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Justin Bieber Plays Random Acoustic Set In MacArthur Park

12:44 PM EDT on September 23, 2026

Global superstar Justin Bieber hasn't toured in many years, but he has given some awfully high-profile live performances in 2026: Coachella, the Grammy Awards, the World Cup Final halftime show. On Tuesday afternoon, Bieber unexpectedly added another gig to that list when he got some friends together and played a quick impromptu acoustic set in LA's MacArthur Park.

MacArthur Park, a location famously immortalized in song form, has apparently been the site of a famous open-air drug market and a lot of recent police activity, per KTLA. But in the videos from Bieber's random little busking session, it looks really nice. As Billboard reports, Bieber and friends used microphones and acoustic instruments to perform four songs from the 2025 album Swag — enough to get a Setlist.fm entry.

It wasn't just those four songs. Bieber also picked up a percussion instrument, and he and his friends did some drum-circle playalongs to his 2016 DJ Snake collab "Let Me Love You." In other videos from yesterday, Bieber hands a tambourine to a little kid and wishes someone happy birthday. He appears to be in a great mood, and the people there seem happy to see him without freaking out about it, though all of them appear to film the entire thing on their phones. If Bieber ever returns to that spot, he'll get mobbed, which means we'll never have this recipe again. Check out some videos below.

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