Onstage, Kevin Antunes is used to going unnoticed.

A few feet away, bathed in spotlight, Justin Timberlake wows the screaming crowds. But Antunes—Timberlake’s musical director, digital-audio programmer, and keyboardist—is perfectly content to work his magic in the shadows.

In fact, Antunes, AS’96, beams like a father when he talks about Timberlake, with whom he’s worked since 1998.

“He’s one of the most talented young cats I know,” he says. “I almost cried when he won two Grammys. I was like, ‘That’s my boy!’”

Even in the background, the former music major is indispensable to the Timberlake show.

“I’m kind of like Paul Shaffer on David Letterman,” Antunes explains. “I make sure we’ve got a really good band. I write a lot of the arrangements, coordinate with the show’s producers on a million things, make a lot of sound files and keyboard samples—plus, I play keyboards in the band.”

This musical wizardry has benefited more artists than Timberlake. A list of past Antunes clients reads like a pop-music Who’s Who—*NSYNC, Britney Spears, Enrique Iglesias, Gloria Estefan.

A New Bedford, Massachusetts, native, Antunes never had any formal music training. Even so, a music career was probably his destiny. His grandfather played bass; dad Michael is the longtime saxophonist for John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band; brother Derek plays drums; cousins, aunts, and uncles play instruments, too.

In 1989, after Michael heard impresario Maurice Starr was looking for backup musicians, Kevin and Derek landed jobs as keyboardist and drummer with New Kids on the Block. The brothers toured with New Kids for the next several years.

“I went from playing small jazz clubs to giant stadiums and traveling the world,” Antunes recalls. “It was the best thing that could have happened to me.”

When New Kids broke up, though Antunes worked other gigs, he felt his career was stuck in second gear. He reconnected with Northeastern music professor Bruce Ronkin, now an interim associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences. Antunes had first met Ronkin in the late 1980s at the University of Lowell, where he spent a couple of years studying the music business. After talking with Ronkin, Antunes decided to go back to school—this time at Northeastern.

Going to college was a grind. Married and living in New Bedford, Antunes commuted back and forth. During traffic jams, he’d review classwork by reading Post-it notes he’d stuck on the steering wheel. “That’s where I did most of my studying,” he says, only half joking.

But it paid off. Antunes’s courses in statistics, economics, and copyright law helped him transition into the management side of music. “My time at Northeastern was extremely valuable,” he says.

After school, Antunes worked for two years as a royalty accountant for Atlantic Records in New York. Then *NSYNC manager Johnny Wright, who’d worked with Antunes during his New Kids days, hooked him up with the up-and-coming boy band.

Now Antunes perfects audio files—digital sounds ranging from drums and keyboards to claps and finger snaps—in his home studio and ships them to musicians around the globe. He also writes songs; his “I’ll Be Good to You,” cowritten with Timberlake, was on *NSYNC’s 2000 release No Strings Attached, which in its first week alone sold 2.4 million copies. And he’s currently serving as Janet Jackson’s musical director and keyboard player.

“I like the versatility and variety of this work,” he says. “It’s what keeps me happy.”

Ministry of Sound

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