Lance Bass and Justin Timberlake attend ‘EVERYTHING I THOUGHT IT WAS’ Album Release Party on March 14, 2024. – Credit: Jerritt Clark/Getty Images
This month marks 24 years since ‘NSync released “It’s Gonna Be Me” as the second single from their third album No Strings Attached — and Justin Timberlake hasn’t known peace since. Every year, when April comes to an end, the singer is reminded of that time he went into the studio and sang “me” with an off Swedish twang that made it sound like he was saying “May” and indicating the passage of time. The lyric goes viral around this time every year, but no one grills Timberlake more than his own friends.

“POV: your friend mispronounces a word once and now it’s a national holiday,” Lance Bass captioned a recent TikTok post. In the video, the singer recruits his husband Michael Turchin to be in a skit where he reads off a poem: “Michael, roses are red/April is gray/But when you wake up tomorrow…” As the poem trails off, the camera pans to Bass who is standing in their kitchen with a mess of pasta noodles on his head (stolen from Turchin’s bowl). Not only will he never let Timberlake live down his lyrical mishap, he’s making sure that his bandmate is also forever haunted by his poor hair decisions.

At least Timberlake is in on the joke. On April 30, he stitched an Instagram Reel where the original creator asked: “What’s a word you pronounced incorrectly one time and it still haunts you to this day?” Looking only slightly defeated, he answers: “Me.”

Last year, ‘NSync appeared on the popular interview series Hot Ones to answer hot questions and eat even hotter wings. Timberlake used the platform to try to explain the origin of the lyrical pronunciation and clear his name. “I sang, ‘It’s gonna be me,’” the singer recalled, “and [the producer] was like, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’ He was like, ‘It’s may, MAY.’”