There are few greater examples of an artist growing with their young audience than the great underrated Backstreet Boys album Never Gone, with its great lead single 'Incomplete', and so many great songs to follow it!
First, some background.
I was part of that young audience that they were growing with.
I was supposed to be a member of the Grunge generation, but I hated Grunge.
I'm not knocking it. Grunge was great for a lot of people. It was just not for me.
I still believed in the Steven Spielberg Jim Henson optimism of my childhood in the 80's, and I still do to this day.
I didn't have any contemporary teen music to identify with until I was a young adult around age 20 and the age of Britney and the Backstreet Boys came.
I was late to the party. I had not paid much attention to contemporary music since I was a teen in 1992. I had my own thing, my own world, which you can find in my stories, all over them. I was preparing to be David S. Annderson, Author.
I discovered the Britney-Backstreet Boys scene when Britney's iconic first video came out.
That's it!
That's my teen music!
About seven years late, but better late then never! That's my teen music!
I was part of the hard-core fan following of the whole scene of N*SYNC, Britney, Destiny's Child (Survivor era!), all of it.
My favorites among them were, and always will be, Britney and the Backstreet Boys.
That, and Destiny's Child Survivor, the song with the best lyrics in the whole history of the English language, words to stand alongside Marcus Aurelius.
I am a Romantic at heart, a poet, and Britney and the Backstreet Boys are the ones for Romantics and Poets.
And so I was very much a part of the audience that the Backstreet Boys were growing with.
Fast forward to 2005. America's changed. The Age of Pop is over.
Britney's audience are more like the age I was when I first got teen music of my own back in the Age of Pop.
And the Backstreet Boys come out with this wonderful album of mature, rock-influenced music, steeped in the feel of acoustic guitars, the sound-world of a 90's counterpart to early Crosby, Stills and Nash, and still those wonderful harmony vocals.
The songs are more mature, reflect on things.
Few artists have done such a wonderful job of growing with their audience, or of creating a work that speaks to where their audience was at this new, later time in their lives.
This album so, so speaks to where much of their core audience was in 2005 when it was released.
Speaks to the America of 2005 so strongly from the point of view of their core audience. Including me.
This is still one of my favorite albums of all time.
Hope you enjoyed this little review!
God loves you!
Sincerely,
David S. Annderson