Joey Fatone on being in a 'Better Place' with NSync and Justin Timberlake, 22 years after split: 'We thought he was just going to… come back'
Fatone explains why the group broke up in 2001 at the peak of their creative powers, how their reunion has sparked a new wave of appreciation for their talents... and if there's more new music to come.
NSync’s much-hyped reunion — tied to the Trolls Band Together movie soundtrack single “Better Place,” the boy band’s first new song in 22 years — has been one of the best-kept secrets in show business. Even when Justin Timberlake, JC Chasez, Lance Bass, Chris Kirkpatrick, and Joey Fatone made a surprise appearance at last month’s MTV Video Music Awards to present a trophy to stunned superfan Taylor Swift, Swift herself couldn’t get them to spill the beans about their plans, which had actually been in the works since March.
Speaking to Yahoo Entertainment days after the buoyant, disco-tinged “Better Place” finally dropped to great fanfare, Fatone acknowledges that all this secrecy annoyed many of Swift’s fellow NSync fanatics. “It is been quite a fun little thing to do. A lot of people are not happy,” he chuckles. “They were like, ‘What's going on?’ I'm like, ‘Why do you need to know right now?’ Everybody needs to know! It's like, let it happen. Just let it happen. If it's going to happen, let it happen.”
Fatone, Bass, Chasez, and Kirkpatrick reunited in 2019 during Ariana Grande’s headlining set at Coachella. (Fatone admits that he didn’t expect such a warm welcome at the festival, and recalls thinking, “Um, they reallywant us to go on?”) But the last time all five NSync members shared a stage was a decade ago, at the 2013 VMAs, when Timberlake received the Video Vanguard Award. All of Timberlake’s bandmates — including Bass, in a 2019 Yahoo interview — had expressed a willingness or even eagerness to reunite the quintet, but it wasn’t until this year that Timberlake got on board, when the nostalgic storyline of Trolls Band Together made him open to revisiting the past. Fatone says he totally understands Timberlake’s previous reluctance.
“Justin came up to us about the idea and … it only fit right for us to do this together as a group. I think the message, the meaning, everything just all around, came to him,” says Fatone. “Because you got to really think about it, too, that he's the youngest one of the group. In general though, think about it this way: He is at the top pinnacle of his career, for many years now. There's nothing wrong with that. Nobody's upset about that. We all love it and we all support it. But when you're going to go backwards… do you think you want to go backwards? If you go back, would you want to split it four ways with other people again, or do your business that you built up yourself?”
Throughout his Yahoo Entertainment interview, Fatone, who considers himself more of a performer than songwriter, insists that he never harbored any resentment regarding Timberlake’s breakout solo success. But he does admit that he was a bit blindsided when, after 2001’s Celebrity — an acclaimed album that represented NSync at the peak of their artistic powers and seemingly indicated a mature new direction for the group — Timberlake went off to record his solo debut, Justified, and never returned.
“I was not blindsided by the breakup; I was more blindsided as far as him coming out with music and not knowing that he was going to go and do an actual album/tour thing,” Fatone explains. “It was more of, ‘Hey, I'm going to do some music, and then we'll get back together.’ That's what that was. And it wasn't him — it was the record company. If it was him, then I'd understand it. When you're younger, you think it's that person. But then you look at the whole bigger scheme of things, and you go, ‘Oh, that’s why I wasn't there for that.’ That's the business. OK, I get it.”
Fatone continues: “We thought he was just going to go out and just come back after the [Justified] tour,” “I was like, OK. But then when he went on tour and then things started going, I was like, ‘All right, I'll go do Broadway.’ That's when I did Broadway. I started doing Dancing with the Stars. I started hosting TV shows and doing my own thing, and that was what led me.” Fatone’s latest solo endeavor is his partnership with Heluva Good! Dips’ “No Team Required” tour, kicking off in Hoboken on Oct. 5, which will include donations to each tour stop’s local food banks for each attendee.
“That's the beautiful part about it: My career and my life led me somewhere else, and I'm good and I'm happy with it,” says Fatone.
But now NSync are in a better place, so to speak. “I’m always in a better place. I don’t know about [my bandmates]; I can't speak for them. But I'll speak for myself,” Fatone says. “Do I ever get mad or do I ever have a bad… yeah, we have our moments. But I'm always looking at the positive side of things. I'm always trying to look at the positive. If it's something negative, yeah, that sucks, but let's figure out what we can do — not ignore it, but see what can we do.”
What the fans really want to see NSync do, of course, is record a full reunion album and go on their own heluva good, team-required tour. Obviously, those fans had hoped that the group would perform “Better Place” at this year’s VMAs, a missed opportunity about which Fatone vaguely explains: “Trust me, we all did. With the powers-that-be, we couldn't at the moment. But I hope and pray that there will be a time that we'll be able to perform that song for everybody.”
As for more new music, Fatone explains, “That takes time. … If you're doing a whole album, you've got about 13 or 14 songs, then you want to do about probably 30 or 40, because you don't know which ones you really want to pick. And now you've got five other guys that got to figure out what's going on. That's just the music itself — then you got to figure out a tour. Think about how long Taylor Swift's tour probably took to build!” But Fatone won’t rule out any “realistic” plans. “You never know. I can actually say, ‘You know what? That's a possibility — 2025, that's a possibility.’ But, there's four of the guys I have to talk to about that.”
In the meantime, Fatone finds the reaction to NSync’s reunion single “interesting and humbling” — and also vindicating, because NSync and their boy-band peers weren’t necessarily taken seriously when they first hit the scene in the late-‘90s TRL era.
“You look at it from either an artist standpoint or just kind of a fad standpoint, as far as a boy band/vocal group: ‘These guys don't know singing,’ blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then you break down our history and what we've done and how we are as musicians and singing and our harmonies and all this, and now people are going into ProTools and even dissecting our vocals now!” Fatone marvels.
“People are trying to pull just to hear who's singing what. I've been getting messages listening from our track, from the song: ‘Joey's singing this part, Chris is singing this, Lance is singing that.’ They're legitimately going in — and nobody does that! Kids are doing that now, which is amazing to me. It's brilliant. They're dissecting these chords, which is really cool to do, and they're overanalyzing and understanding it and trying to get the method or formula of a song. It's interesting now that people are honestly appreciating it.”
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