Justin Timberlake says friend inspired 'What Goes Around'

Justin Timberlake said in a YouTube ranking episode released Thursday that his 2006 hit “What Goes Around… Comes Around” was inspired by a friend’s breakup rather than Timberlake’s own split with Britney Spears.

Many listeners had understood the song as a follow-up to “Cry Me a River,” his 2002 track associated with the Spears breakup. On Complex’s “Re-Rank,” Timberlake ranked songs from his catalog and put “What Goes Around… Comes Around” at “one or two.”

“Maybe I should dispel a rumor at this point, which has gone around forever, which is like, it’s not a personal story from mine,” Timberlake, 45, told Complex.

“It’s actually a personal story from a friend’s. I asked permission,” he said.

A friend’s breakup

Timberlake said a male friend had confided in him while going through a breakup. “He was just going through it and he was telling me what had happened and I said, ‘Do you mind if I write about this?’” he said.

“And I quote, my friend said, ‘Yeah, torch that bitch. What goes around comes around.’ And I was like, ‘I have to go. Thank you,’” Timberlake said, recalling the response that supplied the song’s central line.

Timberlake did not name his friend.

Timberlake said the writing followed quickly. “This song was written in, I mean, damn near 20 minutes. Like, it was just flowing,” he said. The track, the interlude and the 10-minute video all “hit on all cylinders for me,” he said.

Scarlett Johansson starred in the video. Timberlake said he wrote the track first for FutureSex/LoveSounds, his second solo album; it later came out as that album’s third single.

His other top-five choices included “Mirrors,” “My Love,” “SexyBack” and “Cry Me a River,” Fashion Times UK reported. The single topped Billboard’s Hot 100 in March 2007.

Timberlake had earlier described the track as being about betrayal and forgiveness. He sings, “It’s breaking my heart to watch you run around.”

Timberlake and Spears dated from 1999 until 2002. “Cry Me a River” appeared on Justified, Timberlake’s first solo album; its video featured a Spears lookalike wearing a newsboy cap and portrayed as being caught cheating.

In “The Woman in Me,” her memoir published in 2023, Spears addressed that period, writing: “In the news media, I was described as a harlot who’d broken the heart of America’s golden boy.”

Earlier in the memoir, Spears wrote that after the breakup, “I was comatose in Louisiana, and he was happily running around Hollywood.” She also alleged that Timberlake had been unfaithful several times, writing that “Justin neglected to mention the several times he’d cheated on me.”

Whether Spears has responded to Timberlake’s comments was not immediately clear.

Timberlake publicly supported Spears during her conservatorship in June 2021. “Regardless of our past, good and bad, and no matter how long ago it was… what’s happening to her is just not right,” he wrote on X on June 24 of that year.

An announced docuseries will examine Timberlake’s career, with him and Janet Jackson revisiting their 2004 Super Bowl performance and its “wardrobe malfunction,” Rolling Stone reported. Us Weekly reported that documentary filmmaker Fisher Stevens directed the four-part Apple TV+ series, which is scheduled to debut in December.