Joe Riccitelli Upped To EVP/Pop Promotion At Zomba Label Group

Source: FMQB
Credit: Emilia at IB Forums

BACKSTREET BOY, OH BOY! Popular Boy — and breakout solo performer — blondie Nick Carter has been spotted in Edwardsville the past couple of weeks. The singer is reportedly dating a local girl with the first name of Julie who went to college in California. He’s been seen at Shenanigan’s, a local pub, and at the Bread Co. Young ladies around E- and B-ville are all atwitter with reports of the 411 on Carter. Carter, who was included in People magazine’s list of the 50 Most Beautiful People in 2000, will be 27 on Jan. 28. His list of former gal pals includes Paris Hilton.

Source: STL Today
Credit: Emilia at IB Forums

Thanks to KBNHAROX at LD:

HOC is showing 2 all new episodes next week. On it’s regular day and time and on Wednesday at 10/9 pm central.

The Backstreet Boys are currently in the middle of a sold out UK tour, playing to packed audiences in some of the country’s biggest venues.

To mark this, we’re giving you the chance to order a very exclusive download of a live version of the band’s new single Just Want You to Know which is released on Monday 24th October. To order your copy, just go here…

Source: Backstreet Team UK

Thanks to TampaBayBucsFan at LD:

•Cable newbies. Showtime’s dark Dexter (603,000 viewers) and E!’s House of Carters (811,000) premiered modestly Sunday but improved on recent series averages.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/televis…analysis_x.htm

CMT.com have uploaded 4 new video’s from Brian’s Electronic Press Kit (EPK). These go into much more detail than the one video we had earlier this year. Their titles are; Getting Here, Husband & Father, Grace Of My Life and Gone Without Goodbye.

Here’s the link: http://www.cmt.com/artists/az/littre…n/videos.jhtml
They can be found at the bottom of the page under ‘Publicity.’

Source: One-Voice.NET

STEPHEN M. SILVERMAN

ANNOUNCED: Backstreet Boy Brian Littrell, 27, is about to become the first Backstreet Dad, reports the new issue of PEOPLE. His wife, Leighanne, 33, is due by the end of the year. “It’s a boy,” Littrell tells the magazine’s “Insider” column. “We were a little surprised, but it’s a good time because our schedules are lightening up a little bit.” No name has been decided yet.

Source: People.com / Backstreet.net

By Pocholo Concepcion • Inquirer

Editor’s Note: Published on Page A2-6 of the January 18, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

IT’S been 14 years since an aviation entrepreneur named Lou Pearlman, inspired by the success of the New Kids on the Block, masterminded the creation of another clean-cut “boy band” called the Backstreet Boys (BSB).

BSB is said to be the biggest-selling boy band in history, having broken album and concert sales worldwide. The boy band craze may be over, but what’s confounding is that BSB’s latest CD, “Never Gone,” is still selling by the millions (though not as hot as the previous ones).

The group was not yet famous when it came to Manila on a promo tour in the ’90s, so this will be the first time that Pinoy fans will see the boys (now in their late 20s and early 30s) as superstars perform on Friday, Jan. 20 at the Araneta Coliseum. One of BSB’s original members, Alexander James “AJ” McLean, had a phone chat with Inquirer Entertainment and recalled the early days:

What was your life like before BSB?
I was in Southern Florida doing a lot of musical theater, acting in plays, modeling in runway shows, joining talent shows, doing stuff for Nickelodeon and Universal as well as Disney. The next thing I knew, I was in a singing group called the Backstreet Boys.

How did you get together?
Nick (Carter), Howie (Dorough) and I met through the Orlando entertainment circuit-whenever Disney and Universal held auditions, we’d see each other. So we got together and soon we met Kevin (Richardson) who was working in Disney at the time. He kept talking about his cousin Brian (“B-Rok” Littrell) who was in the church choir and was also a good dancer and a nice guy. So we got him, too.

How difficult was it before BSB hit pay dirt?
We definitely paid our dues doing small club shows, the grand opening of a pet store and of a car dealership; we sang in airplanes, we did whatever we could to be heard and be seen. We went through a lot until finally in 1995 we got signed to our record label (Jive). We’ve been with them for the past 13 years.

How did you first deal with success?
We didn’t really know what to expect. But once we got their first big paycheck, each one’s first thought was to buy a house and a car. Nick bought a central air-conditioning system for his mom’s house. I myself bought a house for my mom. Things definitely changed for us, a lot, like we were not our former lives anymore.

Kevin says the group lost perspective due to the non-stop touring.
We had been touring for nine years straight and it was just a matter of time before we were gonna be “fried.” Nine years was a long time to be touring and we needed a break. Had we not taken a break, we probablywould have self-destructed and quit the business. We were all tired. I lost both of my grandparents, Kevin and Brian lost their grandfather,Howie lost his sister, I mean, a lot of things were going on at that time. Then 9-11—it was really kinda crazy. I, for one, got into rehab.”

Could you tell us more about the rehab, what personal demons you had to deal with?
The answer to any pain or anything negative that I was going through was the bottom of the bottle, or cocaine. Now I know that the answer is to let God take over my life and talk things over with my family, my girlfriend and the guys. Communication is the key to any good relationship.

What was the lowest point during that period?
During the “Black and Blue” tour I was drinking onstage. Between songs I was taking shots of tequila and Jack Daniel’s. I would do cocaine before going onstage. I was a mess. I’m on my third-and-a-half year of being sober now. My life has turned around 360 degrees.

How extensive was your involvement in the making of the new album?
We all wrote during the break and I think we submitted something like 55 songs for the album. Took about a year-and-a-half to make the record. We didn’t want to rush it because we wanted it to be the best record possible. We knew that if we had adequate time, we could try different producers, try different sounds and find the direction that we wanted to go. When we started recording in January 2004, we were taking an R&B direction and then in the summer we tried rock and things began to take shape until it became more of a pop-rock album.

Source:  ING7.net

Backstreet’s back all right, but what does it mean? A lot of people must have thought the group — and perhaps the whole boy-band era it represented — was gone for good. But return the Boys have, a little older, a little more pop-rock in their sound, five years after the release of their last record. MTV News’ John Norris finds out where the Boys have been, what they’ve been up to and what they have to say about Paris Hilton, Tommy Lee, AJ’s relapse and Oprah Winfrey. John Norris: Did you guys have your doubts about whether this reunion was actually going to happen one day? Or were you always pretty sure of it?

Kevin Richardson: We were sick of looking at each other, sick of hearing each other. I mean, we were just going nonstop there for about eight years. We were burned out.

Norris: So what changed that?

Richardson: Having time to reflect on everything that had happened to us since 1995. Some time to focus on ourselves, spend time with our families, some time for AJ [McLean] to work on his recovery, some time for Nick [Carter] to work on a little solo project. Brian [Littrell's] a father now. Just time to appreciate everything we went through and reflect, and get grounded again and recharge our batteries.

AJ McLean: When we finished the Black & Blue tour, there was a dark cloud over the whole tour. There was a lot of negative energy, not just coming from my situation. There was 9/11. A couple of us had lost members of our families. There was just a whole lot of bad juju going on. We had originally said, “We’ll take a year off and then we’ll get back in the studio.” Then it became two years, then three. But the whole catalyst for this was when I went on “Oprah.” Little did I know all four of them were going to show up. We all lost it, and that was the moment we all decided, “Let’s go do this again.”

Norris: A lot of people were surprised to hear a power ballad as the lead single from Never Gone. Howie Dorough: We had wanted to get back with [songwriter/producer] Max Martin, but there was a backlash of that Swedish, synth Euro sound, that came from us, ‘NSYNC [and] Britney, so we felt we had to get away from that. Max didn’t know how to work with us directly to change our sound, evolve it into something better, and he stumbled upon it with this song intended for the “Spider-Man 2″ soundtrack, “Climbing the Walls.” Once we put our voices on it, the album started growing into something more organic, more stripped-down, less harmonies, more instrumentation. The last song we recorded was “Incomplete.” It leaked, and we said, “This is a good thing, let’s go with it.”

McLean: It shows growth, it shows maturity. It’s still us. It’s not too over the top. It’s not over your head. It’s not too complex. It’s just us growing up. We can go onstage and not worry about all the added BS that comes with all this stuff. And this is my first time being on tour with the guys sober. When I got out of rehab, I was newly sober, I wasn’t going to meetings then. Sure enough, a year later, I relapsed. I didn’t get married. Everything in my life fell apart … again.

Norris: How bad was it?

McLean: It was bad enough. I dove into a bunch of pills, smoked weed. I told my sponsor, “I smoked weed last night, but I didn’t inhale.” But as my fiancee at the time said, “But he was on so many pills, he doesn’t remember.” You can’t BS a BS-er. None of these guys believed a word I said. And now I’ve got their respect and their trust; our relationship is better than before I started drinking and doing drugs. My life is the best it’s ever been, and it’s only going to get better.

Norris: You guys are no strangers, some of you more than others, to the tabloid world … Nick Carter: I’ll tell you what, I’ve had a lot of scrutiny. [Everyone laughs.] Don’t believe everything you hear, number one. Number two, if we let things like that get underneath our skin, we would not be able to do our job properly. I learned the hard way. I guess I’ve come from a family that’s had some success, so you could look at it like, “It’s good they’re still talking.” At the same time, talk about something that’s more positive. Not everybody’s perfect.

Richardson: When all the stuff hit the fan with one of his exes, I was like, “Take the high road. Don’t fall into the trap.”

Carter: Obviously, you could fight back with fire, but I learn from them, they’re my bigger brothers, even as much as I was distraught and a little bitter from everything that had happened because I was so in love with [Paris Hilton]. I was trying to be the best I could for her, and in some ways it wasn’t good enough. When I look back at it, I’m happy where I am now. I can focus more, and I can contribute more than I ever did to this group. I used to be so wrapped up in relationships and girls and didn’t really give 100 percent to music. Don’t get me wrong, I still like women very much. I just pick and choose a lot better.

Norris: Now these are party credentials: Tommy Lee, who wrote songs with you that’ll appear on his next album, told one of our writers that Nick Carter is one of the biggest party guys he knows.

Carter: I’ll tell you, me and Tommy have had some fun together. He’s a really cool guy. He takes care of his family, he’s very responsible, he’s someone to look up to. He parties hard …

Brian Littrell: Not as hard as you!

Carter: I’ve partied hard a little bit. I’m toning it down for a while now, just because, you know, whatever. I played Tommy all the music we’ve done, he said, “Yo dude, that’s great, man.” You can’t look at it like it’s hard rock. It’s more like U2 or like Journey — big vocals, big harmonies. I’m really, really happy with the direction. Are they going to call us “men bands” now?

Richardson: The word “boy band” used to offend me. Now I don’t care, I’m over it. Call us a boy band. Call us … just call us!

Source: mtv.com 

By Cindy (aka journalistic) from LD:

At a time when boy bands’ glorious moment has seemingly come to pass, it is almost a wonder in itself to simply sit back and watch as something remarkable happens. After being blindsided by their less humble, wildly more popular Nsync counterparts at the dawn of a new millennium (no pun intended), the Backstreet Boys, a group encouraged into obscurity by cynical critics (gracefully bowing out of the spotlight in 2001), are returning. Despite the publicists insistence on sealing the groups metaphorical coffin over four years ago, the Backstreet Boys have taken interesting, incredibly strategic steps over the past 6-12 months to prepare for and almost ensure a successful return. Once again working with Johnny Wright and obviously vowing to take their music in a new direction (now allowing for the word organdic to actually hold some kind of weight), the group is about to defy all odds.

And yet they still are who they are. Save the foolery in interviews for their silly and completely expired rivals of the past; watch them now and it is clear they are simply a calmer, more toned down Backstreet than we may remember. Such is reflected in their combac single, Incomplate a mellow but haunting power ballad featuring live instruments and more meaty lyrical content than they’ve delivered in the past.What we once might have been frustrated by is their apparent disinterest in adapting their music to what’s current: hip hop. But that attitude, the one we might have called a boring or lacking excitement, is helping them remerge as a popular music entity.

They are still the Backstreet Boys, and they are still not putting Nelly or 50 Cent on any of their records. This is where they have succeeded and Nsync (the group once assumed to last longer than Backstreet) failed. Nsync changed too much and too often. Imagine them now releasing an album and throwing Green Day on a track. Any maybe Toby Keith for good measure.The Backstreet fans who’ve remained, who’ve been there since day one and have endured reading critic after critic predict a miserable fate for our Boys, are surely in for a well-deserved sense of pride when Incomplete gains popularity and Never Gone hits shelves in June. Turn your nose up, sing along proudly. But firs lets prove there is still only one true driving force behind the Backstreet Boys, and that’s us. Request that song and buy the album, because only we determine whether their comeback is a success. Longevity was their test, and we’re about to watch them pass.