Need weekend plans?
The best things to do around the city, delivered to your inbox.
Boys Like Girls returns with a new album after 11-year hiatus – and is back in Boston this week
"I always knew in the back of my mind that we would make another record someday."
Formed in Massachusetts nearly two decades ago, Boys Like Girls rose to pop rock prominence in the late 2000s with hits likes “The Great Escape” and “Love Drunk.”
Now, after an 11-year break from producing new music, the band is back and all grown up.
Boys Like Girls released its fourth studio album, “Sunday at Foxwoods,” on Friday via Fearless Records/Concord Records and this week, the band returns home to Boston for a show at MGM Music Hall at Fenway.
Though rumors circulated on the internet for years, Boys Like Girls never officially broke up, frontman Martin Johnson told Boston.com in a recent Zoom interview.
Advertisement:
“We’ve been on sort of a break for so long – sort of an unannounced hiatus for so long – without ever breaking up,” he said.
Despite what fans may have wondered about the band’s future, Johnson said, “I always knew in the back of my mind that we would make another record someday.”
While the band took a pause, Johnson continued writing songs and earning production credits for artists including Jason Derulo, Daughtry, and Avril Lavigne.
He also took time to find himself, realizing that his career started young and so much of his identity was tied up in the band. For so long, “I personified myself as Martin for Boys Like Girls and I didn’t know who I was outside of that,” he says.
Advertisement:
Under his solo project The Night Game, Johnson released two albums and toured with John Mayer.
At the same time, he continued to put song ideas aside for a future Boys Like Girls project.
Other band members also kept busy. Drummer John Keefe made music for commercials, became a black belt in jiu-jitsu, and opened up his own gym, Johnson said.
Paul DiGiovanni, the band’s founding guitarist, “started an incredible career in country music, which he’s still working on – and has a new beautiful baby girl,” Johnson added.
Even as they went about their individual pursuits, the members stayed connected throughout the hiatus.
“We did a 10-year tour in 2016, played ourselves 12 shows, stayed best friends, hung out every Sunday watching football, kept a group chat going the entire time,” Johnson explained. “We just didn’t make a record, you know.”
The band started out young, after all.
Recalling the early days
Johnson launched his music career while he was still a student at Andover High School, where, at 17, he recalls writing songs at 2 a.m. in a bedroom on the third floor of his childhood home, “of one of those triple-decker Boston townhouse kind of condos that was built in the 1800s.”
After graduating high school, Johnson lived in a series of “bottom of the barrel apartments” with his fellow band members, including at least one place “where we were showering with a hose and John was sleeping in the kitchen.”
Advertisement:
In those early days, “a big show for us would be like Old Town Hall in Andover or the Norton American Legion,” Johnson said.
Soon enough though, the band was playing Vans Warped Tour, headlining shows with other popular 2000s bands including Good Charlotte, and co-writing songs with Taylor Swift. The latter resulted in “Two Is Better Than One,” a hit single off the band’s second studio album, “Love Drunk,” and “You’ll Always Find Your Way Back Home,” a track featured in “Hannah Montana: The Movie” (2009).
When asked if he could have predicted back then that Swift – now a 12-time Grammy Award winner – would go on to be so successful, Johnson said, “100%. She’s the most tenacious person I’ve ever met. And, you know, I don’t think she would have ever accepted ‘no’ for an answer in life.”
On tour: Some old, some new
Returning to the stage now, Johnson and other members are cognizant that fans may want to hear all their favorites from the late 2000s, and the band is more than happy to oblige.
Though those songs are different for Johnson and other members of the band – they are no longer the teenagers that produced them – they see the experience of performing on stage as much bigger than them now.
Advertisement:
“It’s been one of the most beautiful experiences of our lives,” Johnson said of performing for fans of Boys Like Girls.
Referencing all that is happening in the world and how negativity and anxiety about the state of the world can affect a person, Johnson explained, “people need music more than ever, and they need to escape more than ever.”
“People, I can feel, are digging for a time that they felt free, and they felt alive,” Johnson said. “And maybe that time was 2008 and there’s a cassette adapter with a long cable running out of it to an iPod with a bunch of music they illegally stole off LimeWire. And it’s a playlist of Boys Like Girls songs and their windows are down and they feel infinite and free.”
So if the band’s job is to deliver that experience to them again in 2023, then Boys Like Girls wants to do just that, Johnson explained.
“So, for 95 minutes and 30 songs, everything feels OK? I mean, what an amazing responsibility as an artist and a musician,” he said.
The band worked hard to establish the setlist for this tour, recognizing the importance of balancing fan favorites from over the years with their new songs and even some covers, the singer said.
Johnson added that he tries not to talk too much on stage, letting the music fill up most of the show.
Since kicking off its “Speaking Our Language Tour” last month, the band has found that fans have been really receptive to its new music, showing their love for singles like “Blood and Sugar” and “Cry.”
“I think it’s so exciting to be able to fit these new songs in the set and not have it just be a complete nostalgic play,” Johnson said. “But it also feels so great revisiting these songs after so many years and finding pride in them.”
Advertisement:
In a lot of ways, the band made this new album for them “to just get back – get back on the tour bus, get back into the studio as best friends,” Johnson said.
Though the band didn’t know what to expect from fans, the response has “been beautiful to watch” as fans embrace both the old and the new, the frontman said.
Massachusetts will ‘always be home’
Though Johnson does not currently reside in Massachusetts – he goes back and forth between Park City, Utah and Nashville – “It’ll always, always, always be home for me.”
His father lives in Maine now, so that has become home, too. But Massachusetts will always be a special place, he explained. Just a couple years ago, when Johnson married his wife, they even planned their honeymoon on the Cape and Nantucket, knowing home was exactly where they wanted to be.
The New England native also still loves Boston sports and typically tries to attend a Red Sox or Patriots game whenever he returns to the area.
Generally though, he said, “I always find myself just walking aimlessly around the city, sort of cloaked in this essence of youth of what it feels like to be back with a town that really built me and shaped me as a man – not just, you know, the suburbs of Andover, but also the city of Boston.”
Johnson also enjoys biking around the city. Last year, he rode his bike across the country from Oregon to Maine, cycling roughly 4,400 miles in total, he said.
Advertisement:
“It’s really nostalgic for me to bike along the Charles and around the town and sort of find a route and pick it and just sort of breathe it in,” he said.
“There’s no town like it,” Johnson said of Boston. “Not one. No town like it.”
Boys Like Girls returns to Boston this week with a show at MGM Music Hall at Fenway on Thursday at 7 p.m. Tickets are still available to purchase via Ticketmaster.
Listen to “Sunday at Foxwoods” below:
