Don't Hold The Wall

Album: The 20/20 Experience (2013)
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Songfacts®:

  • This song finds Timberlake setting his sights on a girl and demanding she give in to her physical impulses. It is set over producer Timbaland's primal soundscape, which is full of tribal chants and spacious drums. Timberlake told Rolling Stone that when he and Timbaland get in the studio, they don't even need to speak to get their vibe going. "He'll start tinkering around or I'll start playing some chords and start tinking around with some loop of something and that'll give him an idea and then we'll start looping it and then I'll start humming a melody and then we just ping-pong an idea back and forth," he said. "My relationship with Tim is very unique; we share the same perspective that we always want to make something that reminds us of music that we love, but at the same time is something we've never heard before."
  • Cirque de Soleil filed a lawsuit in March 2016, alleging that Timberlake and Timbaland sampled a portion of their song "Steel Drum" without permission. The track first appeared in the Canadian avant garde circus troupe Quidam's 1990s stage production, and on the 1997 album of the same name.

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