Forbes staff writer Dorothy Pomerantz recently took a look at the alleged wheeling and dealing behind the new chart-topping Justin Timberlake album, The 20/20 Experience. As Pomerantz wrote The Hollywood Reporter broke down the pop star’s 2009 deal with Live Nation, a touring contract reportedly worth about $20 million. In the well-researched story THR said Live Nation bears a lot of responsibility for the recent release of The 20/20 Experience as the entertainment juggernaut may have feared it could have taken years for him to get interested.

As Pomerantz pointed out it isn’t 100 percent clear that the Live Nation deal is entirely responsible for The 20/20 Experience coming to fruition—Hollywood Reporter music editor Shirley Halperin cites unnamed insiders for the piece, and without any direct quotes provided by named sources from the concert giant or Timberlake’s camp the implication that Live Nation pushed the musician into making the album so he could fulfill a touring contract agreement is slightly weak. But the story does have its merits, and it’s easy to see how Timberlake, a multi-disciplinary artist who has said music wasn’t his focus as recently as 2011, wound up creating and releasing a largely unexpected album in a short amount of time. If Halperin’s story is accurate Live Nation did more than just give Timberlake the $20 million incentive to record and tour again—it gave him a deadline. Without a deadline Timberlake could have pulled a My Blood Valentine and not released The 20/20 Experience for two decades.

Perhaps the one person who can provide the best insight into the process behind The 20/20 Experience other than Timberlake is Buzz Bissinger. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist recently made headlines after GQ published his personal essay detailing his addiction to fashion. Bissinger’s story was re-reported and re-blogged and the most scandalous details—the absurd amount of money he dropped on clothing, his description of his repressive lifestyle and how he decided to revolt against it, “experimenting” with sex—received the most attention. But the one passage that stuck out the most in my mind had little to do with the salacious details of Bissinger’s personal life and everything to do with his work and creativity:

I am also a writer. I crave stimulation. I need it to create, to survive. Without it I feel dead, useless, overcome by the worst anxiety of all, nothingness, dead man walking. There was a time earlier in my life when I loved to write, the same feeling of orgasm that I now get with clothing. But in my mid-fifties the words were harder to find, the excuses to f*** around more pronounced, the anxiety multiplied that whatever I was working on would never reach the dizzying heights of Friday Night Lights. It had been my first book, written nearly twenty years earlier when I was 35—2 million copies sold, a film, a television series.

I began to dread the process, nothing ever good enough, the thoughts in my brain never quite finding the page, the withering negativity that had always been my guidepost in life only more withering. I f***** around more and more—nasty guillotine rants on Twitter going after everything and everyone, Googling my name six or seven times a day, craving crumbs of attention.

Then I started looking at clothing, hot and beautiful and transformative, a new sense of self-expression that I finally had the courage to realize. I hated khaki pants. Clothing became the stimulation and attention I craved.

Although Timberlake isn’t grappling with Bissinger’s addictions, I imagine the pop star can empathize with the journalist’s struggle to do something once beloved and can share in the dread of the creative process. While Bissinger got sucked into the world of fashion Timberlake has got hooked on acting. But both were still responsible for putting out new content in the respective fields of writing and music, and I imagine deadlines became tremendously helpful when the creative sparks weren’t always going off.

Deadlines can be a burden and dreadful thing, but they can also provide the fuel for finishing a task: A deadline can help you find the words for an article that can elude you for hours and days, it can force you to find the melody that felt just out of reach, it can help you get the job done by providing a distinct end point. The end product may not always be perfect—not everyone was won over by The 20/20 Experience, including Forbes contributor Michele Catalano, and THR‘s Halperin suggested that may be because the album was a rush job—but in the end a deadline helps people deliver on delivering something, and in Timberlake’s case releasing a new album was all fans could want. And while The 20/20 Experience is uneven I like to think whatever pushed Timberlake to make and complete it (be it Live Nation strong-arming him or his own self-imposed deadline) helped him create great moments like “Tunnel Vision” that may have otherwise eluded him.