JoJo Recalls Going to Taylor Swift’s House with Selena Gomez and Thinking Everyone ‘Felt…see more

JoJo Recalls Going to Taylor Swift’s House with Selena Gomez and Thinking Everyone ‘Felt Bad for Me’ (Exclusive)
In an exclusive excerpt from JoJo’s upcoming memoir, ‘Over the Influence,’ she writes about finding support in Gomez during a period of career uncertainty

During a period of career uncertainty, Joanna “JoJo” Levesque found support in a friendship with Selena Gomez.

Two decades after rising to fame as a tween with the hit 2004 song “Leave (Get Out),” Levesque is looking back on her life and career so far in her debut memoir, Over the Influence, out Sept. 17, including a years-long period where she was unable to officially release music.

“My whole twenties were just a s—show of confusion,” the 33-year-old performer tells PEOPLE, reflecting on a time where her former label, Blackground Records, did not have a steady distribution deal in place to properly put out music. The label, however, still had the rights to her recorded voice under a contract signed when she was 12 years old.

Fed up with career setbacks that were out of her control, Levesque released two free mixtapes — 2010’s Can’t Take That Away from Me and 2012’s Agapé — online to satiate fans’ hunger for new music, as well as her own desire to share art with the world.

At the same time, she remained at the mercy of the record label, obliging their requests to mold her into a marketable star in hopes of once again putting out music commercially and returning to the heights of her early fame.

“I was just like, ‘Am I this independent spirit who does what they want? Or am I a pawn of the major label systems who are telling me that I need to fit into this box, literally and figuratively?'” recalls Levesque, who writes about going to a weight loss doctor at the label’s suggestion and taking injections (long before the rise of Ozempic) to curb hunger.