Larger than life! Nick Carter isn’t waiting until the finals to break out an entire Backstreet Boys routine on Dancing With the Stars. Us Weekly can exclusively reveal that the singer will be performing to the band’s single “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” during the ABC dancing competition on Monday, Oct. 5.
The boy band heartthrob, 35, and his pro partner, Sharna Burgess, will dance to the catchy tune in honor of the show’s “Most Memorable Year” week. For Carter, that year was in 1996, when he first met fellow band members A.J. McLean, Brian Littrell, Kevin Richardson, and Howie Dorough when he was just 12 years old.
“That was the year my life changed forever. Without them, I wouldn’t be who I am right now,” Carter tells Us exclusively. “Every single one of those guys raised me and taught me so much about values and family and relationships and just morals and I was really fortunate to have that from those guys. They were there for me through thick and thin and cared about me and loved me without expectations wholeheartedly.”
Carter — who has publicly spoken about his rocky childhood — tells Us that the group is what helped him turn his life around. (In 2013, he revealed that he didn’t attend his 25-year-old sister Leslie’s funeral the year before because his family blamed him for her drug overdose.)
“In a lot of ways, they saved me from a very dysfunctional family that I was in,” he reveals to Us. “I was going through a lot and I was highly, extremely depressed and heartbroken from my family and not having that typical — I wanted that dream mother and father, that dream family.”
He continues: “I was heartbroken and tortured for so many years, thinking that I could save them, thinking that I could fix things with money and material things and it never happened. It just made it worse.”
Luckily, his fans have also pulled him through tough times. “We are really blessed and we know that we have the most amazing fans in the world,” he says. “We are so fortunate to have worked with the most amazing producers and writers on the planet and we pride ourselves at putting on a fantastic show and just being showmen and continuing to give the fans what they want. And that is to play our catalog of, thankfully, a lot of hits!”
Carter has received plenty of support from his bandmates in recent years, too. In fact, McLean, 37, will be cheering him on during Monday night’s live taping! Carter, of course, is ecstatic that “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” is the performance that McLean will be sitting in for.
“It’s the best one I think to pay homage to the group,” he tells Us. “That’s my dedication to them and my shout-out to them.”
DWTS airs Mondays at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.
Watch the video above!
