They've Come A Long Way, Baby

06/29/2001 2:00 PM, LAUNCH
Gary Graff

With all of the elevating, flying around, and pyrotechnics-dodging the members of *NSYNC do at any given moment of their 2001 Popodyssey tour shows--touted as the largest stage production ever to hit the road--you wonder if they don't have one of those contract riders requiring promoters to provide clean underwear in the dressing rooms.

"Nah," says the group's Lance Bass. "We're huge daredevils, and we like all that dangerous stuff."

That's a good thing, because Bass and his bandmates have embarked on one of the most dangerous and difficult missions imaginable: maintaining their stature as a scream-inducing, multiplatinum pop music phenomenon. Since forming during 1995 in Orlando, Florida, the quintet has been one of the brightest stars in the so-called boy-band and teen-pop galaxies, selling more than 25 million copies of its three albums and setting TRL meters haywire with hits such as "I Want U Back," "God Must Have Spent A Little More Time On You," "Bye Bye Bye," and "Tearin' Up My Heart." And its 2000 effort, No Strings Attached, still holds the record for the most first-week sales ever, with 2.4 million copies.

Pop music is a notoriously fickle and volatile realm, however: One day you're the Backstreet Boys, kings of the world, and the next you're the Backstreet Boys, one of the faces of "The Teen Bust!" according to Entertainment Weekly magazine. And with a new album, Celebrity, the members of *NSYNC--Bass, Justin Timberlake, Chris Kirkpatrick, Joey Fatone, and J.C. Chasez--are all too aware that nothing is guaranteed.

"Pop is definitely not going to be as big in the next few years as it has been," Bass, 22, concedes. "I mean, it's been enormous. And all the new pop artists are kinda getting lost in the dust right now. I think we're very lucky to be one of the ones that kinda stand out. We always focus on what we have to do; we're constantly thinking, 'How can we progress?' And I think all the rest of the groups and people out there are looking at everybody else going, 'Ooh, they're doing this. We have to do this.' And by the time they do it, it's already old news, and we're already two steps ahead."

Bass says *NSYNC is confident that Celebrity is the right next step for the group, which has taken an even greater role than ever before in writing and producing the album's 13 tracks. Things are already off to a good start with "Pop," the first single and, Bass says, a sonic harbinger of what *NSYNC set out to do for the entire album.

"'Pop' is definitely everything radio is not," he says of the song, which was co-written and co-produced by Timberlake (who, despite rumors to the contrary, is very much alive). "It's not radio-friendly. There's no songs like it out there. It doesn't have a formula. We don't want to do 10 'Bye Bye Bye's or three 'God Must Have Spent's.

"It was scary to release it, actually," he continues. "We just wanted to see how it would do, and everyone says the first time you hear it, you're like, 'Whoa, this is different,' and then the more you hear it, you're like 'OK, that's cool.' Then it just, like, blew up."

The rest of Celebrity moves even further afield from the slick pop/R&B mix of *NSYNC's other albums, according to Bass. "Every album, we try to create and evolve into whatever we're trying to go to in the next level," he explains. "This is like our baby. We wrote about 90 percent of this one, and it's way more energetic--I think. It's way more dance-oriented. We combined a lot of sounds from like, electronica to hip-hop. Every genre of music is in our album. I think you're gonna hear a lot of sounds that you've never heard before."

Still, he acknowledges, "Of course, we have the big, epic ballads we always have, the huge movie soundtrack songs and 'wedding' songs. Then most of the songs on the album are the big, fun, dance..."

Among them are a couple of tracks that embrace the new two-step style from Britain that blends R&B and techno conventions, "that whole Craig David-type sound coming into America now," Bass says. "We're trying to introduce that to America because we love that. Craig David is one of our favorite artists and we're like, 'God, that sound has to come over here.' So we wrote three or four songs like that on the album. Right now, one of them is called 'The Two Of Us'--it's a two-step and that's the fans' favorite on the tour. I mean, everyone's like, 'Oh my God, that's great!'"

Celebrity also features more collaborations with producer Rodney Jerkins and longtime *NSYNC friends Max Martin and Kristian Lunden. R&B stalwart Brian McKnight produced one of the tracks, while Stevie Wonder showed up to play harmonica another of Timberlake's songs.

"That was, um, unreal, very unreal," recalls Bass, who also spent time earlier this year co-producing and acting (with bandmate Fatone) in the forthcoming film On The Line. "Just to be in the presence of him...It's an honor to stand in the same room and also to produce him. Justin was the main producer on that; he was standing at the board and he was scared to tell [Wonder] anything, 'cause, well, he's Stevie. He's perfect. He didn't want to tell him, 'There's, like, one note flat,' or anything. But it was great, and [Wonder] was very cool about it."

Celebrity wasn't fully wrapped until June, but that hasn't kept the group from performing an audience-testing eight or nine songs from the album in each show. "It's cool," Bass says, "because during the new songs, they're more attentive, like really being quiet. They really want to hear the [new] songs. But they're totally loving it."

Now he and the rest of *NSYNC just have to hope for the same reaction when Celebrity is finally unleashed on the world--although Bass contends that the group's past success, along with gigs this year at the Super Bowl halftime show (with Aerosmith) and inducting Michael Jackson into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, has made for a "more relaxing" situation now than before.

"We worked our butts off to get here, and now it's comforting to know that you can do whatever you want to and be very creative, and you know you're in total control," he says. "You have your fanbase that are gonna get that album and enjoy it and respect it. We definitely have a long way to go, but...we feel like we've done a lot to put ourselves in a position to get there."