I Want It That Way: The Boy-Band Smash Whose Lyrics Don’t Add Up

By Dan Cohen · Published 2026-06-27

I Want It That Way, the Backstreet Boys’ 1999 juggernaut, is one of the most beloved pop songs of its era — and one of the most cheerfully nonsensical. Listen closely and the lyric contradicts itself: it seems to be against wanting it “that way,” then for it, gesturing at heartbreak and distance without ever resolving into a story you can actually follow. It sounds profound and means, on inspection, almost nothing specific.

The famous “wrong” version

There’s a well-documented backstory: an alternate version with more coherent lyrics reportedly existed, but the version that made it out — the one the world fell in love with — kept the words that sounded best rather than the ones that made the most sense. The group went with feel over logic, and feel won by a landslide.

Why it doesn’t matter

That’s the lesson of it. The melody, the harmonies and the soaring emotional sweep are so perfectly constructed that the brain happily ignores the fact that the sentences don’t connect. It’s proof that in pop, sound and feeling can completely override meaning — that a song can be a masterpiece of communication while communicating nothing in particular.

What it measures like

On our scale it’s a warm, mid-tempo build — gentle in the verses, opening into a big, anthemic, harmony-stacked chorus made to be sung. Full profile on its song page.

I Want It That Way appears on the Backstreet Boys’ 1999 album Millennium; the well-known account of its contradictory lyrics and an alternate version is widely documented. No lyrics are reproduced.