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Boys Like Girls were born to be rock stars
| 14-11-2007 17:31 | 1 reaction(s) | add reaction | add news |
 It’s common to hear people who make music professionally say they always knew they wanted to write music, perform and make records for a living.
When Martin Johnson, singer/guitarist for the Boston-based band Boys Like Girls, offers a similar story, the specifics he provides show that he’s not quoting some musician’s cliché.
“Basically, I’ve been wanting to play music since I was born,” Johnson said in a phone interview. “By the time I was in second or third grade, I was forcing my friends to learn instruments and stuff to play in bands. [I was] going out and jamming and organizing little band practices when I was basically in fourth grade. So I’ve been wanting to do it forever. It’s just always been my dream.”
In fact, well before the time Johnson was roping his grade school friends into rehearsals, Johnson was already fascinated with songwriting.
“When I was seven, my dad bought me a little acoustic [guitar],” he said. “I never took lessons. The only reason I wanted to play guitar was to write. So as soon as I got a guitar, I was writing little songs, writing little lyrics and poems and stuff. Literally when I was 7 years old I started writing. You know, it was just for me and pretending I was a rock star, but I could never stop. So basically I never played music to play other peoples’ songs. I learned to play guitar for me and to play my own songs.”
It may not be long before Johnson has to stop pretending he’s a rock star. He’s getting close to living that job description.
Boys Like Girls has slowly, but surely, been making a name for itself over the past two years. And with the recent exposure that came with having “The Great Escape,” the lead single from its self-titled debut CD, reach the top spot on MTV’s Total Request Live countdown, the group has started to gain some serious commercial momentum. Sales of the CD, which was released in August 2006, have now topped 200,000 copies in the United States.
Those accomplishments have earned Boys Like Girls its first headlining tour (with dates running until the end of November), with the Audition and All Time Low supporting.
It wasn’t hard to gauge Johnson’s feelings about the tour. The word “excited” came up five times within a single answer as he discussed the headlining opportunity.
“Basically, the last few years of our life have been spent with 14 or so support tours in a row,” he said. “Being able to do it ourselves finally is an amazing feeling. We’re so excited to be able to play a longer set, longer than a half hour, to go out and kick it and do it our way. It’s going to be our fans there. We’re just really excited for it.”
Because Boys Like Girls has only one album out, fans won’t see a marathon set from the group. But Johnson said the extra stage time will allow the group to add a couple of songs from its CD that have never been played live — plus a little extra surprise.
“We’re going to do one cover,” he said. “We’re going to leave it a surprise. But we’re doing a cover and about 10 or 11 songs from the record.”
Obviously, the step up to headlining status hasn’t come overnight for Boys Like Girls, but the band did enjoy a rapid arrival on the national scene.
Things started to come together when Johnson, then a 17-year-old high school junior, met drummer John Keefe.
“We [met when we] were on our way to a do-it-yourself tour, which was organized by two separate bands. We were in two separate bands,” Johnson said. “Basically, by the end of the tour, we had just become complete and total best friends, just absolutely best friends, and had to play music together. And John has known Bryan [Donahue — bassist] since they were really young. That was four years ago. We started playing then.”
The lineup for Boys Like Girls was soon completed with the arrival of guitarist Paul DiGiovanni, whom Keefe and Donahue met while producing a demo for a friend.
One of the first moves, of course, was to demo some songs, including “The Great Escape,” which the band posted on its MySpace page in 2005.
In short order, the song was topping the purevolume new artists chart, and the band’s roster of MySpace “friends” was growing by leaps and bounds.
Perhaps more importantly, the songs immediately got noticed by a few people in very useful places, such as Matt Galle (booking agent for Taking Back Sunday and My Chemical Romance) and record producer Matt Squire (who’s worked with Panic! At The Disco).
“Within a couple of days, we were getting e-mails from booking agents and [record] labels and Matt Squire,” Johnson said. “We were just totally and completely blown away and just overwhelmed by it.”
By the end of 2005, Boys Like Girls had begun touring, and soon a deal with Red Ink/Columbia records was signed, followed by recording sessions for the debut CD with Squire serving as producer.
Johnson credits Squire with playing a key role in helping the band improve its music during the course of recording. Although Johnson and his bandmates had scores of song ideas, few of them had been developed into completed songs ahead of the sessions. The band ended up finishing and recording eight of the pre-existing song ideas and then writing four other songs in the studio to complete the album.
“[Squire] truly became a fifth member of Boys Like Girls for that brief amount of time,” Johnson said. “With his help we just really feel like we became who we are and became ourselves.”
What Boys Like Girls has become is a promising new band that plays highly catchy, straight-ahead guitar pop, all filled with Johnson’s open-hearted lyrics, most of which involve romantic themes of some sort.
The sound doesn’t break any ground, but the hooks and smart instrumental touches in up-tempo tunes like “The Great Escape” and “Dance Hall Drug” are good enough to hold their own alongside the music of other popular pop-rock bands, such as Fall Out Boy, the All-American Rejects or Plain White T’s.
Even though Boys Like Girls has been touring nearly non-stop for two years already — Johnson estimates he’s been home for a total of two weeks during that entire time — he said the band will be more than happy if it needs to stay on the road through 2008 to promote the debut CD.
“We love it, we love it,” Johnson said. “We’re so passionate about this record, and we’re such best friends. We love touring, and we want to just play for the rest of our lives. We love seeing the world, and we love playing our music every night. It’s our favorite thing to do, and we’re so fortunate to be where we are. We’re excited. Our dream for this record is to get it to as many people as possible. And if that means touring for another year on it, we will.”
by Alan Sculley
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 0  @ 01-02-2008 22:29 babie | 28 posts
| I love how i talks about his passion  It was wonderful to read!
I really love Boys Like Girls, and their CD, i can't say it enough, their songs, they never fail 3 |
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