To her long list of accomplishments -- which include a No. 1 talk show, countless Emmys, an Oscar nomination, a book club, a federal bill to protect abused children and the distinction of being the first African-American woman to become a billionaire -- Oprah Winfrey can now add that she helped reunite the Backstreet Boys.
It was January 2004, and AJ McLean was booked on Oprah to pour his heart out about recovering from his alcohol and cocaine addiction.
"I was over in London writing and recording," says Nick Carter in a teleconference, "and I had gotten a call from, I think it was Brian [Littrell], and he was basically saying how AJ was doing a special on 'Oprah' with his mom about his sobriety and about his drug addiction. And that's when we all decided to hop on a plane and go surprise him on the show."
The Backstreet Boys -- less a boy group than a global enterprise with sales of more than 73 million records -- had been burned by McLean on the Black and Blue tour in the summer of 2001, forced to suffer through and then ultimately cancel dates because of his depression and substance abuse.
"We couldn't trust in him," says Kevin Richardson, the one who looks as if he's in Nine Inch Nails. "We couldn't believe in him. So we had to rebuild that trust and work on that trust."
Carter, Richardson, Littrell and Howie Dorough sat in the room backstage at 'Oprah' with McLean and looked hard into his eyes.
"I saw that he was clear," Richardson says, "and that the old [AJ] was back. Then there were no doubts."
The Backstreet Boys -- now men, some with wives and children -- were reborn. Five years after the last album and four years since the last tour, the group has released "Never Gone" and embarked on a world tour that stops at the Post-Gazette Pavilion on Wednesday.
As they tell it now, the Backstreet Boys were all ready for a break when McLean went into rehab. After all, they formed in Orlando way back in 1992 when Carter, the youngest member, was only 12 years old, and then toured the world for eight years, carving out a huge industry for teen pop in the '90s.
During the downtime, Carter enjoyed modest success with the solo album "Now or Never." Richardson starred in "Chicago" on Broadway. Littrell had a son and worked on a Christian record that's due in the fall. Dorough did some writing and producing and charity work.
"I think when we had the chance to find ourselves once again," Dorough says, "it made each of us stronger when we came back to the table to work as a group. I mean, I think we had a chance to grasp normality once again, a chance to just be ourselves outside the bubble that we were all living in. A chance to go to the grocery store, and do laundry, and do normal stuff."
Obviously there was more than laundry, but there was nothing, on the level of, say, Justin Timberlake's breakout solo success post-'N Sync, to keep them from being Backstreet Boys again.
Whether or not people would embrace them was another story, as those old Backstreet fans also grew up and may very well have moved on to Maroon 5 or Coldplay or 50 Cent or who knows what.
"Everything moves pretty quickly in the music industry," Richardson says. "It's always about what's new, what's next, what's going on, and whenever you take a break like we did, especially for as long as we did, there's always a risk that when you're out of sight, you're out of mind. We believed in our hearts and in each other in what we knew we could do, and we believed that we had established a strong foundation being that we toured all over the world."
Turns out, they had reason to believe. "Never Gone," leading with the single "Incomplete," debuted at No. 3 on the charts and is still lingering in the Top 40.
They approached the new record feeling that the older, more synthetic pop sound was passe and what they needed was a more organic approach with real instruments.
"We all went in with an open mind, [to] experiment and try new things and different genres of music, which then led us to a final product, which is a contemporary pop-rock direction," McLean says.
They plan to extend that newfound musical focus to the live show.
"You know," says McLean, "there was that one big summer when it was us and Ricky Martin and Britney Spears and everybody was on tour. It was kind of, 'Who can blow up the most stuff on stage?' And I think now as we've gotten older and the music doesn't really lend itself to all the big acrobatics and pyrotechnics, it's just going back to ... good quality music and having fun on stage. We still do dance, but not as much, especially with the new material. It doesn't really lend itself to [it]."
With the batteries recharged, a sober McLean and a hit album, Carter says, "we're happy in the lives that we're living now. We're all happy in our skin."
Happy enough to be thinking about a long-term future as Backstreet men.
"We're going to take it day by day, album by album," Richardson says. "And who knows? We may be like the Eagles or the Beach Boys, or the Rolling Stones and the Temptations, still doing shows somewhere in our 50s."