Interviewer: what's important to you?
Donnie: Well, you know, pleasing myself is important to me. Because for a while, I was running around thinkin' I could please the whole world, and it's like, an impossibility. Even if you were a fuckin' hero and you did everything you were supposed to do to save the world, it still wouldn't be good enough for everybody.
Interviewer: New Kids on the Block have gotten so much publicity...that sets you up for a lot of harsh criticism.
Donnie: I'm like, in the most commercial group in history. And it's understandable that people are going to get some perceptions of you. This group is probably the most not listened to group in the world. People who don't like us don't try to understand what we're about. People who do like us don't try to understand what we're about. People believe what they want to believe, and people don't want to believe that there might be some substance in NKOTB. What can I do?
Interviewer: What was it like, going back to Boston, seeing the guys who knew you before all this?
Donnie: It's weird. I can go home and see a guy who didn't really wanna be my friend six years ago and all the sudden he's like, "You've changed man," and I'm like "No you've changed."
Interviewer: When all these big producers and big showbiz guys see you, dollar signs must flash in their eyes, so they roll out the red carpets and walk on eggshells around you. It's got to make you feel strange, all this fakeness.
Donnie: I used to be pissed. I used to be an angry dude. I was like, an angry kid in the middle of what was supposed to be the happiest group in the world. I'd see people suddenly kissing my ass for no reason and my first instinct would always be "This is bullshit," you know? But rather than spit on things, now I try to learn from it rather than rebel against it. It keeps you ahead of the game.
Interviewer: Does signing autographs make you feel weird?
Donnie: Autographs are totally insignificant and I don't like signing them. But I like making people happy. If some guys says "Oh, my daughter wants this," if it's gonna make this girl happy, no problem.
Interviewer: People must send you crazy stuff in the mail.
Donnie: People will write like "Oh, I tried to kill myself 96 times. Please come over to my house." You get there and they got a party set up and it's just a joke. It's weird. But if it really should be responded to, I try to respond to it.
Interviewer: What kinds of goals do you have? If you had a kid, would you want him to be a star? Would you wish that on somebody?
Donnie: When I first got successful, I was real incomplete because my goals were to please people I had no real business pleasing-complete strangers. I mean everyone wants acceptance-I want acceptance on certain levels-but I've come to understand where my place is. Not that you can't do whatever you want. My goal now is really personal. I spend 16 hours a day sometimes in a recording studio, writing songs, producing songs, and when I'm in there my goal is to make something that pleases me. It's like my brother Marky's album, Music for the People-when I did that, I was just thrilled. Everytime I'd leave the studio I would put my cassette in my car stereo and I would love what I did. It's almost come down to that-it's that simple. Please myself and make myself happy. If that works, I'll share it with other people. And if other people accept it great. If they don't, it doesn't matter. When I started doing my brother's album, I had gone through all that already, and it was the first album I was involved in that I didn't feel pressure to succeed in, and the album went platinum with a #1 song and it felt great. But it wasn't done out of a desire to show the world anything.
Interviewer: Do you look back at the stuff that's been written about you and think it's entirely off base or just straight-up honest criticism?
Donnie: You gotta just understand-this is entertainment. This is like a fantasy world. Newspapers and shit, it's all a fantasy world man. You can't watch the news and say "That's what is." You really have to evaluate for yourself everything you hear and see. You have to weigh it on your own scales. Find out more facts. And you know, the stuff that's been written about me.....you gotta know yourself to get through it all, It was a good experience for me to have that happen to me. I never thought I'd be grateful for some of the stuff people wrote about me, some of the cruel, harsh stuff, but I am. Because it's really helped me grow up. Helped me learn a lot more.
Interviewer: Right now, you're 22 years old and you've already made it. What's left for you? What do you want to do now?
Donnie: There's two sides to what I want to do. One is just to do a whole bunch of stuff like gettin' into films and cartoons. I wanna make a cartoon with my company logo [Donnie D productions), like a Ren & Stimpy-type cartoon. Real wild shit. Not like the NKOTB cartoon. And with the music production I just wanna help all my friends' dreams come true-Def Duo, Northside Boys, Mass Troopers, Addohonas the Phonetic Genius, Spice. We've been together for so many years and they were doing rap while I was just startin' out singing and stuff, and we always said whoever makes it big first comes back and helps the others. That's all I'm really doing these days. So it's cool.