INTERVIEW WITH: BRYAN DONAHUE of BOYS LIKE GIRLS
APRIL 08, 2008 - VIA PHONE
BY: KRISTIE TAFT



On Tuesday April 8th, I spoke to Bryan Donahue, bassist of Boys Like Girls during some down time during the Avril Lavigne tour. After a finger slip (the interview started a bit behind schedule because I couldn’t dial his number right) Bryan and I talked about how touring life is going, their crazy fans, how writing for the new record is coming along and some things we have to look forward to in the land of Boys Like Girls.

Hey Bryan, Kristie from Trash The Stage, how are you?

Bryan: Hi Kristie I’m doing great, how are you?

I’m well, thanks. Firstly, you guys are smack dab in the middle of the Avril tour. How have things been going thus far? –Any interesting happenings?

Bryan: Yeah, we are at about the halfway point of the tour and it’s been pretty cool. We’ve never done a tour this big and this long. This tour is just under two and a half months long, but before this we were in Australia so if you count that, we’ve been touring for three months now. It’s really cool. It’s completely different from what we’re used to doing, which is like House Of Blues and smaller venues and clubs like that. On this tour we’re playing anywhere from five thousand to fifteen thousand capacity venues every night. When looking back to the first show date, we walked in and as we checked everything out we were like “Holy crap, how is there supposed to be so many people here at one time?” It’s definitely a cool thing.

That’s got to be such a cool feeling. –Where are you guys today, actually?

Bryan: For sure We are in Kingston, Ontario. Which is roughly about two or three hours outside of Toronto.

Okay, yeah I’m familiar with it. It’s about four hours from me. Are you guys playing a show today or is it an off day?

Bryan: No, it’s not an off day, we have to play tonight. We actually don’t have a day off for about another week and a half.

Wow, that has to be a little harsh.

Bryan: Yeah, the last few off dates that we did have, we were supposed to spend up in here in Canada, but we went back into the states to Pennsylvania and Virginia to play a couple college shows, which were cool because they had about two thousand people there each day. It was a nice breath of fresh air, especially being in the middle of the tour, to be able to go back and play to a smaller sized crowd.

Yeah, I took notice of you guys filling in some dates here and there. You guys are playing a college near by, Alfred State, in a couple days.

Bryan: Yeah, right We’re going to be there in like three days.

So, that’s both great and hectic all at once. [Laughs] Now, I attended both the Buffalo show and the in-store the other weekend. Are you guys doing a lot of in-stores on this tour?

Bryan: Yes, we have. Mostly in the states. In Canada we’re still chugging along as far as promo goes. While we’re here in Canada, it’s like an in-store or signing here and there, where as in the states in either every day or every other day, where we have some sort of press scheduled.

Right, so now I have to ask you, are your fans usually as crazy as they are in Buffalo? Because that in-store was insane I mean literally, the girls were out of control!

Bryan: [Laughs] No, that in-store knocked us all on our ass When we got there, they were like, “There are this many people here,” and we were like “Wait, how many? ” We had our manager’s assistant on the road with us for a couple days and we had him take our video camera up there to film to get the crowd reaction. During our acoustic set, the girls were so loud that it turned off the camera It said “noise disturbance” and shut the camera off. No joke, that’s how loud they were!

Wow, that’s crazy. Out of the in-stores I have attended, yours was definitely the loudest. Now, moving away from touring and all that, it’s been a good two years or so since the release of your debut. Have you guys begun writing for the new album?

Bryan: Yes, actually we have. We started writing loosely around Warped Tour, last summer. We had a handful of ideas. When we did our fall headlining tour, TourZilla we had a sound check every night which was good, because we would get up on stage for about an hour and we’d be able to toy around with our ideas and new songs during our sound check and record them. We just took a line from the front of house and plugged it into our garage band on our computer.

That is a pretty crafty idea.

Bryan: It’s definitely easier than going into a studio and rough demoing. It also saves us time and money. At this point, we’re still throwing some ideas around and still doing some acoustic songs for a rough demo. I think we have close to twenty something songs that are done or almost done completely.

Wonderful. With all the baggage that comes with touring, such as press, in-stores, meet and greets, after parties and what have you, how do you maintain focus while writing on the road. How do you even have time do write on the road?

Bryan: Honestly, that fuels the writing because it gives us more experiences and stories to tell. Martin has written a handful of songs that deal with us being on the road and us getting to hang out with our fans and things like that. So, it definitely gives us something to work for as far as lyrics and such. It is very busy between the press, the in-stores and the tour itself, but we do have a lot of down time from when we wake up until we play and from the time after we play until we go to bed. Martin will often sit down, whether it would be in our dressing room or on our bus and just kind of work on some stuff and we go back and forth with it.

When it comes time to begin recording for the follow up, what kinds of things would you like to change or improve upon while looking back on the debut?

Bryan: Change or improve upon. I don’t know. We’ve always been the type of guys and type of band to put all four our heads together and write and create music that we’re really proud of and we hope that other people will really like. I wouldn’t change a thing about how our songs are crafted as far as the songs we have and things like that. I would like to see the second record take the next step from the first record. The first record was us growing up, telling a story from all through high school until we graduated. Then it was like, “Okay, well what do we do with our lives next?” I’d just like to continue that feeling and that story. Like have a running story throughout the record like we did in the first one. I think that would be kind of cool.

When do you foresee yourselves going into the studio?

Bryan: We’ve been talking back and forth with our label and manager and it looks like we’d be going into the studio towards the end of fall. So, hopefully it’ll be finished before Christmas.

Good to hear. You guys are set to begin filming a video for “Thunder” in May. Though it may be somewhat early to tell, do you have any ideas as to how you want the video to turn out?

Bryan: It’s definitely going to be exciting. It’s also going to be a lot different than our first two videos, I know that. We’re looking around for directors right now. We know the treatment of the video is going to be like. We just need it to be written up by someone who can write stories better than we can. [Laughs] It’s definitely going to be a cool, summery video.

I know that you guys are holding a contest, where the fans create their own video for the song. Have people already begun submitting any videos?

Bryan: That’s been up on our Myspace for a little bit now. We’ve gotten some stuff in. I haven’t checked out any of the videos yet. I know the deadline is, I think at the end of this month. We are slowly going to sit through all the videos that get submitted. Each week we’ll sit down and say okay, this is our favorite from this week and then the next week we’ll say here are our two favorites from this week and so on. At the end of the month when the tour ends, we’ll pull up all our favorite videos and go from there. It’s going to be really cool, because whomever wins gets to document the “Thunder” video on the set. If there was something like that for one of my favorite bands I listened to while growing up, I would have been so excited I would have been like, “Oh my god, I get to go to their set ” Not even just to hang out on their video set, but to document it as well. It’s a pretty neat thing.

It is a pretty great way to connect with your fans. –The band formed in 2005 and have already accomplished so much. From signing a major record deal, to selling out venues across the country on multiple tours (even overseas ) that seem to never end. It seems like things just keep getting bigger and better. How are you guys taking it all in?

Bryan: You’re right, a lot has happened in the past few years, which is crazy to think of when we all look back. Martin, John and I used to have a tiny little apartment in a shitty town in southern Massachusetts and now we’re here, there, the UK and Australia and places like that. It’s a lot to take in. We definitely keep each other grounded. We don’t get sucked up in it and we don’t forget where we came from or who we are. It’s so funny. A lot of people will talk a lot of shit about us changing and things like that.

I do, actually hear a lot about that.

Bryan: Honestly, we’re not. We’re the same exact people we were when the band first started. My motto is, if someone is going to say something like, “Oh, he’s not who he used to be,” then that person never knew me in the first place. If they’re saying someone like, “I saw them at this venue with so and so many people and now they’re playing this huge venue with this amount of people,” well then you know, the band is growing, we can’t control that and that doesn’t determine who we are. That hasn’t changed, it won’t change and we’re still the same exact people from when this band first started and from before this band even started.

Continuing on with your success, with having accomplished so much already, how do you feel you guys have evolved both as a band and personally?

Bryan: Well, we definitely have smartened up a lot. [Laughs] On our first couple of tours, we used to do some stupid little pranks. On our first tour, we used to treat our van with complete disrespect and everyone would get trashed and obviously, sometimes we would get sick and now we have to be like, “Okay, let’s not do certain things and stay clean on the bus.” We now know what to do and what not to do as far as touring goes. Like, dealing with other bands and productions. Especially on this tour with Avril Lavigne. Her whole camp has definitely taught us a whole hell of a lot as far as bigger tours go, how bigger and longer tours go dealing with promoters in different countries and so on. We’ve definitely matured, obviously that comes with extensive touring but we’ve also aged three years from when this band first started. It’s a nice growing and learning process.

Definitely. Now, a major part of a live performance is connecting with the crowd. How would you define performing and the importance of live music?

Bryan: Well, you can’t exactly just come out with a record and not play live. [Laughs] I mean, the fans can connect through the music but they want to come out and see how its translated live. It’s like all that energy that was put into making the record, you get to put out again into a live show every night. You get to really tell and show all the fans all the passion that you feel with the music you’ve created with these other guys. I hope a lot of kids pick up on that as well. For us, we’re four best friends who have been in bands for years and years in the past and we love each other’s commodore and we have fun with each other and we have a lot of fun playing live together. We just like to have fun with it. We hope that it translates through our music and our live show.

I just have one more question for you before I let you go. What are the band’s plans after the Avril tour? Martin mentioned you guys going out on a headlining summer tour, “Soundtrack To Your Summer” tour. Any plans for anything before the start of this and when is the tour actually supposed to take off?

Bryan: Okay, this tour goes until May 10th. Then, I think we have a few spring radio festivals around the country before we head to the UK for a couple weeks with our friends, We The Kings and Cute Is What We Aim For. That’s going to be a fun tour. We were just over there with Cartel and The Plain White T’s and we’ve known those guys for a while now and that was a blast. This is going to be smaller venues from when we were there with the T’s. That tour is going to be a whole lot of fun as far as shows with no barricades, especially with debauchery and the drunkenness because the age over there is eighteen. The last time we were there we were like, “Wow the UK kids are loud Oh wait, that’s right. They’re all drunk ” [Laughs] We’re there for about two weeks with them and then we come home from almost a full month, which we’re going to not take completely off, because again we’ll have a few more radio festivals, but mostly during that time we’ll be finishing up demoing up new songs for the record. Then the sumer tour starts up at the beginning of July I believe.

Also, what kind of crowds are you looking to play? Are you looking at smaller clubs or something like amphitheaters?

Bryan: I’m not sure. It’s being booked right now. We’ve seen some venues where our booking agent is holding for some cities. So far, right now, it’s hard to say until he figures everything out. But, as of right now it looks like a mix of venues. It depends on the city, their markets and what’s available. That tour should be officially announced sometime this month, with a full list of venues and the line up and everything like that.

Anything else you'd like to throw in?

Byian: Yeah, actually. Thank you to everybody who reads this and thank you to all of our fans for their continued love and support. Come see us on the road and come say Hi! Thank you to you, also for wanting to do an interview.

Well thank you, actually, for taking the time to answer our questions. See you soon!

Bryan: You’re welcome, take care!

For more information on Boys Like Girls, visit the band's Myspace.