98 Degrees‘ new album Full Circle features new songs, plus note-for-note re-recordings, Taylor Swift style, of all their biggest hits, like “Give Me Just One Night” and “The Hardest Thing.” The group’s Jeff Timmons tells ABC Audio why they took on the project.
“We’ve been talking about doing it for a long time. Certainly Taylor Swift has sort of made it ‘en vogue’ to do it,” he says, adding, “We kind of wanted to gain ownership of our stuff, if nothing else.”
And while Taylor Swift redid her albums because of her feud with Scooter Braun, Drew Lachey says any artist can benefit from doing it.
“When a song is placed in a TV show, or even streamed, there are different types of royalties that are [paid] out,” he explains. “So when you own your masters, you are in control of where those songs get placed and how they’re used. And you’re also in the driver’s seat as far as making it profitable for you.”
But Nick Lachey says making the songs sound exactly the same was, indeed, “The Hardest Thing.”
“A lot of these songs, we recorded back in 1996, and so our voices have changed, the way we sing them has changed … it was trickier than I think we all expected it to be,” he says.
Justin Jeffre agrees. “There’s little rap parts or talking and ‘uh’ and ‘huh,'” he laughs, noting it was difficult to “really nail the timing” on those details. But, he adds, “We really wanted to give the records the same kind of vibe and feel that the originals had, and what people fell in love with back in the day.”
And the new songs on Full Circle? Drew says their focus was what it’s always been: “Melody, harmonies and a good story.”
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