Free Justin Bieber by Justin Bieber Page A

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 specializesin 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.

FIGURING IT OUT
    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.”

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    Out of all the things in life that I could fear,
    The only thing that would hurt me is if you weren’t here,
    I don’t want to go back to just being one half of the equation
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    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