Actually, That Bieber Track

December 2013, and Justin Bieber was midway through his Music Mondays run—a new track every week, most of them R&B-inflected in ways that felt less like label pressure and more like someone actually trying something. The production was cleaner than expected, the vocals less buried under processing than usual, and somewhere in that run there was a moment where I didn’t reach for the skip button. I’m not going to oversell it. But it happened.