Backstreet Boys - I Want It That Way -fuentez -... (ESSENTIAL ◆)

In 2017, a Reddit user claiming to be Fuentez’s nephew posted: “My uncle Carlos played the arpeggios. He said Max Martin made him redo it 40 times until it ‘felt like a heartbeat.’ They paid him $800 and a pizza.” The post was deleted, but screenshots remain.

Martin’s reply, legend has it, was a shrug: “It doesn’t matter. It feels right.” Backstreet Boys - I want it that way -Fuentez -...

“I Want It That Way” began as a ballad. Martin and Carlsson had a chord progression and a title: “I Want It That Way.” Carlsson later admitted the phrase was deliberately ambiguous—a breakup song where the narrator insists on emotional distance, or a love song about accepting a partner’s flaws? Both readings work. Neither is fully satisfying. That’s the point. In 2017, a Reddit user claiming to be

In early 1999, before the final version was recorded, a session guitarist named (according to uncorroborated forum posts from ATRL and UKMix) was brought in to play the song’s clean electric guitar arpeggios. His contribution, some claim, was the “spark” that turned the demo into a hit—adding a Latin-tinged warmth to the sterile Swedish production. It feels right

“I Want It That Way” endures because it resists closure. It is a song about wanting without specifying what—a perfect metaphor for desire itself. And in that endless ambiguity, there is room for a forgotten session player named Fuentez, a misprinted CD, and a million teenage fans who didn’t need logic. They just needed to believe.

Others insist “Fuentez” is a misspelling of , a Swedish session musician who worked on Millennium ’s “Don’t Want You Back.” But BMI and ASCAP databases show no “Fuentez” attached to “I Want It That Way.”