Inside Aaron Carter’s Rocky Journey After Child Star Success

In his final days, Aaron said on the No Jumper podcast that he was taking all of his medication legally, including Xanax, as well as “taking care of my mental health, working on my relationship.” The interview was released three days before he died.

He shared on the Brett Allan Show in August 2022 the questionable reason why he wanted to follow Nick into show business.

“I wanted to do what he was doing because he would come home with all these stuffed animals,” Aaron recalled. “I remember very vividly all of these toys. He would bring back this stuff and have ‘Nick’ on it. So I wanted to become a singer at the age that I did for stuffed animals. Not money. I wanted my own toys.”

He got money and toys, but he wasn’t sure the trip had been worth it.

Aaron admitted to Esquire in 2016 that being an entertainer made him predisposed to wanting to please everyone—and it was a bummer even when “somebody that has two followers” says something nasty. But that’s also why he shared so much with the world, he said, on Twitter and elsewhere, including on stage.

It bothered him when haters dumped on him, “but as a man, I’m like, you know what, I’m going to focus now on what I have to do and what my message is,” Aaron said. “And I am going to show the world a little bit of what I deal with, because that’s what I deal with. I deal with hate and I deal with love. And I deal with naysayers and people who believe in me. And people who are fans of me and have little blip of me in their mind from a certain time period, and still think that I’m a little boy.”

“But the thing is,” he added, “I missed out on being able to show them any proper transition with me with music because of all the unfortunate things that happened. At least I can hopefully say in the future that it made me a better man, maybe a smarter man.”

(Originally published Sept. 7, 2017, at 2:09 p.m. PT)