Justin Timberlake Calls Prince "The G.O.A.T. of Musicians"

A few hours after Justin Timberlake took the stage as the performer for the Super Bowl LII halftime show, he appeared on NBC’s The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon. Timberlake and Fallon discussed the Prince tribute, which was certainly a hot topic prior to the performance — his set was previously rumored to have a Prince hologram.

“It’s a moment for me, and if I’m being quite honest, it’s because he’s always been the pinnacle of musicianship,” Billboard quotes Timberlake as saying. “And when we decided that the serendipity and synergy [of being] in Minnesota, he’s such a special thing here aside from what he is all over the world. I just felt like I wanted to do something for this city and something for him that would just be the ultimate homage to what I consider the G.O.A.T. of musicians.”

He added: “We got the actual vocal stems from ‘I Would Die 4 U’ and the actual recording, and then we got uncut footage from his performance of it in Purple Rain and somehow, someway, by the grace of, probably Prince looking down on us, it synced up and it was this crazy, serendipitous moment … and I just wanted to use that opportunity to do something special for this city but most of all my favorite musician of all time.” Questlove, who’s a huge fan of Prince, would say on the show that he thought the tribute was dope.

Later on in the show, JT acted in a sketch called “songversation” and performed his Man of the Woods singles “Supplies” and “Say Something” with Chris Stapleton.