BOYS LIKE GIRLS It seems inherently appropriate that Boys Like Girls drummer John Keefe would be working in the studio only moments before our interview. The 29-year-old has been making music for as long as he can remember, and for the last six years, that has most often taken the form as drummer for the pop-rock band. Boys Like Girls skyrocketed to stardom in the later half of the last decade, and then shocked fans when they announced a very unexpected break in late 2011. Though music history has proved that exiting members and solo attempts have steered most bands off course irrevocably, Boys Like Girls’ members always stayed strong individually — and ultimately reunited for a new EP and album in late 2012. “We’re all best friends,” John says. “We talked to each other every week no matter what.” Boys Like Girls — known by their fans as BLG — was formed in 2005 in Massachusetts, but John’s love for music began much earlier. “When I was 12, the band instructor brought a snare drum to school and told people about drums,” he says. “I was hooked ever since. John played in several local bands during high school, before ultimately meeting would-be Boys Like Girls lead singer Martin Johnson in this mid2000s. “I met Martin on a DIY tour,” John says. “It kind of just came together organically.” The pair found lead guitarist Paul DiGiovanni and bassist Bryan Donahue soon after. “I had played in a folk-y project with [Paul] and I had also been in a post-hardcore emo type of band with Bryan,” John says. “We all just played in and around New England.” And while the foursome’s interesting band name, Boys Like Girls, seems like it should have a lengthy backstory behind it, John insists that there isn’t one. “It just kind of made sense at the time,” he says. “It was like, ‘Oh yeah, this sounds pretty cool. There’s no band called Boys Like Girls. Why not give it a whirl?’” Shortly thereafter, the band started a PureVolume channel to get their sound out there, and eventually uploaded rough demos of two songs that would later become two of their biggest hits: “Thunder” and “The Great Escape.” The channel took off with fans and industry executives alike and the band soon began touring — including slots on tours with Cute Is What We Aim For, All Time Low and Butch Walker. In 2006, their eponymous Boys Like Girls record was released, selling over 500,000 copies in the U.S. alone. The success of the album catapulted BLG into stardom and landed them spots on countless 6
tours over the next three years. After being asked what the moment was when he knew things had changed for the band, John hesitates. “Doing MTV’s Total Request Live and hearing your song on the radio,” he says. “Those moments are just crazy.” The first radio success John is referring to is none other than BLG’s breakout hit “The Great Escape,” which the band heard on the airwaves for the first time while traveling on tour. “We were in the Midwest and Martin was driving during a late overnight drive,” John remembers. “All of a sudden, he just started screaming and yelling. I was like, ‘Holy shit!’ I thought we were crashing.” But ‘crashing’ couldn’t be further from the band’s reality. BLG would soon embark on their first co-headlining tour — with Good Charlotte, no less — for the Soundtrack of Your Summer Tour in 2008, which they would follow up with their 2009 sophomore record, Love Drunk. The album included the massively successful “Love Drunk” — Martin’s then-girlfriend Ashley Tisdale even appears in the music video, which has been viewed over nine million times on YouTube — and a melancholic yet sweet duet with Taylor Swift, “Two Is Better Than One.” John says that even now, those songs receive some of the warmest receptions on tour. “[The crowd] always goes nuts on ‘The Great Escape’ and ‘Love Drunk,’ but it’s really cool to see all the cell phones and lighters go up on ballads like ‘Two Is Better Than One,’” John says. In late 2009 and into 2010, it seemed like Boys Like Girls were on the top of the world, even making international news as one of the first acts to perform at Asia’s very first MTV World Stage Live concert in Malaysia. But in early 2011, the band surprised fans by announcing that they were taking some time apart to work on individual projects, with Martin even debuting new solo material on the radio in June of that year. “We were just tired,” John says of their decision to take a break. “We needed a minute to try some other stuff. We’d been on the road for so long, for six years straight, so it was time to hang it up for a minute.” But John had never really considered an alternative career path to music. “What would I be doing?” he mused after being asked what he would’ve done had the band never reunited. “I don’t know…” After several minutes, he ventures, “Maybe I’d be fighting mixed martial arts or something. My brother’s a trainer for MMA fighters so I imagine I’d probably be doing that. I actually love that stuff. I go and see some of those guys when I’m home and screw around.”