Justin Bieber’s 2012 hit single “Boyfriend” was a coming-of-age move for the then 16-year-old artist. Recently, the song’s co-writer Mike Posner revealed that the song was originally never about Bieber being someone’s boyfriend.
In a new web interview with The Tonight Show, he says it all came together “on a dark Los Angeles night” while he was hanging out with his friend, and fellow co-writer, Blackbear. “He was playing guitar, and I started singing this thing over it,” Posner says in the video. “Originally we had these lyrics that went, ‘Inside of your bedroom, no one has to know. Inside of your bedroom, that’s where we should go.’”
But he never really liked those lyrics and after a few hours in the studio came up with the idea to change the chorus to “If I was your boyfriend.”
He elaborated on this in an annotation on Genius:
Originally I wrote much raunchier verse lyrics. It was like, ‘If I was your boyfriend I’d never let you go. Put you on ship that I bet you didn’t know. We could take a trip, babe, all around the globe. Take pics of my … if you keep it on the low. Can you keep a secret, do you want to see it? I thought so…' That was what I wrote originally and then what often happens when you write songs for someone else, they need to make it their own. Justin was 16 at the time. So a lot of those lyrics didn’t really make sense for him.
There you have it: a 16-year-old Bieber was penned a song originally about going up to a girl’s bedroom but eventually it was toned down for his then-PG fans. You can read all the lyrics to “Boyfriend” and Posner’s verified annotations on Genius now.
