Lance Bass admits that NSYNC went into their blockbuster 2000 album, No Strings Attached, with a sense of trepidation.
In an interview with Us Weekly, Lance reveals that at the time of the album's release, the band was embroiled in a legal battle with late record producer and manager Lou Pearlman, who was later the subject of the 2019 documentary The Boy Band Con: The Lou Pearlman Story, focusing on the creation of his Ponzi scheme that defrauded investors out of more than $1 billion.
Lance says the release of No Strings Attached came at a "crazy time" in the group's life as they were trying to part ways with Pearlman while capitalizing on the success of their RIAA Diamond-certified debut album.
“I was very young. I think I was 19 years old or 18 years old at the time, so I didn’t really know what the hell I was doing," Lance explains. "But I knew that we had such success with the first album that the second album is your make it or break it type album. If it flops, it’s hard to recover from that. So going into it, we were scared because we didn’t know what we were going to be able to do with the second album.”
NSYNC ultimately left record label RCA and were able to keep the name NSYNC. “And thank goodness the courts sided with us and we got our name back. And that really is what launched the whole theme of No Strings Attached with us, getting away from Lou Pearlman," Lance continues. "And it just inspired us to write more than we’ve ever written. And some magic really happened.”
At the time, No Strings Attached set the record for biggest first-week sales, with 2.4 million copies sold.
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