98 Degrees fans probably don’t need their parents to drive them to concerts now, as they did back at the height of the boy band’s popularity during the early 2000s.
“Like we have, they’ve gotten a little bit older. Then, they were overwhelmingly teenagers, and now they are overwhelmingly grown women, for the most part,” band member Justin Jeffre says in a phone interview from Lemoore, Calif., several hours before the group’s show at the Tachi Palace Casino.
“Of course, they had fun back then, but nowadays, they can have some drinks and really let loose,” he says. “Its still kind of like going back in time for them just because when you listen to a group that you grew up listening to, the music really takes you back to those times and those memories.”
The boy band, whose images adorned the pages of teen magazines during the early 2000s, performs Wednesday at Elkhart’s Lerner Theatre as part of its 31-date Christmas tour.
“We’d never done a Christmas tour before and having another Christmas CD, having two to pull from, we now have enough Christmas material to do a full-on Christmas show,” Jeffre says. “Of course, we still do the hits, but it’s a whole lot of Christmas.”
The band — brothers Nick and Drew Lachey, Jeff Timmons, and Jeffre — decided to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the release of its self-titled debut album by recording what would be its second Christmas album, “Let It Snow,” which it released in October.
“I think, collectively, we felt like our favorite CD as a group was our first Christmas CD, ‘This Christmas’” Jeffre says. “It had been 18 years since we had done that, and Christmas is such a special time.”
The Christmas CD, he says, also is something that not only their female fans will enjoy.
“I mean, the other guys have kids and stuff, so we kind of wanted to create something for the families, and our fans really loved the Christmas CD,” he says. “It kind of hit a wider demographic. We would have a lot of guys that would come up to us and be like, ‘Hey, I really wasn’t a fan of you guys, but my daughter was. But every year we listen to that Christmas CD and think it’s great.’”
Noting that there is a lot of good Christmas music out there, Jeffre lists albums by Stevie Wonder, Boyz II Men and Take 6 as some of his favorites to listen to during the holiday season. On “Let It Snow,” 98 Degrees actually covers Wonder’s “What Christmas Means to Me.”
“Mostly, I just kind of listen to the radio,” he says. “You don’t have to go searching too hard to listen to Christmas music around the holidays.”
Having two Christmas albums to pull material from, Jeffre explains what fans going to Wednesday’s concert should expect.
“Well, this concert is a little bit more theatrical than any other show we have done before,” he says. “Typically, we would just do a pop concert, but this, you know, there’s an intermission, which is a little bit different.”
In addition to a “whole lot of Christmas songs,” Jeffre says, fans will hear the band’s hits sprinkled throughout the set list.
“We have enough material that we take people on a journey,” he says “There’s definitely some uptempo, a rock part of the show, and then we … do some a cappella and just kind of mix it up a little.”
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