AJ McLean says daughter hates this Backstreet Boys song with a ‘passion’

Unfortunately for AJ McLean’s daughter, the Backstreet Boys’ hits are still larger than life.

The founding member of the classic boy band told PEOPLE at Monday’s iHeartRadio Music Awards that his daughter, Elliott, has a sharp distaste for “I Want It That Way,” one of their signature hits. “My oldest daughter hates that song, hates it with a passion,” he said. “Because she gets teased at school when she walks into school.”

McLean shared, “When I drop her off, the boys [sing the lyrics], ‘Tell me why,’ and she’s like, ‘Stop doing that’… And then I start doing it to embarrass her because that’s what dads do.”

Formed in 1993 by McLean, Nick Carter, Howie Dorough, Brian Littrell, and Kevin Richardson, Backstreet Boys achieved major success with their self-titled debut album, released in 1996 and containing the hit “Quit Playin’ Games (With My Heart).” The sophomore follow-up, Backstreet’s Back, arrived the next year, but it wasn’t until their third studio album, 1999’s Millennium, that the band broke through the pop stratosphere.

The songs “Larger Than Life” and “Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely” proved to be enduring hits for the group, but it was the album’s lead single, “I Want It That Way,” that would prove such an irresistible earworm that it would go on to haunt the next generation of Backstreet kids.

McLean joked that daughter Elliott, who changed her name from Ava in 2022, does “secretly” like some Backstreet Boys songs. The band still “love that record. We love showing the meaning,” McLean said.

About that meaning. In 2018, the band settled the debate over what many perceive to be some ambiguity in the song’s lyrics — namely what “way” do they want it, and what is “it” — on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “Don’t wanna hear you say that you want heartaches and mistakes…or to be 2 worlds apart. We don’t want you to want ‘it’ that way — that’s the way we want it…for you to not want it that way,” the band’s official account responded to a now-deleted question by Chrissy Teigen.

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Yet just two years later, McLean admitted that the song “makes no sense.”

“There was a completely different version of the song that actually made sense and thankfully we decided to go back to the one that didn’t make sense,” he joked, telling Watch What Happens Live host Andy Cohen, “I don’t think it would’ve been as big as it was, had it made sense.”

McLean announced last year that he and wife Rochelle DeAnna McLean were separating after 14 years of marriage.

“It is with deep love and respect that we have made this decision,” McLean wrote in a joint statement with the mother of his two daughters. “Our focus now is moving forward in the healthiest possible way with friendship and coparenting our girls at the forefront of this next chapter. We appreciate your kindness respect and privacy at this time.”