Justin Timberlake

Justin Timberlake, born in Memphis in 1981, did his growing up under the studio lights: a spot on Star Search, a place in the cast of Disney Channel's The All New Mickey Mouse Club, and then the screaming late-'90s mania of NSYNC, a boy band that sold records by the truckload. Boy-band alumni tend to go soft when they go solo. Timberlake threw in his lot with hip-hop producers, The Neptunes and Timbaland chief among his collaborators, and Justified in 2002 came out sleek, skittering pop and R&B, sung in a tenor that knew exactly when to float up into the rafters.

FutureSex/LoveSounds in 2006 went bigger and stranger. "SexyBack" strutted in on a stripped, buzzing beat, and it, "My Love" and "What Goes Around... Comes Around" all went to number one, with the album itself debuting on top of the Billboard 200. Both records sold more than 10 million copies. Then he got busy on screen too, in Shrek the Third and The Social Network, and picked up Primetime Emmys for guest turns in a comedy series in 2009 and 2011.

He came back in 2013 with The 20/20 Experience, the year's best-selling album in America, led by the sharp-suited strut of "Suit & Tie". Voicing Branch in Trolls brought "Can't Stop the Feeling!", another number one and an Academy Award nomination. Along the way he has collected ten Grammys, and Berklee handed him an honorary doctorate in 2019.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.