“I was playing some of the stuff for my friends and they would come in and out of the studio and I’d say, ‘What do you think of this?'” he recalled on Ryan Seacrest’s radio show Monday. “And my best friend said, ‘This is music that you can see,’ and for some reason that stuck with me.”
Show host Seacrest had guessed the “20/20” in the album title was a nod to the reports that he and Timbaland had created 20 songs in 20 days, but Timberlake joked that he wasn’t that clever. Although his return to music has been a long time coming, he could definitively say, “No one’s more excited than me, man.”
And it turns out the teasing video announcement he released in January ahead of his new single, “Suit & Tie,” was actually part of a larger project.
“That little piece is from a documentary that we sort of started working on throughout the making of the album, which started last June,” Timberlake revealed.
As a result, some of his work on “The 20/20 Experience,” which will bow March 19, coincided with his plans to marry Jessica Biel. However, it wasn’t too stressful for the singer.
“I don’t know how many of you are married, but … that type of process is saying, ‘Whatever you want honey,'” Timberlake quipped. “Every photo, everything that went into that event, I was riding shotgun.”