andPOP » BSB

Video Interview: Nick Carter loves Black Ops, channels Spider-man

andPOP Staff — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 12:52:31 +0000

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Nick Carter’s a Backstreet Boys vet who’s been hanging on the walls of teenage girls for over a decade. Sure he’s just released his second solo album, but he’s also just completed Call Of Duty: Black Ops for the first time. (That’s got to rank pretty high on his achievements, if you judge by his celebration dance.)

He sat down to talk to us about the new album, what it’s like to be him, and to answer a couple of the questions our Twitter followers, (that’d be you,) demanded he answer. Honestly, we would have asked more, but he’s a very busy man.

Also the interview takes place on Nick Carter’s bed. Is that not enough to get anyone excited?

Interview: Midnight Red Tours With BSB and NKOTB

Elisheva Baer — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 20:11:07 +0000

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You may not know it yet, but just as boy bands like Backstreet Boys and ‘N Sync have, RedOne’s newest project, Midnight Red, is gearing up to take the world by storm – “One Club At A Time.”

The band, made up of members Eric Secharia, 19, Colton Rudloff, 22, Anthony Ladao, 18, Thomas Augusto, 19, and Joey Diggs, 21, just wrapped up their tour with NKOTBSB, and we recently caught up with Midnight Red member Eric during some down time to chat about touring with two of the greatest boy bands of all time, as well as what fans can expect from the band’s debut album.

“If someone would have given me that situation again I couldn’t even recreate it, it was so surreal,” Eric told andPOP of going on stage for the first time in Las Vegas during the NKOTBSB tour. “All my life I’ve known this is what I wanted to do, and it’s like right at that moment, in Las Vegas, all the lights came off…all the fans were just screaming, and I was just standing there on stage and you could just feel their presence. It was so surreal the way that all happened.” And that surreal experience represents perfectly how the band came to be.

Eric, having already known Thomas previously, was in Los Angeles with Anthony when they decided to fly Thomas over to try out for the band, and later met Joey through a former manager. But it’s the story of how Colton came to join the group that proves how down to earth the members of the band truly are. “Colton we found on YouTube,” explains Eric. “We just typed in white boy who can sing, we went through it and he popped up. And that’s how midnight red came to be.”

Despite their age differences and having come from all different parts of the United States, the group had no problem getting along. “Two years ago when we first formed, everyone was really nice to each other, we had each other’s’ backs, literally like brothers from day one, so we never really had trouble getting along together. There’s the different age ranges but it’s as if we don’t even see it,” says Eric.

If Eric had to describe each member in one sentence, he believes Joey would be the ladies’ man, Anthony the “look at me, I’m super cool, Seattle grunge,” one, Colton would be “tater tots and ketchup,” Thomas the theatrical one, and himself the “goofy one that’s always smiling.”

“It’s not the best example,” says Eric, “but it’s the only example out there. We tell ourselves we are the male version of the spice girls. Just like they have each individual mixed, that’s how we are.”

Having just released their first EP on July 12, which includes their single, “One Club At A Time,” and their remix of the’90’s NKOTB hit, “Step By Step,” Eric says the feedback has been far greater than they ever imagined possible. “We just thought it would be our parents and some friends that would buy it,” says Eric, “but it has been getting amazing feedback through all the fans we’ve made from the past three shows and just with everyone who knows who RedOne is.”

“On the day it came out we were already number 41 on the music pop albums chart on iTunes,” says Eric. And the amazing feedback is a great thing since it’s their first single that is to set the tone for the rest of their debut album. “It will be the same kind of sound as our single,” explains Eric. “It might even go a little different route, but it’ll basically be the same thing…If you think of a red one album, that’s going to be our album.”

According to Eric, the best way to describe the band’s music is a Lady Gaga and Black Eyed Peas music love child mixed in with some ‘N Sync and Backstreet Boys, and their debut single embodies just that. “It’s kind of just your basic pop lyrics that we’re taking over the world one club at a time, were winning everyone’s hearts over one club at a time.”

And the band is wasting no time doing just that. They have already built an incredibly strong fan base just from the few shows they have already done, and with almost 4,500 followers on Twitter already, it is promising to grow even more as time goes on. “It’s weird because none of these girls, even before we came out, they’ve never met us and we didn’t have anything out that anyone could see,” says Eric. “And they were like oh my god, we love you guys! And we were like, wait, you haven’t even seen anything yet. They’re like psychics or something.”

Going on tour with NKOTBSB has definitely helped shape Midnight Red as a boy band that is stepping out onto the scene as one to be watched, and has given the group the opportunity to get advice from people who have been there and can understand what they are going through at this time, as a boy band trying to make it big.

“At our first show in Vegas, we were doing our sound check,” says Eric, “and right after our sound check Brian from the Backstreet Boys, he came in and he was like you know what…eighteen years ago we got this advice and now I’m passing it down to you guys, and we were just kind of standing there like alright, Brian from the Backstreet Boys is talking to us, no big deal. But it was amazing advice that he gave us.”

“Really, going on tour with two of the biggest boy bands that there has ever been and us just from nowhere being thrown on to the tour, and just the feedback that we’ve been getting, it’s amazing and it is surreal,” says Eric. “Growing up, Backstreet Boys was my favourite boy band and now I’m on tour with them. It’s amazing.”

Follow Midnight Red on Twitter, check out their website, www.midnightred.com, and find their single, “One Club At A Time,” on iTunes today!

Backstreet Boys Are Back Again

Sara Harowitz — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:25:51 +0000

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Backstreet’s back, alright!

Only this time, critics are not grooving to the music.

The Backstreet Boys have returned with their seventh studio album entitled, This Is Us. But reviews are in, and they are not in favour of the boy (er, man?) band.

The album was released on October 6, and music critics across North America are in agreement: that sure, the Boys deliver a few catchy tunes, but that at the end of the day the album just sounds like a regurgitation of their previous hits.

“Though the Boys were one of the biggest pop acts of the ’90s, they largely hand the reins off to their producers here, who include Lady Gaga’s hit-maker RedOne, Jim Jonsin and OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder,” writes August Brown of the Los Angeles Times. “Cuts like ‘Bye Bye Love’ and ‘Straight Through My Heart’ have au courant hotel-lounge decadence to them, and ‘She’s a Dream’ benefits from the light melodic touch of guest T-Pain. But when the boys extol a lady’s virtues because ‘she don’t even know I’m a celebrity,’ the lyric rings of self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Other critics agree.

Elysa Gardner of USA Today writes that the album’s songs don’t ”provide the Boys — now grown, thirtysomething men — with a distinctive musical persona, outside that of an aging teen act. These frothy, synth-laden love songs — co-written and produced by a predictable posse of studio professionals, from old collaborator Max Martin to the now-ubiquitous Ryan Tedder — are basically ghosts of singles past, updated with some contemporary flourishes.”

The Backstreet Boys hit superstardom in the 1990′s, with hits like “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)”, off of 1997′s Backstreet’s Back, and ”I Want It That Way,” off of 1999′s Millennium. The group took a break after 2000′s hit album Black & Blue, and reunited in 2005 to release Never Gone, which drove BSB fans wild with the hit single, “Incomplete.”

After a successful comeback tour, band member and co-founder Kevin Richardson, decided to leave the group in 2006 to start a family. That left his cousin and co-founder Brian Littrell, as well as AJ McLean, Howie Dorough, and Nick Carter to keep the band going. They did so with 2007′s Unbreakable, which, much like This Is Us, was an attempt to re-ignite a flame that burned in a much-different musical era.

The new album features only the four members.

Still, the Grammy Award nominated band enjoys bringing back that 90′s pop sound, and infusing it with more current approaches.

“We made a conscious effort to go back to being ourselves,” says Littrell on the band’s website. “It’s important for the fans to remember what was, but it’s also important for them to know where we’re headed.”

Nick Carter says, “We always want to top our past albums. That’s always our objective, to create an album where every song could be a single.”

While the chances of This Is Us topping the massive success of the Boys’ early albums is unlikely, perhaps USA Today’s Gardner says it best: “If you’re a band that’s nearly a decade past your commercial heyday, it takes either considerable courage or enormous hubris” to do what they’ve done.