Backstreet Boys 'embrace the challenge'

Backstreet Boys 'embrace the challenge'
By Graham Rockingham
November 06, 2008
The Spec

According to Backstreet Boy Nick Carter, the proof is in the pudding. Or lack thereof.

Carter told The Spectator that he's shed 45 pounds in the past three years, and the loss of the fat has put new energy into his performance.

"I'm at 170 pounds now," Carter said. "On the Never Gone tour (2005) I was 215 pounds, so physically, onstage, the energy is beyond belief. It's from staying on top.

"When you look good, you're going to feel good; and if you feel good you're going to perform better. You sing better, your diaphragm is going to be stronger. You're going to have more wind. I just feel great, and that's kind of like how all of us feel in this group now. And it shows. Because people can feel that energy, and the energy that we give to them is what it's all about."

Carter had just finished a weightlifting workout with his personal trainer when The Spec caught up to him by phone in Los Angeles. "I work out five days a week," he says. "I box, I do plyometrics. I play basketball and I lift."

Carter is talking about his conditioning in response to a question about whether the Backstreet Boys still had the same onstage energy they exhibited back in the '90s when they were one of the most popular acts in the world, selling more than 100 million records.

Back then, they truly were a boy band. Carter and three of his bandmates were in their teens. He's still only 28, but it's tougher staying on top of the game.

In the record industry, the Backstreet "Men" don't seem to have the same money-making prowess the Backstreet Boys did.

The group's latest CD, Unbreakable, hit the charts at No. 7 when it was released 13 months ago, selling 81,000 copies. After another week, however, it had dropped completely out of the Billboard top 100. Unbreakable had the buoyancy of one of those weights Carter was lifting.

They are not the same group of guys they were when they were discovered in Orlando, Fla., by Lou Pearlman, the convicted fraud artist and embezzler who also put together 'N Sync.

The most noticeable difference is that the Boys are no longer a quintet. Kevin Richardson departed in June 2006, to pursue an acting career and start a family.

"I don't think he was happy," Carter says about Richardson. "He wasn't enjoying the business side of the music ... the stuff that goes on around us, and the sort of give and take that you have to deal with the record label."

The problem for Carter and his band has been bridging the gap musically between boys and men, and, fanwise, teenage girls and hockey moms. It's the struggle between pop-dance beats and adult-contemporary harmonies.

"It's definitely a growing process and a learning process," Carter says. "I know that we are in that stage at the moment where we are kind of experimenting and finding ourselves again. Coming from the success we've had in the past, it's more difficult to stick around and reinvent yourself. But that challenge is something that we're embracing."
Posted on 06 Nov 2008