The singer recently spoke with ET about hitting the road and performing with Fatone on their new A Legendary Night Tour.
After years performing with different massive boy bands who dominated the charts, AJ McLean and Joey Fatone are teaming up for a new tour, set to kick off this month.
But before the pair embarks on their collaborative A Legendary Night Tour, McLean (of Backstreet Boys fame) and Fatone (of *NSYNC fame) sat down for a new edition of "Spilling the E-Tea," and interviewed one another about their new endeavor, new music, and memories from their boy band days.
"What was your first impression when you met me first?" Fatone asked, recalling their initial meeting back in the early '90s.
"My first impression was everlasting," McLean said with a laugh. "We kind of just gelled. Like you just had a really kind of outgoing personality... a very inviting personality, and you had a great voice."
According to Fatone, his impression of McLean was very similar. "I was like, 'Man, the voice is cool as s**t. It's smooth. He's sexy. He's slick, but he's got his weird edge," Fatone recalled, before ribbing McLean for his choice of simultaneously rocking goggles and sunglasses as a fashion statement.
"Funny story -- I don't know if I ever told you this -- we were in London. It was the opening night of a restaurant/club type place," McLean recalled. "Titanic had just come out and Leo DiCaprio was in town during promotion and there was only one bathroom upstairs [at this place]."
"So all these people were going up and down the stairs. So my security stayed at the bottom. I was walking up, I had the goggles on and the glasses. Leo was coming down the stairs, and I think he may have been a little bit tipsy," McLean claimed. "He looked at me, he said, 'What is all this?' He grabbed my goggles, pulled them and let them go."
"They broke my glasses, [it] cut my nose, and then he laughed and walked away!" McLean alleged. "Cut to: I see him many years later, Howie [Dorough] and I saw him at the SNL 40th [anniversary special in 2015], and he gets in the elevator. He had just done The Revenant and Howie's like, 'Dude, now's your chance! Get him back, get him back!' And Leo goes, 'AJ! Good to see you, man.' I'm like, 'Hey, good to see you, buddy.' He's like, 'This is my mom.' And I'm [thinking] like, 'Oh, man...' That was my chance, but not in front of dear old Mom."
"Right, right, you can't do that," Fatone chimed in with a laugh.
Looking away from the past and toward the future, Fatone asked, "What are you most looking forward to when we start touring together?"
"I'm looking forward to the kind of spontaneity that is this tour, this show," McLean said. "You know, the fact that we can literally flip the script on people nightly and just trying new things."
He's also looking forward to "experimenting, especially with this first round of shows."
"We want to go everywhere with this thing. And, honestly, I mean, we're getting hit up from Brazil, from Australia, from Europe," he added. "So, yeah, I'm looking forward to it. It's gonna be a blast... This is something [we] never got a chance to do with our respective groups."
"I'm always a team player in that sense of just performing," Fatone shared. "So for me, if I can perform with somebody like yourself, it's awesome."
Aside from the tour, McLean also recently dropped new music -- a track called "Electric" -- and explained that he's "a huge fan of '80s funk," which heavily inspired the tune.
"I miss songs that have a great groove. That, [even] if there's no lyrics, it makes you want to move, it makes you feel good. You don't want to skip it," McLean said. "And that’s what 'Electric' is."
Fatone and McLean's co-headlining A Legendary Night Tour kicks off March 15 in California, and runs through July 20. McLean's new single, "Electric," is out now.
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