#tu es...mon feuuuuuu-uuuuu/la seule...désiiiiir-e

[caseuoiseau]

The songwriter, Max Martin, has written or contributed to the lyrics for a huge number of pop hits since the 90s. Max Martin is Swedish, and English is not his first language, a fact which feels incredibly obvious once you know it.

It's not my intention to mock him for this--his English is miles ahead of my Swedish!--but this sincere vagueness and novel interpretation of English grammar are a noticeable quirks of his songs, especially his earlier work, so much so that trying to tease apart the individual words and phrases of them is a task designed for a Greek tragedy. His songs are the aural embodiment of "no thoughts just vibes."

Citation: Slate's 2014 article/highlight reel of some of Martin's most baffling lyrical Decisions:

They don't bring it up in that article, but Martin is also responsible for Britney Spears's "...One More Time," and I'm sorry to anyone in whom something was awakened with those lyrics, but our good friend Max thought "hit me" was contemporary American slang for "call me."

I feel like this adds a thin, waxy coating of surrealism in a genre whose worst examples can lean hard toward bland vapidity, and I love that Backstreet Boys lyrics are still making people question their sanity 25 years on. But mostly I can't get over the thought of all of these singers--many of them already really big before they worked with Martin--puzzling their way through these lyrics enough to figure out how to sell the shit out of them.

did anyone ever tell the Backstreet Boys why