Boys Like Girls: A Look Back at Their Hits

Four-piece, rock leaning pop-punk band Boys Like Girls brings its Soundtrack of Your Life Tour to MGM Northfield Park on Wednesday, April 1, and the tour name serves as a callback to the Boston-born band’s wildly popular 2008 Soundtrack of Your Summer co-headlining tour with Good Charlotte. It also references a lyric from “Thunder,” a catchy fan-favorite love song on the band’s self-titled debut album.

The Soundtrack of Your Life Tour will celebrate the 20-year anniversary of Boys Like Girls’ debut and the 17^th anniversary of the band’s hit follow-up record, Love Drunk.

“Can we talk about you?” says lead singer Martin Johnson, as he joined a recent Zoom call, tired from a long day of talking about himself.

I told him that I have a rescue dog but no kids, and we small-talked about Cleveland before diving into the two iconic 2000s albums that occupied younger Millennials’ and older Gen Zs’ childhood MP3 Players and iPod nanos.

The concept of the Soundtrack of Your Life Tour is just that — capturing nostalgia.

Boys Like Girls will play both its 2006 debut and Love Drunk front-to-back in order.

“If I could go back in time, and bottle whatever cocky…Like, I knew it all. I know nothing now. I knew everything when I was 18. I was 100 percent convinced that I was gonna get a major record deal. I was 100 percent convinced that I was ready,” says Johnson on the early days of his music career. “And I had no idea what I was doing. I knew six chords. I knew how to play a couple of open tunings. I didn’t know what key I was playing in; I just knew how to clamp a capo on [a guitar] and look down at the tuner, and I could tell you what key I was in.”

A teenage Johnson took that young confidence to an attic apartment in Taunton, MA, where he got to work with his band, Lancaster, made up of three of the four founding members of Boys Like Girls and two other members.

“It was like a makeshift kitchen with a microwave and a mini fridge, and we hung up a curtain and cut a wall-to-wall carpet that we found on the street,” recalls Johnson. “We cut it to size and created a third bedroom. It was basically like a hose that was hung up, for our shower, into like a bucket. We just started practicing every day. I graduated high school early and stopped having to make that 90-minute trek.”

At that point, his performance experience consisted of what he could collect as a theater kid and playing in childhood bands since he was 11, forcing his friends to form one and his cousin to record a four-track tape demo, but Johnson and his counterparts managed to put together some DIY club tours.

“We were like turned down by every single label, including Columbia, who we ended up signing with,” Johnson shares. “We had turned in ‘Thunder’ and ‘Top of The World’ [from the band’s debut album]. We turned in the acoustic demo [of ‘Thunder] that Columbia ended up buying back and putting out, years later.”

Johnson and his bandmates just kept trying and ended up writing about half of Boys Like Girls’ debut album in that apartment.

He went on to play a few label showcases alone with an acoustic guitar. Johnson thinks playing, rather than being a frontman without a guitar in his hand, helped his case. He played another Columbia showcase, but this time, added smash hit “The Great Escape” to his offerings.

“It was sort of instant. The conversation was like, ‘But it’s a band, right?’ We had passed the sort of John Mayer, Howie Day, Ryan Cabrera 2004 moment. We were stepping into 2005, 2006. And I just called up the same guys. And I was like, ‘I got news. I think there’s some interest from Sony,’” says Johnson. “They knew that one of the guys had passed on Lancaster. So, I was like, ‘Can you guys grow out your hair? You know, so you look different.’ That’s why [drummer] John Keefe and [original bassist] Bryan [Donahue] had long hair in early Boys Like Girls. It was so that nobody thought that they were also in Lancaster.”

Boys Like Girls pounded the pavement, booking several opening slots, this time with in-ear monitors. But the “baby band” still had a lot to prove. Columbia ended up demoting Boys Like Girls from a full deal to a contract with distribution.

But this only helped the band’s traction.

“It was uncool to sign with a major label at the time,” says Johnson. “Nobody cares now, but they cared then. So, we made up a label, and we called it Red, ’cause it was the distribution company, so we could be on the MySpace charts as an independent artist.”

All the while, the band was touring and touring and touring.

“All of a sudden, we were spit out onto 2007 Warped Tour, and the label decided to bring ‘The Great Escape’ to radio. They launched ‘The Great Escape’ into Top 40 radio, and we didn’t really know what that meant,” says Johnson. “I knew it meant that we had done 10 tours and sold a bunch of records on our own. We were selling, you know, 50 CDs a night at these shows and a bunch of T-shirts. I didn’t realize what was happening was, simultaneously, people were hearing about us on the internet and MySpace and they were going out and buying our CD, or at least, downloading it illegally online.”

“The Great Escape” ended up going number one on MTV’s influential Total Request Live.

“We were rocketed out of a cannon,” says Johnson. “Our lives changed forever.”

But the good times didn’t last forever.

After the first two albums were a certified success, things began to shift in the music industry.

“I was looking at the trajectory of my career, and I was seeing that it wasn’t just our band that was getting pulled off the shelf,” says Johnson. “It was pretty much everyone with a guitar. And we were kind of the last man standing in the time that music indicated culture. And I could feel culture indicating music, especially with ushering in the EDM world and that really pop space.”

The band’s country-leaning third studio album, 2012’s Crazy World, didn’t perform well commercially.

“I just started making music for other people, and we sat in the dark for twelve years, until it was time to come back with [2023’s] SUNDAY AT FOXWOODS.”

It’s hard for Johnson to recall writing a lot of Love Drunk. He was busy enjoying his newfound fame, and presumably, numbing some of the pressure of a sophomore album with a lot of eyes and ears on it.

“We were focused on making an album, but we were really, really focused on being rockstars, and the extracurricular activities that came with that, in the form of pills and powder,” says Johnson. “And whatever bottles we could shove in our face dictated the Love Drunk era of our career. That record was us trying to mimic ’80s hair metal, and I can hear it on the record.”

Johnson calls out the “unique choices” on the record, production-wise and goes on to say that a handful of deep cuts from the first two records have never been played live before and will likely never be played live again.

“Someone Like You” has been a particularly emotional moment at tour rehearsals.

“It was a cry for help that I’m not sure if anybody heard,” says Johnson, who has been sober since 2010. “They would [have] rather hire[d] an EMT to go on the road with me than send me to rehab.”

But Love Drunk also has its wholesome moments.

“She’s Got a Boyfriend Now” pays tribute to yearning after a high school sweetheart and another ex from 2007.

“I felt pretty undatable,” says Johnson. “I’m on this sort of proverbial island. Like, I live in a pirate ship. I can’t focus on anything, really, other than myself. It feels very strange. And I feel like an alien descending on the universe, when I’m walking into a normal situation. People are looking at me strange. You know, the band was on MTV, which gave it a different air as you walk into the room; people recognize your face.”

Johnson recalls the sonic evolution of the track, as well.

“We put out a Garage Band demo of it, that you can hear the bus going. Like, you can hear the back of our bus on one of our early tours,” says Johnson. “It used to have this different style riff, and when we got into the studio, we ended up kind of changing it.”

Another Love Drunk highlight is Johnson’s duet with Taylor Swift, “Two Is Better Than One.” The two singer-songwriters wrote the track, the final song in the Hannah Montana movie, You’ll Always Find Your Way Back Home, and “If This Was a Movie,” which was on the Deluxe Version of Swift’s 2010 album, Speak Now, together.

Speak Now is famously Swift’s only album that she wrote without co-writers. Swift also penned the two additional tracks on the deluxe version and all six additional songs from 2023’s Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) solo, making Johnson the only co-writer of the entire Speak Now discography.

“I learned more from her as a songwriter than some of the songwriter pros, like career songwriters that aren’t artists. Even back then, she was 18, and I was learning. I remember trying to write a song about who knows what, and she was like, ‘My fans don’t wanna hear that.’ And I was like, ‘How do you know that?’” recalls Johnson.

“She’s an impressive brain, and it’s been a joy to follow her career.”

Since coming back to touring, Johnson has been playing the ballad acoustically as the encore at shows, but that is nixed for this tour, as the band chose to stick to track list order.

“I mean, I don’t know that Taylor will be able to come on our whole Soundtrack of Your Life Tour,” he jokes, “But we’re definitely gonna be playing the song without her.”

As excited as Johnson is to play these records that played such a large role in people’s lives, front to back, it’s also a relief that Boys Like Girls won’t have to center their careers around the band’s old discography, moving forward. Putting out new music, Johnson hopes that they feel less “indebted to their old selves.”

“I’m really proud of these records,” says Johnson. “I’m really proud of the kid that made them. I was embarrassed by that kid for a really long time. I think, at this point, it really doesn’t even feel like these are our songs anymore. At this point, they’re yours.”

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