Joey Fatone revealed his kids have a thing or two to catch up on when it comes to his musical catalog.
While chatting exclusively with Us Weekly about his back-to-school campaign with Great Clips, Fatone, 47, recalled the time he discovered his daughter Kloey, 14, was a secret Backstreet Boys fan.
“We were at a wedding. She was definitely, I think, probably eight, maybe seven years old, and ‘Bye Bye Bye’ came on,” he shared. After his friend convinced him to grab the mic and sing along to the ‘NSync track, Fatone tried to get Kloey to join in.
“[I] had the microphone, and then, I was like, ‘Kloey, you know it?’ She’s like, ‘No, I don’t really know it.’ I’m like, ‘OK, whatever,’” he told Us. However, things took when the Backstreet Boys tune “I Want It That Way” came on.
“She knew every damn word,” Fatone revealed. “Why? I don’t know, but she knew every word. And I went, ‘Wait a minute. Why do you know their music and not ours?’ And I think that was the joke, to me, I guess. So, she learned Backstreet Boys.”
While the two boy bands were competitors in the late ‘90s and early ‘2000s, the artists have grown close over the years, with Fatone currently traveling across the country with BSB’s AJ McLean on the A Legendary Night tour.
Fatone told Us that the “cool thing” about performing today versus back in the day is his ability to “pick and choose the jobs that I want to do.” He explained: “[The A Legendary Night tour is] only basically on weekends. So, we pick and choose when those weekends are. [On] weekdays, I’m home with my kids. So, it’s been absolutely amazing. It’s been great.” (Fatone shares Kloey and his eldest daughter, Briahna, 23, with his ex-wife, Kelly Baldwin.)
Despite Kloey’s BSB moment, Fatone said his daughter is “getting more” into ‘NSync’s discography and has even caught the music bug herself. “She’s into musical theater. She’s now learning more about music. She wants to do more shows,” he shared, noting that he took her to see several Broadway shows during a trip to New York City.
“It was just cool to see that, to where she’s excited about stuff like that” he continued. “And that’s something that I was excited about when I was a kid. So, now I’m like, ‘Something I like? Yes!’ Like, ‘Let’s go!’ So, I’m excited to see what her path is.”
Kloey recently got to put her acting skills to use alongside her famous father in Great Clips’ new back-to-school campaign. The salon chain teamed up with popular teacher social influencers, a.k.a. Student Slang Translators, to help parents better understand modern-day teen vocabulary.
“I am still learning the new slang, to be honest with you,” Fatone noted. “There’s a lot of things that I still don’t know, a lot of terminologies that are happening nowadays, where back in the day when I was young, it was more like, ‘That was rad, dope mint.’ That kind of stuff.”
In addition to him and Kloey getting stylish new haircuts, Fatone told Us he signed on to film the ad to better connect with his daughter. “It was because of those definitions and those things in the dictionary,” he said. “It really sold me more on it because it’s hilarious that they actually have people there that will be able to help you know what your kid is saying if they need to decipher between those words of being, whatever it is. What is it, ‘rizz?’ ‘No cap?’ ‘Caught in 4k?’ I don’t even know half the words, but I’m learning.”
With reporting by Christina Garibaldi
