Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez may no longer be together, but the tortured love affair they shared continues to inspire their music.
Bieber admitted to Ryan Seacrest on Thursday that his ex-girlfriend Gomez still influences the music he's currently creating. "A lot of my inspiration comes from [Gomez]," he said.
The young couple started dating in 2010 when Bieber was 16 years old and Gomez was 17. Over the next five years, their on-again-off again relationship made headlines and even became the subject of legal depositions.
"It was a long relationship that created heartbreak and created happiness and a lot of different emotions that I wanted to write about," Bieber said on "On Air with Ryan Seacrest."
Gomez wrote her own song about their doomed relationship in 2014 with her hit "The Heart Wants What It Wants." She's currently been linked to her "I Want You to Know" collaborator DJ Zedd.
The 21-year-old singer is working with Kanye West on his new album, for which he wouldn't reveal a release date. The two last worked together in 2010 on the remix of "Runaway Love."
"I've been in the studio with him for the past month or so," Bieber said. "He just pushes you. He definitely wants it to be my way and my direction and he doesn't want to steal what I want. That's why artists like to go to him, because he pulls something out of you that other people don't."
The majority of the album will focus on being "really musical" with "a lot of real instrumentation." It also may feature some of the EDM elements similar to his collaboration with Skrillex and Diplo on "Where Are U Now."
"I just want to create the best piece of art that I can create, something that's really near and dear to my heart. I know there's a lot of stuff that I've been going through over the past few years. I just really want to bleed it on this record. I just want people to know that I'm not playing around, I'm not doing a record that's cookie-cutter, or doing something that I think people want to hear," Bieber said.
He continued, "I want to do something that I know that I can feel and people are going to feel it through my music. I'm pretty silent about what I've been going through, and just growing up in this life is hard. So I want to translate that."