Former new kid Joey McIntyre stays the same

"I'm not going to have bed sheets. I'm not going to have pillows," laughs former New Kids On The Block member Joey McIntyre when asked how he's going to do thing differently for his solo pop debut.

McIntyre is in Toronto on a promotional trip for his album, Stay The Same, and even after all these years he still has teenage girls tracking him down. "They're kind of there wherever I go," he says. He plays The Warehouse in Toronto August 7 and will be touring all over the U.S. this summer.

Noting the current resurgence in pop music and the fact that the Boston-based vocalist is still only 26 (younger in fact than the oldest Backstreet Boy) the blue-eyed, chisel-jawed McIntyre could well recapture his pop idol status, but he's isn't keen on the constant frenzy the New Kids invited.

"I'm trying to be conscious of the fact that I want a normal life," he says. "I still want to make them crazy when I'm onstage, but I try to be honest with my fans and say, 'Hey, take a picture or whatever but now I gotta do my thing.' I think they can respect that. If you respect them, they respect you."

When New Kids On The Block disbanded in 1994, McIntyre, the youngest member of the group who joined when he was only 12, had enough money to do absolutely nothing. He has bought a house and Mercedes back when he was 17. The group had sold over 60 million albums and 500,000 pieces of related merchandise.

Unlike other teen stars, McIntyre happily reports that no law suits ensued from disgruntled employees or management, no bad investments were made, no tens of millions went missing.

"No horror stories," he says. "We had good people. Everybody was watching everybody else - our families. We had a good agent, we had a good manager, we had a good producer. Everybody was making money. Ironically, we were the ones that hung onto our money. (Management and creative team) Maurice (Starr) and Dick (Scott), I don't know how much money they have, but they've certainly spent a lot of money. They made a lot of money, but rightly so, Maurice wrote a lot of the songs."

It never dawned on McIntyre to write his own songs too once New Kids was no longer. Instead, he got into acting. He took a few acting classes -- a craft he dabbled in pre-New Kids -- and landed a movie role in Fantastics, based on the Broadway musical. "It never came out, not even on video," he laughs.

Undedicated, he stopped taking acting classes. "To get the work ethic back, I did a professional play," says McIntyre. The Barking Sharks, as the play was called, was written by Israel Horowitz, father of Beastie Boys' Adam. McIntyre did seven shows a week for one solid month, then concluded, "That was fun."

"My work ethic was done because I guess I had worked so much as a kid, I wasn't totally into it," McIntyre explains.

"I kind of went through a period where I didn't really know what I wanted in life and didn't know what I wanted to do. For a while, it was just about going out at night and partying. Sometimes, I'd have to have a couple of drinks just so I could lose my inhibitions and not worry about what people think and that's not always healthy. It wasn't too crazy, but it was just part of growing up."

He wanted to get back into music and turned to big band material. He did covers of Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole and wrote some originals too. He even recorded it in DC with arranger Vince Evans (who co-wrote the stunningly aching six-and-a-half minute ballad "Without Your Love" on Stay The Same). "We didn't professionally record it," says McIntyre. "It was in a basement with all these old jive cats. It was a lot of fun. I thought I'd go to New York and do some gigs there."

But his plans changed when he was in Los Angeles and hooked up with his old New Kids mate, Donnie Wahlberg. "Me and Donnie fought the most back then," remembers McIntyre. "We were so much alike back then that we clashed, but now we're really good friends."

Together, they wrote and recorded "We Can Get Down", which appears on Stay The Same. "For a month, I was just listening to it in my car and my friends were digging it and that's it," he says.

He immediately recruited New Kids producer Phil Green as well as a local producer/co-writer Joe Carrier and self-funded a full album, McIntyre wrote or co-wrote 12 of the album's 13 cuts. Three were written with Wahlberg, who also executive produced with Danny Wood.

"It wasn't about going out and getting seven different producers and a bunch of different writers," says McIntyre. "This was my personal thing, and so I worked with people I knew. And it was a lot of fun, and then I met Joe Carrier, who is a great arranger and he produced six of the tracks. When I started working with him, it made me feel, 'Okay, I'm doing the right thing. I'm on the right track.

"It was such a surprise to me," he says of his latent songwriting talent. "I never knew I had it in me, but my family is pretty creative. My mother always writes poems and does parodies of songs for birthday parties and stuff like that and I finally just opened up, and the more I opened up, the more it came.

"'Stay The Same' was one of the last songs I wrote for the album. It's hard to take responsibility for that song because -- I'm not saying it's the greatest song ever -- but that's just from God and it just comes and boom."

Record companies, however, were not so interested.

"They have no guts, man. They sit on their hands and they want to keep their job and the last thing they're going to do is sign some marketing fiasco of a has-been teen idol," admits McIntyre.

So he made the album available on the Internet, did four solo live dates in Boston (which all sold out) and gave the single, "Stay The Same", to the local radio station KISS-FM. The song became the No.1 most requested song, receiving dozens of call nightly. Then the record companies had a change of heart.

McIntyre agrees it's all great timing, releasing a pop album at a time when the genre is enormous with everyone from Backstreet Boys, 'N Sync and Britney Spears.

"That's why they signed me," he says of Columbia Records, the label which signed New Kids, "because they felt the market was right, and not because they totally believed in me, and that's fine. Everybody has their own agenda, and it's up to me to do my work and make my own path."

He has seen the Backstreet Boys perform but doesn't chuckle at the similarities when he sees the pandemonium, the in-sync dance routines and innumerable merchandise with their likeness.

"I know that they're immensely popular and the fan reaction is crazy, and they're five white kids and there's a similarity. I know everybody wants to put it in the same box, but we were doing what we were doing, then everybody put a label on it and corporate America said, 'Wow,' and it got crazy, it got out of hand," he says.

"I'm not saying we were the originators because there as New Edition and The Jackson 5, but we were just being who we were and then they made a blueprint. But these guys are doing new things too and they're very talented. They're great singers and great performers, so they're doing what they're doing."