As a longtime songwriter, artist and musical theater fanatic, JC Chasez is aware of the ability of a very good story that strikes an emotional chord.

That’s why he was floored when his pal and Golden Globe-winning musician Jimmy Harry confirmed him a theatrical adaptation of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein by his late mom, playwright Barbara Field. “What I found really appealing and very inspiring about the piece is her ability to make it more direct and accessible in terms of the emotion,” the *NSYNC star tells Billboard. “It wasn’t just about a big monster and this kind of, like, growling thing that I initially had the impressions of in films and when reading Frankenstein. I guess I was just young, and just didn’t really have the time to settle in and really dig into the material. Recently, I was able to spend some time with the material and really get a good read and a good understanding of how emotional it was.”

From there, Chasez and Harry took the story’s themes of affection, duty, loss and the human situation and channeled it into a significant inventive mission: a 16-track musical theater idea album referred to as Playing With Fire, which provides to Fields’ theatrical adaptation that initially written as a play and never a musical. “I was a little bit apprehensive at first. It’s like, you start messing with somebody family,” Chasez says with amusing of musically constructing off of Harry’s mom’s mission.

Chasez disregarded these nerves quickly sufficient, as Playing With Fire is, in plenty of methods, a fruits of the famous person’s inventive abilities. In addition to writing the mission, Chasez additionally lends his vocals to a variety of tracks on Playing With Fire, alongside singers Cardamon Rozzi and Lily Elise. The album marks his first main musical mission since his 2004 solo album, Schizophrenic. “Playing With Fire touches on almost everything that I like,” he fortunately admits. “I love a good sci-fi film, so you get that aspect, and I love how music can make you so emotional in a different way. Obviously, I love pop music, so I love the fact that you can sing and dance together in musical theater. It was just a great opportunity to bring all of these things that I’ve really enjoyed together into one space.”

Furthermore, he was pleasantly stunned at how a centuries-old story touches on themes that also exist at this time, contributing to simply how unifying the human expertise is — even when Frankenstein’s monster isn’t human, per se. “Shelly was communicating these points hundreds of years ago that we’re still wrestling with today. I was just going, ‘How did you know?’ How did she write something that is so appropriate for now and then? Then, how did Barbara Fields make this so accessible to me? I felt like I had a direct line to the emotions that Shelly was trying to convey because of the way that Barbara framed it.”

He continued, “When we first started writing, we thought that this is about humanity, technology and the dangers and the morality of ‘Just because you can create something, should you?’ We’re still dealing with all of these for questions with encountering different technologies and AI and all that. We were tinkering with the idea, but we started becoming interested in the way Barbara framed it, as a conversation between the creator and his creation, which we framed as a conversation between a father and son getting to the bottom of their issues, their denials, their neglect and the consequences of those things.”

Ultimately, Playing With Fire is a narrative of development and actual connection, and in accordance with that, Chasez has ambitions for the mission to achieve as many individuals as potential. “This is the beginning of a journey to make something that will hopefully end up on a stage that people can sing live every night and communicate to audiences,” he says. “That’s why this technological discussion is so relevant now. I love the fact that real people will be singing these songs. I want it to connect to humanity.”

Playing With Fire is out by way of Center Stage Records on Oct. 25.