JC Chasez is back with Playing With Fire 20 years after his debut album. The singer talks about how the concept of his latest work was built out, a possible *NSYNC reunion, duetting with Christina Aguilera in the future and more! 

Rebecca Millzoff:
I’m Rebecca Millzoff. I’m the executive magazine editor here at Billboard, and I’m here with JC Chasez today. 

JC Chasez:
Hi. 

He has an album out today, Playing With Fire on Center Stage Records. It is not what you might expect from JC. 

It’s a different kind of thing. Playing With Fire is a musical that I’ve co-written with my writing partner, Jimmy Harry. When you’re making a musical, it takes quite a bit of time, and we decided to release a concept record of the music from the musical, and it’s all based on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. We were kind of wondering what we were going to work on next. We were kind of trying to come up with ideas. You know, what would be interesting? We knew we wanted to write a musical, but we just didn’t know what about yet, we came across a piece of work, actually, that Jimmy’s mother wrote. Her name is Barbara Fields, and she wrote a play that went on in the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis called Playing With Fire.

A major off-Broadway theater for people who don’t know. 

Yeah, I got to look at the material that he shared with me, and I was totally blown away by the way she framed Mary Shelley’s story, the architecture that she put in place to communicate some of the themes and the emotions we talked about. And we said, well, why don’t we just start with a song and see if there’s anything there, and from there, we wrote the first song, which is, “How Do You Sleep.” 

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