The History Of The Mystery Track – Britney Spears & The Backstreet Boys Hype Millennium

Jive Records had an idea.  They had signed a new artist, an ambitious 16-year-old girl from Louisiana.  Already a show business veteran, she was ready to move on from children’s Television, commercials and live theatre.  Quickly disinterested in sticking with a girl group called Innosense she briefly joined, she wanted the spotlight all to herself.  Jive was the only label willing to take a chance on her.

Her first single, co-written by Max Martin, was a fairly standard but irresistible I-dumped-you-but-I-still-love-you-and-want-you-back pleader and, as it turns out, easily misunderstood.  Martin wrote the lyrics in his native Swedish and the English translation came out a little awkward.  The song’s premise was otherwise straightforward.  A lovesick protagonist ultimately wants to know if their ex has similar feelings.  “Give me a sign,” they plead.  “Hit me, baby, one more time.”

When a demo of the song was presented to TLC, they were appalled.  They wrongly thought the chorus advocated violence against women.  So they passed.  They weren’t the only ones.

By the time the kid from Louisiana heard it, she knew it was a hit.  It took her two days in May 1998 to nail the vocals in Martin’s studio in Sweden.  As she later revealed to Rolling Stone magazine, she listened to Soft Cell’s cover of Tainted Love for inspiration.

As her first single was being prepared for release in October 1998, Jive wanted to add something extra to the CD, an advertisement of sorts for another one of their newest signings.

Imajin (pronounced Imagine) were four Black teens from New York also working on their first professional recordings.  (Aged 14 to 16, unlike most pop vocal groups of the era, they were talented old-school musicians who played their own instruments.)  They had already found success with their own debut single, Shorty (You Keep Playin’ With My Mind), which cracked the Top 30.  Jive was getting ready to release the follow-up.

Why not promote this song on their labelmate’s first single?  Both were scheduled for autumn releases.  (Free cassettes featuring both artists were already being handed out to kids during the Louisiana teen’s early mall showcases.)

With deep concerns about the original title, Hit Me Baby One More Time became the unnecessarily mysterious …Baby One More Time despite no change to the lyrics.  Although those concerns turned out to be well founded (some critics had the same wrongheaded reaction as TLC), Britney Spears would go on to have her first massive chart success.

After the conclusion of track two, a rare B-side called Autumn Good-Bye, an Unlisted Audio Track begins with the singer addressing the listener on track three:

“Hi!  This is Britney Spears and thanks for buying my first single, …Baby One More Time.  Right now, I’d like to introduce to you some friends and labelmates of mine.  They’re called Imajin and this is a sneak preview of their new single, No Doubt.  Hit it, guys.”

For the next minute and sixteen seconds (really the actual opening of the song), you’ll hear a catchy piece of fluff from this young R&B quartet until it fades out near the end of the second chorus.  The full song, an uptempo popper about a guy trying to convince a girl he likes to get busy with him without making her feel pressured to do so, runs three and a half minutes.

While …Baby One More Time topped the Billboard Hot 100 in early January 1999, Imajin’s No Doubt didn’t even make it to the Top 40.  (It fared much better on the Hot R&B Singles chart where it entered the Top 20, just like Shorty.)  Not even having a young Meagan Good appear in the accompanying video, which is included on the credited enhanced multimedia portion of Spears’ own single, made any difference.  (Scrubs alumnus Donald Faison makes a cameo in the beginning of it as an annoyed, sleep-deprived man.  He’s the brother of Imajin frontman Olamide Faison who currently appears on Sesame Street.)

Imajin released their self-titled album on October 26, 1999, 369 days after the surprise shoutout on …Baby One More Time.  Despite the inclusion of their only hit, Shorty, and the earlier unlisted push from Spears on her single, it failed to make much of an impact.  (No Doubt is track eight.)  After offering a few more tracks to soundtracks, the band backed up Baby DC on a standalone single and released one more of their own.  Both flopped as well.

Unable to find another breakthrough, Imajin broke up sometime in 2000.  That didn’t stop Jive Records from trying the same sales tactic again.

The same week …Baby One More Time the single hit number one on Billboard, …Baby One More Time the album also debuted in the same position on the Top 200, a first in American music history.  Two seconds after Spears’ cover of Sonny & Cher’s The Beat Goes On fades out on track 11, she once again addresses the purchaser of her CD in a Buried Audio clip that begins at the 3:43 mark.  Her scripted patter is very similar to the earlier mystery track found on her single:

“Hi!  This is Britney Spears and thank you so much for buying and listening to my first album.  It means so much to me that you enjoy listening to my songs as much as I love singing them.  Now, I’ve got something very special just for you.  I’m gonna give you a private sneak preview of some new music from an upcoming album by some labelmates of mine, The Backstreet Boys.  Hit it, guys.”

It had been two years since the Backstreet’s Back album broke this Florida-based quintet in America.  (Their international self-titled debut first started taking off in Quebec in 1996.)  And there was much anticipation for the follow-up.  Eventually entitled Millennium, it would be the most popular record they would ever make.

As Spears begins to talk about this “private sneak preview”, the first song clip fades in and we’re in the middle of the chorus.  When it fades out, she comes back.

“That was called I’ll Be The One and I think it’s gonna be number one.”

Released as the fourth and final single in the spring of 2000, The One, as it was ultimately called, was not a chart topper.  It peaked at #30 on Billboard’s Hot 100.  (It fared much better in Canada where it entered the Top 5.)  Curiously, the group had originally planned on releasing Don’t Want You Back instead.  The change came about because of a sabotaged vote on MTV’s Total Request Live.  Viewers were asked to make their own choice but once Nick Carter called in to give a push to The One, the fanbase followed his lead.

The mystery clip of the song doesn’t sound like it was directly taken from the finished album version, at least not that brief instrumental build-up.  The chorus is clearly from Millennium but it’s not clear if this portion was incomplete or ultimately discarded from the final mix.  Either way, you can understand why it wasn’t a bigger hit.  It’s routine fare.

“Next up is something a little different from the boys.  It’s called Show Me The Meaning Of Being Lonely.  I know you’re gonna love it.”

An enormous adult contemporary hit (it reached as high as number two in the spring of 2000 and stayed on that chart for over a year), this third single from Millennium was indeed an audience pleaser.  It peaked at number six on the Hot 100.  (It was number one in Canada.)  This unlisted clip joins the song in progress at the 42-second mark just as A.J. MacLean sings the tail end of the last line of the first verse (“…will be done”) and fades out right after the group chorus as the Spanish guitar and the string section start to take over at 1:12 of the finished track.

“And last, but definitely not least, a beautiful ballad called I Need You Tonight.  Thanks again for supporting me and I hope to see you all at my shows very, very soon.  Bye.”

Strictly an album cut, I Need You Tonight (it was originally titled Heaven In Your Eyes) was produced by Mutt Lange, the famed hard rock producer who twiddled the knobs for AC/DC and Def Leppard.  His then-wife Shania Twain sings uncredited back-up on the track, according to Wikipedia.  This unlisted snippet fades in as Spears very quietly and unenthusiastically signs off.  We’re entering the 52-second mark of the full-length song from Millennium as an overwrought Nick Carter warbles the last bit of the first verse and goes right into the chorus.  This final clip fades out just as he begins verse two (“I figured out what to say to you”) as we only get as far as the 1:38 mark of the finished song before the CD shuts off.  Thank God.

Interestingly, this was not the first time Jive secretly offered fans an early taste of Millennium.

Long before they handed out fully credited cassette samplers, way back in early January 1998, The Backstreet Boys released All I Have To Give, the third and final single from Backstreet’s Back, their second album.  A year later, the song was rereleased.  On the two-track US version, track three reportedly features uncredited snippets of The One (when it was still known as I’ll Be The One), Show Me The Meaning Of Being Lonely and I Need You Tonight.  On the expanded five-track US release, it’s apparently the unlisted track six.  According to discogs.com, the mystery track on both singles runs a little over two minutes.

Almost a year later in mid-November 1998, a VHS tape entitled A Night Out With The Backstreet Boys began circulating officially.  (The DVD came out two years later.)  Besides highlighting a concert taped for German Television in March of that year, there was a bonus CD called Selections From A Night Out With The Backstreet Boys, featuring six audio versions of tracks that appear in the video.  The seventh and final track features a much longer trailer for the same three songs Spears introduces a few months later on …Baby One More Time in the exact same order but with longer running times.  There’s no mention of it in the track listing on the back cover.  This uncredited preview runs almost four and a half minutes.

Instead of Spears doing the shilling, after that same brief instrumental snippet of The One at the top (six seconds worth), the clip continues with Howie D & Kevin Richardson (they also reportedly appear on the shorter All I Have To Give mystery track), clearly speaking off the top of their heads, urging the listener to not turn off the CD:

“Howie:  Hey, hey, wait up!  Wait up!

Kevin:  Hold up!  Stop!  Don’t touch anything yet because, uh, we’re looking forward to seeing you guys on the 1999 world tour.  But at the same time, we got some sneak previews of, uh, some of the material we’ve been working on for the next album, right, Howie?

Howie:  Yep.  You’ll find these songs and much more on the up and coming album in 1999.  So, hope you enjoy ’em.

Kevin:  So, check ’em out and we’ll see you guys soon.  Peace.”

As they start to wrap up their intro, this unfinished mix of The One rises in volume and then we’re into the first verse (“Guess you were lost when I met you”).  At the 1:27 mark, the song’s chorus ends cold and immediately after, you hear the beginning of Show Me The Meaning Of Being Lonely.  This time, we get past the brief instrumental break after the chorus and just as Richardson sings the opening line of verse two (“Life goes on as it never ends”), it fades out completely at 2:46.

At 2:47, you’ll hear the start of I Need You Tonight.  The song fades out at pretty much the exact same point as it does on the …Baby One More Time album, just as Carter finishes singing the first line of the second verse, wrapping up the mystery sneak peek at 4:23.

I haven’t been able to confirm if this banter is the same found on the All I Have To Give single.  (One superfan on Twitter believes it is but wasn’t completely sure and I never heard back from her again.)  The CD is long out of print and it’s been extremely difficult to find an online version of the unlisted preview, despite numerous, fruitless searches.

So, just to recap, for half a year, there were three separate mystery tracks promoting an album that would go on to become one of the biggest of the decade.  Astounding.  If only Imajin had this much institutional muscle behind them.

At the time, Spears wasn’t happy about doing her own Backstreet Boys promo.  As she told Entertainment Weekly in their March 12, 1999 issue, “If I would’ve known I had a choice, I wouldn’t have done it.”

What’s curious is why she was ordered to do it at all.  All I Have To Give sold 900,000 copies while the Night Out videotape/CD package sold three million.  The most astute fans were already aware of Millennium’s future release.  But, then again, young attention spans can be fleeting.  Jive Records were clearly not taking any chances.  These mystery ads ultimately paid off enormously.

“It worked,” Jezebel writer Maria Sherman told The Ringer about her own reaction to hearing the secret sales pitch on …Baby One More Time.  “It’s really cheesy marketing that I think nobody would enjoy now, but it really did work.  And I think I’m not alone in getting into them that way.”

She was 7 in 1999.  Today, now a professional journalist, she’s planning a book about boy bands in 2020.

An open fan of the group, Spears certainly didn’t hold it against the Backstreet Boys themselves who, according to Billboard, weren’t even aware of the mystery pitch for them on …Baby One More Time.  When she met Richardson in the late 90s, as she later recalled in a quote reprinted in the 1999 book Britney Spears: Backstage Passes, “He was so beautiful–he’s prettier in person than in pictures.  And I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness,’ I didn’t know what to say.”  The other guys didn’t do anything for her.

In turn, they were big fans of hers.  Each member has their own favourite Spears song.  (Tellingly, none of them picked …Baby One More Time, a song the group rejected as a possible recording of their own for Millennium.)

It’s not clear how many copies of …Baby One More Time feature the Millennium presentation.  Andrew Fromm, who wrote I Need You Tonight, speculated to Billboard Magazine in May 2019 that it’s probably only on “the first 200,000 copies”.  That seems a little low considering how well the CD was selling in those early months of 1999 not to mention the gap between its release and Millennium’s monstrous debut.  Regardless, if you buy a new copy today, the mystery track is not on there.  (Good luck finding a used edition.  It took me years (and two purchases) to finally snag one with the Millennium preview.  You’ll have an easier time finding it on YouTube.)

After failing to make Imajin a significant crossover act, along with the earlier mystery track ads on All I Have To Give and Selections From A Night Out With The Backstreet Boys, Spears’ personal promotion for the quintet four months before their return to a much brighter spotlight clearly had some kind of impact.  Millennium entered Billboard’s Top 200 Album Chart at number one selling a still remarkable 1.1 million copies, a record that would eventually be significantly broken the next year by *NSYNC.  (No Strings Attached would sell over two million its first week.  Adele has the current record with over three million.)  On that same chart, …Baby One More Time had actually moved up from number six to number three after almost 20 weeks in release.  Both albums would remain in the Top 10 for much of the rest of the year.

As of this writing, twenty years later, Spears’ debut album has now sold over 12 million copies in America alone.  Millennium’s overall total is over 15 million.  Unlike with Imajin, Jive Records correctly deduced that Spears’ new audience in early 1999 were either already fans of The Backstreet Boys to begin with or, like Sherman, after having heard the mystery track on …Baby One More Time, easy converts.  This unusual approach, to an undetermined extent, had finally worked.

In 2017, both started lucrative residencies in Las Vegas.  Spears was scheduled to return for a second run in early 2019 but real life has gotten in the way.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Saturday, December 21, 2019
12:34 a.m.