All net proceeds of the track will benefit No Kid Hungry.
New Kids on the Block is giving fans new music to enjoy during quarantine. On Friday, the boy band dropped the track "House Party," an anthem about making the best out of this time of self-isolation due to the coronavirus, that features Jordin Sparks, Naughty By Nature and Boys II Men and Big Freedia.
ET's Nischelle Turner recently spoke to the guys -- Donnie Wahlberg, Joey McIntyre, Jordan Knight, Danny Wood, and Jonathan Knight -- via Zoom, and they opened up about how the star-studded track came to be after an online chat with their fans.
"On the chat a fan said, 'Are you doing new music?' And I said, 'I don't know, maybe some. One of our producer friends is watching this and they'll send us a song and who knows what could happen,'" Wahlberg recalled. "Well, it happened. One of my producer friends [Deekay Music] was watching, he sent me a song immediately. I was literally upstairs at the kitchen table, I sat down, opened it up, and I called him on FaceTime and we wrote the song right there. I just started singing ideas, we wrote it."
From there, Wahlberg said that the "groove hit" him and "words were sorta coming out on their own." After he and Deekay Music finished the track, Wahlberg "sent it to the guys, they responded "great, and then we just started recruiting friends."
Those friends lined up in droves to be involved with track, with some A-list celebs even opting to lend their dancing skills instead of their singing voices to its accompanying video.
"My brother, Mark [Wahlberg], who doesn't like to be on musical things after Marky Mark days, [got involved]," Wahlberg said of his younger brother. "I said, 'Listen does your daughter wanna dance in our video? But you gotta stand there with her.' He said, 'Alright, fine, I'll do it.'"
Nicole Scherzinger, Ken Jeong, Derek Hough, Carrie Underwood and Wahlberg's wife, Jenny McCarthy, also filmed videos from their homes to be included in the music video.
"I got a text out of nowhere from Carrie Underwood and she's, like, performing her heart out for this song she barely knows. She has her own kids, and her own family, and God knows what state her life is in, and everyone is really going above and beyond for this," Wahlberg said. "There are moments where I don't know if I want to ask, I don't know if I want to impose on people, but I kind of just keep pushing through, and making the call, and sending the text and the way that they reacted, it just reaffirms love and gratitude because that is what the song is about."
Wahlberg also noted that everyone involved donated their time for free, as all the net proceeds of the track will benefit No Kid Hungry.
"Everybody did it for free and everyone had to build their own studio," he said. "... The effort that people have gone to give and just to spread love, I really can't put it into words. It's just inspiring and I'm just grateful to everyone that has been a part of it. It's just really amazing and the results are awesome. It is great."
For Jonathan Knight the eagerness of people to get involved "just goes to show that everyone's feeling the same way."
"Everyone's feeling kind of disconnected and I think that that's why, like so many people, we're just willing to jump on the track and do something together and join together and have fun. That's what we're all missing right now," he said. "... It's so cool. I think a lot of people are going to get a lot of joy out of it."
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