The nostalgia ship steams into the region this week with an NSYNC star at the helm.
Lance Bass will host the Pop 2000 tour when it stops at Circle Drive-in, 1911 Scranton-Carbondale Highway, Dickson City, on Saturday, Aug. 21, at 7 p.m. The concert takes place outdoors but is not a drive-in show where the audience would be confined to its cars, so fans will have a chance to get up and dance along to performances by O-Town, Ryan Cabrera and LFO.
When O-Town star Jacob Underwood heard about the tour coming together, he thought it was “really about damn time,” he said with a laugh.
“You forget how much you miss every day or how much you take for granted … hearing live music as loud as you get to hear it,” Underwood said.
“When the bass hits and you feel it, like, oh my goodness,” he added. “It’s just medicine to the soul.”
Underwood rose to fame in 2000 as a member of the boy band that formed through the reality TV show “Making the Band.” The group released a pair of records, disbanded and then reunited in 2014. The guys have spent the last few years touring and released another pair of albums, one of which fans helped fund through Kickstarter.
“This whole ride has been one step to the next shocking to us,” Underwood said. “Now we’ve been together twice as long as the first run.”
O-Town planned to tour in 2020 to celebrate its 20th anniversary but scuttled those plans because of the pandemic. The Pop 2000 tour, though, has given the group a chance to get out again to perform its hits alongside some of the other popular acts of the age. They’ve seen how much people have enjoyed being together again, Underwood noted, recalling how, during his first stop on the tour, he saw fans cry with joy. He even got goosebumps a few times himself.
“We definitely had a lot of emotional peaks throughout that show. … Everything seemed like we were finally getting back to normal, and multiple times throughout the night, we threw out some songs we hadn’t played in 20 years,” Underwood said.
Underwood said the acts in the tour have a real camaraderie and feel joyful about working again.
“We’re looking at a bright future,” he said.
The recent nostalgia for the late ’90s and early 2000s has been “the biggest blessing you could ask for,” Underwood explained, as it spotlighted the kind of shows the band gets invited to do. The group goes to the United Kingdom every year for ’90s nights and pop nights and plays other nostalgic shows all over.
The group has a good relationship with its fans, Underwood said, and its followers have even become friends with one another from coming to shows. While he can’t believe 20 years has passed since O-Town formed, he now sees fans bring their own kids to the group’s concerts. Fans have even shown the band photos and said things like, “Here you were holding me when I was 1.”
“That’s the stuff that makes you go, oh, some time has passed,” Underwood said with a laugh.
Fans can expect to hear lots of songs they love at Pop 2000. O-Town performs many tracks from its first record as well as others from “Making the Band” it hasn’t played in two decades.
“We do mashups from some of our favorite old and current songs,” Underwood said. “We have a lot of stuff from the new two records.”
O-Town also teams up with some of the other acts, including LFO and Bass, to perform some LFO and NSYNC hits.
Underwood said he hopes the audience comes away from the show feeling a “great relief from everything.”
“We (know) that music can snap you back to some of the greatest points of your life. … The memories come back,” he said. “It allows for nostalgia (and) a fun night.”
Caitlin Heaney West is the content editor for Access NEPA and oversees the Early Access blog in addition to working as a copy editor and staff writer for The Times-Tribune. An award-winning journalist, she is a summa cum laude graduate of Shippensburg University and also earned a master’s degree from Marywood University. Caitlin joined the Times-Shamrock family in 2009 and lives in Scranton. Contact: cwest@timesshamrock.com; 570-348-9100 x5107; or @cheaneywest
