Connelly: Did you guys ever dream that you would get to work with someone like Stevie Wonder on the song "Something Like You"?

All: Yes.

Chris: We always dreamed about it. But that's it. You just dream about it.

Connelly: What was it like for you, Justin?

Justin: That was crazy. It came very spur of the moment. We came in the studio and we wrote the song with a harmonica part in mind and that's what I told the record company. I said, "We have to get him to do it." I mean, that's the other thing that he's famous for. Besides his incredible voice, he's killer on the harp. Somehow, the record company got a hold of him and he came in, and it was definitely a surreal moment.

Connelly: Was he familiar with any of your stuff? Did you get to talk?

Justin: Yeah. He's such a nice guy. Very humble. The thing that really impressed me is he's such a perfectionist. He stayed in there until he got [his solo] exactly like he wanted.

Connelly: Well ["Pop" producer] BT has been talking about what perfectionists you guys all are in the studio, too.

JC: We've always expected the best out of each other. We're our own worst critic, so we're gonna beat it up until it's right, at least in our eyes. We're gonna make it as good as we can, always. Everybody that we encounter usually says that we're hard working and it's great to get it from people that you look up to as well.

Connelly: How does this compare to the last time you put a record out? You had the huge SoundScan number for the first week. What number will you be satisfied with for first week sales this time?

Lance Bass: We're satisfied already with the response that we've had to it. Last year it was crazy, because we did so much promotion for the album. It was a perfect time in history to do it. This time, we've been on tour and we haven't had time to promote it. We promoted it by doing a show in every city. It's great, because people are really paying attention to the album. Yeah, there's a lot of hype of, "Oh, is it gonna break the sales record?" It's not gonna break the sales record, most likely. [RealVideo]

Chris: Last time we were not even talking about the first-day sales. We didn't even think about that. We were thinking about how much fun we had putting out an album that was us. That's why we called it No Strings Attached. We had no clue it was gonna do as well as it did. We were hearing from other people who were like, "You're gonna be lucky if it sells 100,000 copies." And then when the numbers came back ... one million or something the first day. We were just blown away. We didn't even know what to do.

Justin: I was like, "The week's not over, how do they know that?" I thought they meant that we were going to sell a million records in the first week. And they were like, "No, no, no, the first day. I was just like, "Whoa!"

JC: We still don't really understand that one. I mean, it's really not fathomable.

Justin: People probably don't think we think about this kind of stuff. But if you really wanna get technical about it, the whole country's economy is down 15 percent, so if you put the calculations in to sell somewhere between 1.6 to 1.8 million copies, that would be the equivalent of selling 2.4 million [copies] when the economy was a little bit stronger last year. But all that stuff, we really don't take it into consideration. Like Chris said, we put out music that we feel is us and we feel is taking our sound to a different place. ... We wanna stick around for longer than the first week.

Long distance dedication to Britney, much love for AJ and "the biggest band in the world?" ... NEXT >>>