When your band turns into a punchline to a bad joke, there are very few places to turn. Take what happened to
New Kids on the Block. Like most teen pop phenomena, they suddenly dominated the charts for a few years, and then just as quickly they crashed to earth, their name eliciting nothing more than a smirk by the same audience who bought their records only a few months before. After 1994's
Face the Music, the group members went their separate ways, some disappearing (
Jonathan Knight), some turning to acting (
Donnie Wahlberg), the rest eventually returning to music at the turn of the century. Of those three, only
Joey McIntyre appeared to work hard to develop a distinct personality outside the group. He dipped his toe back into the water with 2001's
Meet Joe Mac, which at the time sounded as if he was attempting to ride the teen pop wave at the time, but in retrospect shows signs of the melodic, mature pop stylings he developed a few years later.
McIntyre began to come into his own when he hooked up with songwriter/multi-instrumentalist
Emanuel Kiriakou, who co-wrote a handful of songs on
Meet Joe Mac and became a full-time collaborator not long afterward. The breakthrough came on 2002's unheralded
One Too Many, a ridiculously fun and loose live album. It was filled with wisecracks, flubs, and covers, yet also displayed a limber musicality, one grounded in classic pop songwriting and more in line with modern adult pop than the dance-pop that brought
McIntyre his fame. It was the rare live album that pointed the way to the future instead of recapping the past, and those who heard it wondered where
McIntyre would head next.