This is the transcript of Kevin's portion of "The One on Ones" interview that was aired on MTV as an Ultrasound episode following the premiere of "The One" on TRL. I didn't include the rest of the Boys' transcripts, but you could read them at, either, MTV or, one of my favorite Backstreet sites, Backstreet Millenium.

Source: MTV
05.04.00

John Norris: We've been talking to each of the guys about their particular segment in the "Show Me The Meaning Of Being Lonely" video, and I knew you had lost your dad, but I really didn't know a lot of the circumstances around it until I read more of what went into the video. Can you talk about your decision to include the home movies in the video, and how tough a thing that was for you?

Kevin Richardson: My part of the song, "Life goes on..." whenever I sing that part, it just makes me remember how, when my father passed away, how I wanted everybody to stop what they were doing and recognize it and realize it kind of stops, but life goes on. I think that's a realization that I had back then. It's like, when my father died, it made me realize, "Life goes on." Life keeps going with or without you. So I really wanted to include him in the video, or at least the story. I mean, I had some home video footage that I thought about using, but I was like, You know what? I don't want to see [my father] on MTV. But I wanted to include that, and that's just me in a hotel, just reminiscing about me and my dad and watching all the old home movies.

MTV: How old were you?

Kevin: I was 19 when he passed away. It was nine years ago. I was living in Florida, and I got a phone call from my mom that my dad wasn't doing too good. He had had an operation before that, but they didn't want to worry me. They didn't tell me it was cancer. They just said he had a problem with his colon and with his intestine, and they had to take a polyp out or whatever, but they didn't tell me it was cancerous, because they didn't want to freak me out. So she had told me that it was cancerous, and he had been going to chemotherapy. And I was just like, Oh, God. So I moved back home and within about a month or two, he passed away.

MTV: Wasn't he the one who really encouraged you to go to Florida in the first place?

Kevin: Yeah.

MTV: Was there any one point where you decided that you wanted to become a performer? Was there any performer or record that inspired you?

Kevin: When I was 9 years old, we moved to this camp, and there was a piano in like the mess hall where they had, like, activities and stuff, like Ping-Pong tables and stuff like that. It was the first time I ever had access, any time I wanted to, with a musical instrument. So I used to just go down there and tinker around on [the piano] every now and then. And I started picking music out that I was hearing on the radio. My dad was walking by the mess hall one day, and he's like -- he used to tell his friends this -- "I heard the prettiest sound coming out of the mess hall. I was like, 'Who is in there?'" And he was like, "I opened the door, and it was my son on the piano." A good memory of my dad.

But yeah, I just started tinkering around on the piano by ear. I can't read music. I wish I had [learned]. I took some piano lessons, but when I took piano lessons... I mean, she had me playing "Mary Had A Little Lamb," and I'm reading it when I could already play "Jump" by Van Halen and stuff by ear. So I would just buy tapes and records. I listened to Prince all the time. When I was a little kid, when I was like five or six years old, I listened to my mom and dad's Ike and Tina Turner records and the "Saturday Night Fever" soundtrack. I would just lay in the living room with the headphones on and just lay there and listen to it. So music, it's like I've just been trying to follow my heart, and it's just like music is always going to be a part of my life, no matter what I do.

MTV: You mentioned the line, "Life goes on...," and it does, but in different ways. Brian seems to have gone through a reevaluation of what's important as a result of his surgery and the way that management treated it and the way that he had to get back out on the road and this and that. Can you talk about that a bit? Have all you guys reevaluated what's important?

Kevin: I mean, when Brian went through that, it made me reevaluate definitely, because I'm a work-aholic perfectionist, and sometimes it gets out of control. And at this point, right before Brian went in to the hospital, you know, we already had a tour. We've got a tour booked, and we've got to do the tour. And if our management would have planned with us instead of planning by themselves, we wouldn't have been in this situation. If it would have been a team effort, if we would have all planned together, Brian wouldn't have had to move his surgery twice. But he did, and that's sad. An open heart surgery that has to be moved twice? I mean, that's ridiculous. Here I was: "Well, we got this deadline over here, and release this single, and we got to shoot this video, and we got this tour booked, and we can't postpone it, because if we postpone it, we're gonna lose momentum. We're trying to break it to the U.S., etc., etc." And when I saw him after he got operated on, walking down the hallway with a friggin' IV hooked up to him, that opened my eyes. Yeah. It made me realize what's important. And if you don't have your health, and your family and your happiness, your career don't mean sh**.

MTV: And Howie was saying, with his sister, he actually had to ask himself whether he should have left the road and phoned home and seen her.

Kevin: Isn't that weird?

MTV: Yeah, it's pretty messed up when the priorities are like that.

Kevin: Exactly.

MTV: It seems like, and success certainly adds to this, you are able to call the shots now as far as how you approach things.

Kevin: Well, we want to have a balance, you know. We don't want to end up on "Storytellers," all screwed up in 15, 20 years. We want to be in this business for a long time. We want to be writers, producers, label owners, whatever. We've learned a lot, and we want to be healthy and happy, and you have to have a balance.