Thursday, March 20, 2008
By GLENN GAMBOA
The band’s first appearance on MTV’s ‘TRL’ told the musicians they’d arrived.
The guys from Boston’s Boys Like Girls are starting to get the hang of this whole rock star thing — the TV appearances, the video production and the holiday radio shows.
Thanks to the success of the quartet’s breakthrough single, the pop-rock anthem “The Great Escape,” and its current follow-up “Hero/Heroine,” Boys Like Girls finds itself playing sold-out arenas on bills with some of the year’s biggest artists for the annual best-of revues.
“It’s really cool to walk out of your dressing room and run into bands you’ve been fans of your whole life,” said Paul DiGiovanni, the band’s 19-year-old guitarist. “It’s over in the blink of an eye, but it’s still totally insane.”
However, Boys Like Girls — DiGiovanni, singer Martin Johnson, drummer John Keefe and bassist Bryan Donohue — is getting used to lots of “totally insane” things. The band, which formed in the fall of 2005, while DiGiovanni was still in high school, was recently chosen as MTV’s artist of the week, meaning a whole week of performances and interviews sprinkled through the channel’s programming.
“It’s so weird turning on the TV and seeing yourself acting like an idiot,” DiGiovanni says, laughing as he calls from the band’s tour bus in Texas, somewhere between San Antonio and Austin. “It doesn’t really freak me out, but it’s still a surprise.”
For DiGiovanni, it was another MTV milestone — the band’s first appearance on “TRL” — that became the first sign Boys Like Girls had actually arrived.
“I remember running home from school and watching that every day,” he said. “It was the biggest thing in the world. I think that’s the time I’ve been most nervous.”
As Boys Like Girls gets more touring under their belts, though, being on stage in front of larger and larger crowds gets even easier. After the current string of radio shows and a break for the holidays, Boys Like Girls will head to England to open for another pop-rock breakout artist, Plain White T’s, and then return to the states for an arena tour with Avril Lavigne.
Though Boys Like Girls’ eponymous debut still has plenty of singles left to roll out, DiGiovanni said the band is already working on material for the next album. “At every sound check, we hammer out something new and then record it at the end,” he said. “We’ve added a ton of little parts to our other songs too. We want to give people who’ve seen us a bunch of times something different each time.
“It’s all so much fun,” DiGiovanni continued. “Everything is still so new that we’re just enjoying whatever comes up.”