Backstreet Boys Reveal How Justin Timberlake Influenced a Track on Their Upcoming Christmas Album
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Rob Kim/Getty; Larry Busacca/Getty Backstreet Boys and Justin Timberlake
Backstreet's back, with Christmas music!
The Backstreet Boys' first holiday album, A Very Backstreet Christmas, will be released on Oct. 14 and will feature a collection of both original songs and covers.
When pulling the album together, band members AJ McLean and Nick Carter told Variety that they found inspiration in a possibly surprising place — another former boyband member.
"Nick would be the first to tell you he really wanted 'Can't Stop the Feeling!' to be the inspiration for one song," McLean, 44, told the outlet of Justin Timberlake's song. "He wanted that really happy, funky vibe."
Carter, 42, added, "It's funny because there's all this stuff about Backstreet versus *NSYNC, but we're all about good songs and good movies and Trolls was a movie we watched a lot with our kids," he said of the 2016 film "Can't Stop the Feeling!" was featured in.
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"Justin wrote a really great song and we wanted to write a happy, uplifting song that had the same feel," Carter continued. "Especially with the way the world is right now. It was like, 'Let's put some positive stuff out there,' so we wrote 'Happy Days.'"
The holiday record will feature classics like "White Christmas and "Winter Wonderland" as well as original music. The first single, a cover of Wham!'s "Last Christmas," was released Sept. 6.
"This is Backstreet in its truest form," McLean said of the upcoming project. "It's very mature and the vocals sound incredible. It's the best we've sounded as a group in years. My wife's like, 'This will be on repeat in our house.' She starts playing Christmas music in July."
Carter echoed the sentiment telling the outlet that some of the music featured on the album is some of the best work they've done in their 29 years as a band.
"The sound is so good that so many songs could be singles," Carter said. "This is probably the best work we've done, which is funny because it's a lot of covers and we've been against covers for so long, but these Christmas songs are so ingrained in our souls. It's been a long time since we've had so much great material [to choose from] for a single. 'Happy Days' could be one, but we'll see."
The band announced the upcoming album on their Instagram back in July telling fans that the project was " nearly 30 years in the making."
Howie Dorough told Entertainment Tonight at the time that it took a while for the band to decide on which tracks to include on A Very Backstreet Christmas, with more than 50 songs in the running at one point.
The band — which is made up of Carter, McLean, Dorough, 49, Brian Littrell and Kevin Richardson — finally found time to make their first Christmas album during the onset of the pandemic when their Backstreet Boys' DNA World Tour, which originally began in 2019, had to stop halfway through.
"Believe it or not COVID gave us the gift of time to work on this record," Dorough said. "We started working on this about two years ago. Normally, during regular times, we're always on tour. So, now that we have the time off we started working on it."
The Backstreet Boys restarted their DNA World Tour in February 2022 with four shows in Las Vegas. The band has been touring around North America ever since with a European leg of the tour kicking off in Portugal on Oct. 3. The tour will conclude next March in New Zealand.
