Nick Lachey, the 98 Degrees singer who re-recorded his hits to take his voice back

Nick Lachey

Photo: Eva Rinaldi / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 9, 1973 Harlan, Kentucky, U.S.
Occupation	Singer, television host
Known for	Bewitched, Rise: Blood Hunter
Awards	ASCAP Pop Music

In a recording booth, Nick Lachey was trying to sound like the young man who first sang I Do (Cherish You), and finding it harder than writing the song had ever been. “It was actually easier to record the originals than it was to rerecord,” he admitted when 98 Degrees released Full Circle, a record built partly from note-for-note copies of its own hits. The reason was ownership, and he did not dress it up: “These songs defined our career, they’re a part of us, and to have the feeling you can’t control your own identity just seems ridiculous.” For millions of Netflix viewers he is something else entirely, the man in the dark suit who asks couples at the end of Love Is Blind whether they are ready to marry someone they first met through a wall.

Those two figures, the harmony singer chasing his own masters and the television host presiding over other people’s vows, are the same person. Lachey’s career is the story of a voice that kept finding audiences through screens rather than through the songs themselves.

Nicholas Scott Lachey was born on November 9, 1973, in Harlan, Kentucky, and grew up in the Cincinnati area, which he has never stopped treating as home. He studied at Cincinnati’s School for Creative and Performing Arts, and later enrolled at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. With his younger brother Drew he sang in the summer shows at the Kings Island amusement park. The break came in Los Angeles, where Jeff Timmons, another Ohioan, was assembling a vocal group and recruited him. Justin Jeffre and Drew completed the line-up, and 98 Degrees signed with Motown.

That label choice shaped everything that followed. In the 2026 Investigation Discovery docuseries Boy Band Confidential, Lachey described the plan bluntly: “The president of Motown, he wanted us to be the white Jodeci.” The four were sent to Black churches in Harlem and put on a train to Rochester, New York, to work with Jodeci’s DeVanté Swing, whom they found in the studio being fitted for a bulletproof vest. It “really starts to mess with you mentally,” Lachey said. The self-titled debut, 98 Degrees, arrived in 1997 and its single Invisible Man reached No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100.

The R&B crash course paid off once the group stopped imitating anyone. 98 Degrees and Rising (1998) went four times platinum on the strength of Because of You, which climbed to No. 3, The Hardest Thing, which reached No. 5, and the ballad I Do (Cherish You). The same year they sang True to Your Heart with Stevie Wonder for Disney‘s Mulan. Revelation (2000) reached No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and produced Give Me Just One Night (Una Noche), a Latin-tinged No. 2 single. Their biggest chart moment came as guests: Thank God I Found You, recorded with Mariah Carey and Joe, went to No. 1 and earned a Grammy nomination. By the time the group went quiet in the early 2000s it had sold more than ten million records, with Lachey’s tenor out front.

The critical problem with Lachey’s solo career is that it never belonged to him. His first album, SoulO, came out in 2003 while MTV was airing Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica, the reality series that turned his marriage to Jessica Simpson into weekly entertainment. The show made him one of the most recognisable men in America and the album stalled at No. 51. The couple married in October 2002 and their divorce was finalized in June 2006. Seven weeks earlier he had released What’s Left of Me, a record read almost universally as a breakup diary. It debuted at No. 2, went gold, and its title single reached No. 6 on the Hot 100 and won him an ASCAP Pop Music Award. His best-selling solo music was sold, in other words, on the back of the same tabloid story he resented. When Jive Records shelved his third album indefinitely in 2010, there was no second act of songs to fall back on. In Boy Band Confidential he went further back, recalling that on 98 Degrees’ first tour “someone at the label gave us a book. It was the age of consent in every state in the country.” He called the memory “super shady”, and it says a great deal about the industry that packaged four young men from Ohio.

Television filled the gap. Lachey hosted the a cappella competition The Sing-Off on NBC from 2009 to 2014, and in 2021 he won the fifth season of The Masked Singer disguised as Piglet: a professional singer winning a singing contest only once nobody could see who he was. The decisive shift came with Netflix. Since 2020 he has hosted Love Is Blind alongside his wife, Vanessa Lachey, followed by The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On, and he fronts Perfect Match on his own. Nick and Vanessa met when she appeared in the video for What’s Left of Me; they married on July 15, 2011, on Necker Island and have three children.

The band never quite ended. 98 Degrees reunited in 2012, released 2.0 in 2013 and the holiday album Let It Snow in 2017. Full Circle, out on May 9, 2025, on XOXO Entertainment, was its first non-Christmas album in twelve years: five new songs, including Stranger Things (Have Happened) and Mona Lisa, beside faithful re-recordings of Invisible Man, Because of You, The Hardest Thing, I Do (Cherish You) and Give Me Just One Night (Una Noche). The group said it was “definitely” inspired by Taylor Swift‘s campaign to remake her own catalogue.

His 2026 has been almost entirely on screen. The fourth season of Perfect Match, shot in Tulum, premiered on May 13. Earlier, the tenth season of Love Is Blind brought the format to Ohio, his home state, from February 11. In April he sat for Boy Band Confidential beside Lance Bass, AJ McLean and members of Boyz II Men.

The next date is fixed. On October 14, 2026, Netflix opens the eleventh season of Love Is Blind, set in Boston, with Nick and Vanessa Lachey back as hosts. The songs are a separate question: whether listeners stream the 2025 versions of The Hardest Thing or the 1998 originals will decide if Lachey’s late bid to own his voice was worth the effort of singing it twice.

Selected Discography

SoulO (2003)
What’s Left of Me (2006)
A Father's Lullaby (2013)
Soundtrack of My Life (2014)

Tags: singers, pop, Nick Lachey, Vanessa Lachey, 98 Degrees, Jessica Simpson

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