Justin Bieber Rumors

When did you sit down and create what we now know as “Available?” JaVale McGee: I was in the studio with Poo Bear around November of last year. I didn’t know who I was making music for. I was playing some songs and samples and he stopped on this one sample that I had made. He looped it, put it in the computer and we just started writing to it. We ended up writing the whole song, but there were no drums or anything. The original melody, when you hear it in the beginning of a song? That’s what I brought to the table.

If you follow such things, you might have learned that pop star Justin Bieber has a new album, Changes, that is rapidly headed toward No. 1 on the Billboard charts. What you might not know, unless you’re a fan of reading song credits, is that McGee helped produce and write one of the songs on the 25-year-old’s latest effort.

While his priorities are to the Lakers and his NBA career, he’s proud of how he’s grown as an artist. On the court as a center, he’s often dependent on someone else getting him the ball to score. In the studio, he becomes the person who initiates the project. “It’s definitely about placement,” he said. “It’s about getting a body of work. As a producer, the more music you put out there, the more exposure you get, and the more residuals you get — I guess that’s what really matters. … I feel like I’ve developed extremely well, because I’ve figured out how to collaborate and how to move him in the music game.”