Sometimes when you meet an artist whose songs you’ve been binging for quite a while, there’s something a little surprising about the man behind the tunes – he’s softer than expected, or smarter, or more goofy than the heavy matters of his music. It almost doesn’t feel like the same person whose voice you’ve been listening to all this time. You think to yourself, “Huh. That’s not at all how I imagined he’d be.”
And then there are musicians like Ben Thornewill, who sounds and speaks and thinks exactly like the music he creates.
One-third of a nearly decade-old eclectic pop trio known as Jukebox the Ghost, Thornewill skillfully hammers out the band’s trademark piano backbone in every song, sometimes a fluttering classical part and other times via full-out dramatics. At live shows, one can witness his fingers fly across the keyboard and bounce up and down with fervor. He’s also one of the band’s primary songwriters, sharing lead vocals with guitarist Tommy Siegel.
Generally speaking, their songs prominently feature intense emotional earnestness (“Don’t treat me like the past, don’t let me fall behind”), always expressed with a certain degree of levity (“Good idea, good idea, you keep me waiting ‘round”) and an overarching motif of electric fantasy or doom (“It starts with a flash and a blast of plaster and glass as an earthquake came floodin’ through my living room”).
When asked about his personal songwriting process, Ben tells me: “I’ll come up with one lyric, and then from that one lyric everything will cascade down,” he says. “Generally I’m sitting at the piano or the synth or whatever it happens be and playing and singing along and sort of waiting for that moment where my brain and everything sort of synchronizes and something magical happens.”
His everyday speech is incredibly lyrical – the candidness mixed in with a bit of lighthearted bounce and a dash of “magic.” His songs and musical style are immediately recognizable within the way he talks.
He laughs when I point this out to him.
“You know, I think when art is at its best, it is on sort of various levels representing or embodying the songwriter or the performer,” he tells me.
But as authentic as Thornewill certainly is – he as a character is remarkably reminiscent of his own work – the word “performer” is key here. Interestingly, Jukebox the Ghost is of the rare breed of musical artists that don’t necessarily write about themselves in their music. Rather, they weave together stories of imaginary people or situations to describe an emotion or idea they’ve encountered in real life. It’s less a contradiction and more a balance.
“I’ll write usually from a fictional standpoint with very real references in mind,” he says. “But I would have trouble drawing, you know, ‘this is about this moment in time with that person’ or however it is.”
I ask if it’s weird to sing songs that aren’t necessarily about himself.
Thornewill thinks for a moment and then responds: “No. I think I actually forget what is and what isn’t. Some songs are hugely meaningful and emotional but don’t have a direct relationship to whatever something happened in my life or me or whatever, and some songs that are like, ‘this is about this moment in time,’ and doesn’t mean so much or doesn’t end up sort of hitting that emotional chord for so long.”
He compares his process of performing these songs to the way an actor might perform in a play: “They’ve done it a hundred times. If they’re doing it right, it doesn’t mean the emotion’s gone. I think you have to really believe what you’re singing and doing.”
For Thornewill, believing in the music should be easy. After all, it’s been his entire life since childhood. Born and raised in Kentucky, Thornewill started playing the piano at seven years old and “did classical piano really furiously when I was a kid while everyone else wanted to be astronauts.” A little on the nerdier end, Thornewell says he had very few meaningful friends before his junior year of high school. Finally, he shipped off to Washington, D.C., to study classical music at George Washington University.
Thornewill knew he wanted to start a band as soon as he got to college, so he did. He met Siegel and drummer Jesse Kristin in 2003 while they were all students at GW, which gave birth to an early iteration of the band as early as 2006. The boys played under the name The Sunday Mail before deciding to change it with a democratic vote: Siegel liked the word “jukebox” from a Captain Beefheart lyric, Thornewill liked the word “ghost” from a Vladimir Nabokov passage and Kristin wanted to be a “the” band like The Killers or The Strokes. With a cutesy doodle of a ghost done by Siegel (who actually just released a collection of his tour drawings called Van Doodles in December), Jukebox the Ghost was born.
“There’s stuff in the early songs that feels very college almost,” Thornewill said. “Like – idea, idea, idea! Thought! Thought! Lyric! Stuff! Let’s put it in a score crescendo! Let’s be crazy!”
Definitely true. See: Let Live and Let Ghosts, the band’s first full-length album, which dropped in 2008 and featured wild, racing apocalyptic epics, dramatic tempo changes within single tracks, plenty of clever transitions and just a ton of youthful creativity in general.
As it goes, GW turned out to be the exciting birth place of what are now some of Jukebox the Ghost’s biggest hits. Thornewill wrote “Good Day,” for example, when he was 19 years old, and it’s still one of their go-to jams for nearly every tour.
I inquire – it strikes me as strange and perhaps even uncomfortable to be 29-going-on-30 and still singing songs you wrote when you were 19.
He breathes out a “yeah” almost immediately, resonating but thinking.
“I don’t feel emotionally distant from that song. It still resonates in the exact same way,” he says after a beat. “It’s weird to think about, but it doesn’t feel like 10 years ago. […] I feel like I’m 10 years more mature than I was when I was 19, but it doesn’t feel like it was that long ago. It still feels recent and real.”
He sounds almost a bit surprised at the revelation as he says it, thinking out loud. “I think it’s good.”
Since their college days, they’ve put out three more records, the latest of which dropped in October. Called simply Jukebox the Ghost, the album marks a departure from the band’s earlier, more theatrical works to a cleaner, more well-crafted pop sound.
“I think for us as a band, there was sort of two goals. One, we want growth. We want to reach more people. We want to build. And we also want to stay authentic and do things that are going to please our fans,” Thornewill says of the new record. “How do we make a record of pop songs, like a record you can put on at a party and listen to all the way through, and still be weird and do strange arrangements and strange instrumentation, vocal stuff, whatever it happens to be?”
The self-titled outing was the product of these tough questions, and it seems their solution worked well: Their new sound drew the attention of Cherrytree Records, the label that houses power acts like Ellie Goulding, LMFAO, Sting and Marianas Trench and known for taking semi-weird pop bands into the mainstream. They signed with Cherrytree in January and rereleased Jukebox the Ghost with an extended disc of Thornewill improvising all 11 songs as classical piano pieces.
Throughout their careers, the boys have toured with bands like Barenaked Ladies, Jack’s Mannequin and Motion City Sountrack. Ingrid Michaelson will be the next to join that list – the trio joins her on a national U.S. tour beginning at the end of June, along with close friends and labelmates Secret Someones, with whom they’ve recently collaborated on a cover of “Walk Like an Egyptian.”
The boys of Jukebox the Ghost, Michaelson and the ladies and gent of Secret Someones actually all come from the same Brooklyn music scene, Thornewill tells me.
“I’ve met [Michaelson] a couple times,” he says. “I stayed at her house once and slept on her roof after her roommate and I had gone to a LOST party, and she didn’t know I was there, and we saw each other on the roof, and it was strange and a little embarrassing.”
But even after all the adventures and having essentially intended to do live this sort of life since he was seven, Thornewill tells me he still finds the whole music thing surreal.
“It’s very strange that I am in a band,” he says. “I’m in a state of almost arrested development. I am not normal.”
He doesn’t sound like someone who’s been doing this all his life. But he does sound kind of like a Jukebox the Ghost song.
“I love it.”
Can’t wait until June to meet Thornewill and the gang? Jukebox the Ghost will headline the 2015 Hop Sauce Festival tomorrow in Beach Haven, NJ. Rumors have it there might even be a Jukebox the Ghost-branded hot sauce floating around… Visit www.hopsaucefest.com for ticket info.
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