98 Degrees reunited just in time for *NSYNC to team up again.
In an interview with SiriusXM’s Andy Cohen Live, the ’90s boy band — Jeff Timmons, 50, brothers Nick and Drew Lachey and Justin Jeffre — opened up about what it was like announcing their comeback just as *NSYNC came back together for the 2023 MTV VMAs and their first new music in more than 20 years.
When Cohen, 55, asked the foursome “how annoyed” they were knowing *NSYNC were making their return to music, to which the band gave a handful of responses.
“Stole the thunder,” Nick, 49, joked in the interview, before Jeffre, 50, added, “it’s a boy band universe.”
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The band then answered more seriously, reflecting on how thrilled they were at the resurgence of boy band hysteria.
“When one succeeds, we all succeed. Because we’re all kind of like us, *NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, we’re all clumped into the same, into the same kind of pile there. So, if one’s elevated, it elevates everybody,” said Drew, 47.
Nick added, “But I mean, happy for those guys personally too, because we obviously know them well at this point. And excited for the fact that they’re hopefully gonna do this — they’ve held up for a long time, so [have it] be a big moment. Yeah. Fingers crossed.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Nick addressed the production challenges that came with filming the Love Is Blind reunion live.
“It’s funny ’cause I was doing press for that, and I was on the TODAY show and, and Carson [Daly], who’s done obviously a ton of live TV on air, said, ‘Do you think this is a good idea to do this live?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know, I’ll tell you on Monday morning.’ And you know, clearly — I wanna say I appreciate what you said after the fact because very few people I think understand like you do. What all goes into that and what’s involved. But it was definitely not the way it was meant to go down,” he explained.
Nick continued, “The technology failed. I think people were frustrated with that. But to your point, a reunion, there’s so many things you wanna flush out and so many things you wanna get to. And trying to do that in a timetable that’s finite. It’s just not the way to go so….”
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The 98 Degrees bandleader added that because they were filming the reunion for “an hour tight” they were “cutting people off.”
“So you’re trying to let people flush out their stories and get things off their chest and you’re doing it while you’re being rushed,” he says, before Cohen adds, “And then people start blaming production. Which gets cut out.”
“In fact, I didn’t do anything wrong,” Nick said, referring to the filming of the reunion
“Well, that’s a first, that’s a first,” Drew joked.
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