AJ McLean catapulted to fame as a member of the Backstreet Boys within the late Nineteen Nineties, however he now regards the latter a part of the band’s heyday as a “really dark time,” each personally and professionally.
McLean is amongst a bunch of pop musicians who seem within the new Paramount+ documentary “Larger Than Life: Reign of the Boybands.” In it, the Florida native remembers how the Backstreet Boys started to retreat from the limelight following the discharge of their 2000 album, “Black & Blue,” because the relationships between him and bandmates Nick Carter, Howie Dorough, Brian Littrell and Kevin Richardson turned more and more strained.
“With the Backstreet Boys, there was never a breakup, but 2001 was a really dark time,” McLean says within the doc, based on Individuals. “We had toured for nine years straight — just go on tour, make an album, go on tour, make an album. And instead of dealing with my real emotions or my feelings, I kind of got caught up in the lifestyle and the partying and the drinking and the drugs.”
Ron Galella through Getty Photographs
A turning level got here, McLean explains, when he drank alcohol whereas performing onstage someday in 2001: “That’s when I even had to know, ‘OK, dude, something’s not right.’”
Later that very same yr, he checked himself into rehab for the primary time. By that time, he says within the movie, Carter, Dorough, Littrell and Richardson had been “just at their wit’s end” for various causes.
Directed by Tamra Davis and launched this week, “Larger Than Life: Reign of the Boybands” is billed in press notes as a “raw, unvarnished” take a look at “one of pop culture’s most enduring musical movements.”
Along with the Backstreet Boys and their onetime rivals ’NSync, the documentary additionally options segments on The Beatles, One Path, the Jonas Brothers and Okay-pop group Seventeen.
McLean, now 46 and a father of two, has been candid about his experiences with drug and alcohol dependancy. In 2023, he advised Individuals he’d been sober for 2 full years.
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“I’m in the best shape of my life, both mentally, physically, spiritually. I’m actually really happy and I love it, and I don’t want to lose it,” he mentioned on the time. “I want to continue to keep growing, growing with my wife and my kids and myself.”
Watch the trailer for “Larger Than Life: Reign of the Boybands” beneath.
