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So I apologize… it’s been a while since I blogged last… BUT i’ve been rather busy, and as I don’t have a laptop of my own yet… i haven’t been able to keep things up to date from the road.

I’ve now been in the South East for almost two months… and it’s been worth it for sure. I’ve met some great players, and great people… and will soon have a very solid band together…

What’s freaking me out at the moment is that I’ve now been working with Ironworks Music for a full year… and it’s been amazing. I never thought i would have this much support from any Record Label I signed to. Time flies when you’re having fun…

So I’m about to head home for a while, maybe for the holidays also which will be nice. Then it looks like i’m gonna be headed to Austin, TX at the start of the year to meet some more players before the album drops and I hit the road properly.

I hope you’ve all been enjoying the tracks I posted up here… as soon as anything else is available, i’ll let you know.

Much love.

J

xxxx

“This is a Ginsberg quote, the first lines of ‘Howl’,” he explains. “He’s definitely my favorite poet but I read Burroughs, I read Robert Frost, I read a lot of philosophy, I just read the Communist Manifesto just because I felt like it. I got to the end of the book and thought ‘Wow, if only people could be perfect’.”

Billy Boy On Poison’s erudite and literate singer isn’t your average LA rock freak, but then Billy Boy aren’t your average LA rock band. Their glam sparkle is gleaned from Bowie, not Motley Crüe. Their garage punk crunch is Hendrix, New York Dolls, The Strokes and The Stooges, not 70s Aerosmith and Dogstar. Their lyrical inspiration is beat poetry, not breast enhancement. And unlike the Sunset Snort Set, Davis had his sex and drug years already; as a moody and reflective artist he did his teens entirely the wrong way round.

“I matured very quickly,” he says, a fallen product of the US school system. “I’ve been told that I have an old soul from an early age and that I grew up quickly. I started to get in trouble at twelve years old, smoking pot, doing drugs, having sex.”

You were, to quote your debut album title, a ‘Drama Junkie Queen’?

Davis laughs. “Maybe not the drama, but a junkie queen, yeah. At that young an age I didn’t get that bad but I’d fuck around in school, I’d piss my parents off, not things where I’d get arrested, I just felt rebellious towards everything, I cut God out of my life and do to this day. I chose the completely opposite side of life.”

So, having been brought up on John Griffin, Glen Miller, Miles Davis (after whom he was named) and classic rock (his abiding childhood memory is of his father sitting him and his brother down and air-guitaring along to Led Zeppelin’s ‘Immigrant Song’) at the age of thirteen, Davis sold his old soul to rock’n'roll. With three songs written with mentors Michael Gurley, Chris Sorenson and Stu Brantley, Davis started Billy Boy On Poison at the start of 2006 on a mission to meld his childhood influences with his favorite bands – The Velvet Underground and The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Psychedelic glam rock, it transpired, would never sound so modern.

Shunning the original idea of a solo project because “I didn’t want the focus all to be on me”, he roped in guitarist Ryan Wallengren (a true child of Aerosmith) through a musician friend and saved his cousin Jessi Calcaterra from the mile long mountain town of Middle Park, Colorado (they’d play baseball against South Park) by recruiting her on drums.

As Davis gradually developed the skills to write songs without his svengali trio, in Hard Drive Studios in North Hollywood the threesome and a revolving cast of guitarists and bassists pieced together a debut album, ‘Drama Junkie Queen’. They wrote songs about girls (’Saturday’s Child’), sex (’On My Way’) and being attracted to people who’d had the fucked up childhoods they never had themselves (the staggering Weezer-esque epic ‘Four Leaf Clover’). Davis was a precociously talented melodic virtuoso singing unreconstructed rock hog lyrics like “I’ll make it to your bedroom honey/I can make you wet” to songs that took in The Hives, The White Stripes, The Strokes’ “Last Night”, The (International) Noise Conspiracy and Weezer’s “Pinkerton”.

And playing music live over the following year, Billy Boy on Poison dazzled. Decked out in full make-up, bleach blonde locks and spandex and covering ‘Suffragette City’, Descanso’s ‘Heart Is A Whore’ and ‘Speaking In Tongues’ by Eagles Of Death Metal, a Billy Boy show at Silverlake’s Safari Samʼs club understandably drew the eye of Ironworks Music in 2007, a label co-owned by habitual foiler of terrorist masterminds Kiefer Sutherland and producer/songwriter Jude Cole.

In the time since signing with Ironworks, Billy Boy on Poison have changed in all but Clockwork Orange-inspired name. Guitarist Greg West was lured away from a course at the Berklee School Of Music to join the band, hooked by the Myspace page that described Billy Boy as sounding like ‘hot, wild, abusive, dirty, hair pullin, ass spankin, pillow bitin, moanin, groanin, howling sex!’. Bassists came and went like Spinal Tap drummers and they finally decided to remain a four-piece. They became the first band to be signed to the UK offshoot of Geffen Records, toured the US south, wrote a potential single called ‘Doctor Danger’ with the DeLeo brothers of Stone Temple Pilots and had one of their raw early songs ‘Dirty Bomb’ used as the theme to a VH-1 show and released on the limited ‘Sweet Mess EP’. Furthermore album opener and single ʻOn My Wayʼ featured in the hugely popular US TV smash ʻGossip Girlʼ. And, most pivotal of all, they have begun to grow out of their glam postures and started mining a rich seam of brooding darkness.

“I used to try and go for the whole Bowie thing,” Davis explains, “and something clicked in my mind ‘Why are you doing this? What sort of role are you trying to play? This has already been done’. When we all started getting depressed and went through this dark time when we were switching members I wasn’t feeling it as much anymore. One day I was like ‘Alright, I’ve had my fun’. We went from bright colors to black. I don’t want these kids to look at us and be like ‘oh just another one of those bands’. If you see a band that’s wearing all black you don’t know what to expect.”

So the glitterburst of youthful punk energy that is ‘Drama Junkie Queen’ arrives.

And so it stands, a wonderful record of filth, fury and overt exuberance alongside the artfulness of their more recently penned tunes and the creative lyrical depths that Davis now dredges daily.

“I’m writing poetry every day and eventually I’d like to write books,” he says. “I feel like the songs on this record are good songs because they’re hooky and they’re catchy and they mean something, they have a message. And now I have a different way of approaching it, I can look more outside the box, use my art and test myself. Now we’re moving forward because we want to move forward, not because people are telling us to.”

Watch close: you’re about to see the best minds of our generation enhanced by madness…

Still in their twenties, the guys in Lifehouse have an impressive resume. Founding members Jason Wade and drummer Ricky Woolstenhulme Jr. met in Los Angeles and formed the band in the late 90s. Lifehouse released its smash debut No Name Face in 2000, which launched them to global stardom. Their breakout single “Hanging by a Moment” was the single most played radio track of 2001. Over the next few years – joined first by a replacement, bassist Bryce Soderberg and more recently by new member, guitarist Ben Carey – Lifehouse built upon that initial success. Combined album sales are over 5 million and Lifehouse singles have sold over 3 million copies online including number one hits “Hanging By a Moment” and “You and Me.” Later Lifehouse singles “First Time,” “Whatever It Takes,” and “Broken” have also achieved major chart and sales success. From very early on, Lifehouse fans demonstrated a resilient loyalty to the band, so much so that several of the band’s hits still maintain chart positions on iTunes, years after their initial release. The band also has a formidable online presence – their video streams are at 70 million and counting.

Lifehouse has always done well on radio, TV, and online, but just as impressive is their take-no-prisoners approach to touring. “We stayed out on the road for the last ten years,” Jason says. “Even through the hard times we played four to six shows a week. We refused to disappear (laughs)!” When Lifehouse’s fourth album Who We Are came out in the spring of 2007 it set the band on a near-relentless tour that should have pushed them to the brink of insanity. Instead, they hung out on days off and made the road a way of life. “We really love being on the road,” Ricky says. “We enjoy playing live, feeling that energy. And when we have time off we have a good time doing whatever. We go to basketball and love to eat! I’m like the camp counselor – I track everything down and make all the plans. Even if they don’t want to go, they have to. I’m that guy.”

In the fall of 2008, when the band finally came off the road from supporting Who We Are, they were on a post-tour high and urgently wanted to bring that visceral live energy to the next album. So they got together with Jude Cole, the producer of Who We Are, and began working on new material both at Cole’s Ironworks Studio and at Jason’s recently built home studio, Castle View. But instead of putting themselves on their usual strict schedule, the band decided to take their time with this record. As a result, it was a real creative journey. “We knew we were in a good place where we could afford to stay off the road and keep the crew employed and happy, and basically just develop the band a little bit – go in a few different directions,” Bryce explains. “We experimented with Americana, classic rock, pop – we tried a bunch of different styles, really growing even further as a band.”

Lifehouse ended up spending a year recording upwards of thirty-five tracks before settling on the twelve songs that make up Smoke & Mirrors (many of the rest will be included on a deluxe edition). The record is loosely split between rock tracks meant to capture the feel of seeing Lifehouse live, and extremely catchy, sing-along pop songs. “That’s where the title of the album comes in,” Jason explains. “It’s about the record being half live and half studio.” The first single, “Halfway Gone,” a collaboration with acclaimed rapper/songwriter Kevin Rudolf is most definitely in the latter camp. It’s an irresistible pop rock song featuring explosive, driving guitars and a chorus that feels instantly familiar. “Kevin brings another side – a hint of the hip hop world but in context with what we’re doing,” Jason says. “We were fans of his and he was a fan of ours and it just clicked. What resulted was a nice blend of older Lifehouse with a new fresh sound -– we can’t make the same record over and over.” Lifehouse fans approve of the evolution; “Halfway Gone” is already the fastest growing single in the band’s history, reaching the top twenty within three weeks of its release. Rudolf also worked on “Falling In,” another potential pop hit.

Rudolf was not the only high profile collaboration on Smoke & Mirrors. The band also worked with American Idol alum Chris Daughtry, whom Jason met and became friends with on the road. “I haven’t done much co-writing in the past and I’m a bit leery of it,” the singer admits. “You can end up with a song that is not good and just wish you had that day of your life back (laughs) however, I went over to Chris’s place in LA and within an hour we had ‘Had Enough.’” The song, to which Daughtry contributes vocals and Richard Marx also co-wrote, is a blistering, anthemic example of the kind of music that made Lifehouse fans fall in love with the band in the first place.

Rudolf was not the only high profile collaboration on Smoke & Mirrors. The band also worked with American Idol alum Chris Daughtry, whom Jason met and became friends with on the road. “I haven’t done much co-writing in the past and I’m a bit leery of it,” the singer admits. “You can end up with a song that is not good and just wish you had that day of your life back (laughs) however, I went over to Chris’s place in LA and within an hour we had ‘Had Enough.’” The song, to which Daughtry contributes vocals, is a blistering, anthemic example of the kind of music that made Lifehouse fans fall in love with the band in the first place. It belongs alongside the more traditional rock tracks on Smoke & Mirrors like “Nerve Damage” and “Wrecking Ball” (bassist Soderberg’s first lead vocal with the band), songs that capture the unparalleled feel of a Lifehouse show.

The band will deliver an actual, real live take on these songs very soon – they hit the road in support of Smoke & Mirrors early next year. According to Lifehouse, it feels like they’re doing this all again for the first time – they are inspired and excited about getting out there and playing these songs live. “It’s our fifth album but I feel like we’re just starting as a band,” explains Bryce. “As far as our chemistry goes, we just really know each other now. We know what pisses each other off and how to avoid it. We keep each other level headed, we vent to each other. We leave our egos at the bus door. We’re good to go.”

Dirty Bomb

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On My Way

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