Songoftheday 1/11/22 - I may run and hide when you're screamin' my name alright, but let me tell you now there are prices to fame alright...

 

 

"Larger Than Life" - Backstreet Boys

from the album Millennium (1999)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #25 (two weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 9

 

Today's song is from the pop vocal group (aka "boyband") Backstreet Boys, whose second American album Millennium had already scored a top ten pop hit in the summer of 1999 with "I Want It That Way". The follow-up single, "Larger Than Life", was originally intended as the lead single from the record, being the big dance number on the set. Written by member Brian Littrell with later assistance from producers Max Martin and Kristian Lundin, the track is a showing of love between the Boys and their fanbase, and really set the tone for what would evolve into K-Pop decades later. In fact, this is what acts like BTS aspire to, albeit with clunky bad English lyrical results. This was clean, infectious, and had a wheelbarrow of musical hooks. The music video for the song cost over two million dollars, throwing every CGI trick in the book that was available at the turn of the century in the mix for a space odyssey adventure. I can't lie than this is my favorite song of theirs, and so iconic in the "boyband" genre...

 

 Despite the favorable reception of the song by their fans, since either the act or their record company didn't a physical CD or cassette single for "Larger Than Life", probably to goose up sales of the album, it stalled down at #25 on Billboard magazine's pop Hot 100 chart in November of 1999, even though it climbed to #6 on the Mainstream Top-40 radio chart. The song also rose to #35 on Billboard's older-skewing Adult Top-40 format list. Internationally, where it was released commercially, it was a different story, topping the chart in Hungary, and reaching the top ten in Finland (#2), Australia (#3), Sweden (#4), Belgium (#4F/#7W), the UK (#5), Canada (#5), Germany (#5), Norway (#5), Spain (#6), Italy (#6), the Netherlands (#6), Ireland (#9), and Switzerland (#10). The Boys and the Millennium album will return to the series.

(10/10)

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Here's the group performing "Larger Than Life' live on their Millennium tour in 1999 that was an eleven minute show-opening spectacle that included the Star Wars theme and the five guys gliding over the audience to enter...

Fast Forward to a show at the iHeart Theater in Los Angeles in 2016...

In 2018, the group brought "Larger Than Life" to Good Morning America with the crowd still going apeshit...

and finally, in concert in Chile the following year...

Up tomorrow: the other big boyband slows things down for a movie with a special guest from Miami.