the family was Jenny, my tutor. Because I was only fourteen, there were strict child-labor laws that governed the hours I was allowed to work and educational requirements that had to be followed to the letter.

Jenny works for the School of Young Performers, which specializes
in homeschooling kids and teenagers who work in the entertainment industry. This was the school that Chris Brown and Rihanna and lots of kids in Broadway theater and television used.

Jenny and I do pretty good together. (Pretty well, that is. Holla, Jenny!) She makes sure I’m on top of the homework and stuff, and I don’t prank her more than once a month. It’s hard to resist, because she’s so sweet and believes everything I say, which makes her very prankable.

On April Fools’ Day, I said to her, “Hey, Jenny, let’s do a science experiment.”

“Great idea,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

“I read that if you put salt on top of butter, it heats it up. You can actually feel it.”

“Really? I’ve never heard that.”

I carefully put a stick of butter on a plate and measured a tablespoon of salt over it.

“Okay, now we have to wait sixty seconds.” I meticulously timed the sixty seconds, then held my hand over the butter. “Oh, that’s wild. You really can feel it. That’s amazing. Check it out.”

Jenny held her palm over the plate of butter, and faster than she could react, I pushed her hand down and squished the butter all over.

It was hysterical.

Pranks vs school = pranks win all day. Can you blame me? I’m just a kid.

There was a lot of back-and-forth over whether or not I was ready to go into the studio and record my first single. Usher felt my voice was raw and needed more Mama Jan, but Scooter and I were impatient. We were beginning to think I’d go through puberty and grow a beard before I ever got anything on tape.

Scooter had a woman named Tashia working with him as an A&R administrator on certain projects, helping him organize producers and cutting the payments and everything, but Tashia also has her own studio with Lashaunda “Babygirl” Carr. Asher Roth had worked there a few times and liked it a lot.

Scooter told me and Mom, “I think this would be a great place for Justin creatively. It’s not scary. There are no bad influences.”

Mom liked the sound of all that, and I liked the sound of their music. One song in particular seemed perfect for me. They played “Common Denominator” for us, and Scooter said, “This is the song.”

It had all the heart and soul we were looking for, plus the math images that make you think of a guy and a girl sitting close together helping each other with homework.

So before we had any real budget or plan or album in the works, I got in there and recorded it, and I found out I loved being in the studio. Not as much as performing live, but a lot. The night we finished it, Carin was going to drive me home, but we ended up driving around and around Atlanta, listening to my song over and over. We stopped for ice cream at some point, but I think we drove around until about three in the morning. To this day it’s still Carin’s favorite song, and she constantly tells me I have to sing it someday at her wedding. It was a great song. What killed me was not being able to put it out into the world. We had to be very strategic about the first single to be released.

Mama Jan had a showcase for all her acts a couple times a year at Eddie’s Attic, the place where John Mayer was discovered. Mama Jan invited me to sing. So at the end of the program, after all these amazing acts who’d been training with her for years, I got
up and sang “Common Denominator.” At the end of it, everyone was on their feet, and I was pretty much in shock. (The video’s on YouTube. Check out that look on my face.)

Scooter sent “Common Denominator” up to L.A. Reid, sent it over to Usher, sent it to everybody, saying, “It’s time to record.”

And they were like, “Yeah. It’s time.”

Usually, people record ten songs or so, release them on an album, and follow with another album a year later. Scooter and L.A.’s idea was to do a dozen songs plus bonus tracks and divide them between two albums –
My World
and
My World 2.0 –
releasing them only about four months apart. We dove into the studio. I’ve never worked so hard in my life – and I’ve never had so much fun.

One night, Scooter was driving me home, and I was lovin’ on this music he was playing. It was just the skeleton of a song – like a demo the songwriter records just to give you a general idea.

“This is awesome,” I told Scooter. “Who is this guy?”

He said, “It’s Adonis. He’s a writer. An artist too, but he writes for people.”

“Cool, cool. Who’d he write this one for?” I asked.

“You.”

I was totally in shock. Speechless. Because I felt like, if I tried to talk, I was going to start bawling. You have to understand, I was still so new to this and the thought of all these amazing people writing these songs with me in mind was overwhelming. Even now I still feel that way whenever someone I look up to in the music industry wants to work with me. I’m just so grateful. I hope to never lose that feeling. Scooter cranked it up louder, and when we got to my house, he kept on driving so we could keep listening to it again and again.