Boys Like Girls: Reliving Your Youth
There’s a lot to be said when it comes to legacies and celebrations of music. It’s undeniable when it comes to revisiting an album from 10, 20 years ago that there’s pure nostalgia and joy in listening to something that soundtracked the time where you were growing up and figuring out who you are. But what about the musicians behind the song: do they share that nostalgia? Do they maybe have some regrets? Maybe a blend of different emotions? BOYS LIKE GIRLS have found that balance when it comes to revisiting those songs.
Currently, the band are on tour celebrating, not only, the 20th anniversary of their self-titled debut record but the 17th anniversary of Love Drunk. With the US leg now finished and the UK shows coming up in July, we had a moment to sit down with frontman, Martin Johnson, to have a chat about the anniversary celebrations and the emotions that come with revisiting music that was written two decades earlier. In Martin’s words, to be able to celebrate these two milestones with fans, whether there from day one or joined somewhere in the last 20 years, is a joy.
“Speaking with anybody about music that was written when we were 17 and 21 years old to have people that still care is an honour and a privilege, and we don’t take it lightly. I think it was a little bit more emotionally important as honouring who we were as kids and kind of inviting them into the room. I was looking for the purpose of doing it because I knew that it was important to celebrate 20, a lot of other bands have done that, and thinking how we make it different. So, we decided to do it as a double album play, and it’s deeply emotional.”
“So many of these songs we’ll probably, and when I say probably, we will definitely never play again. We’re not the type of band that will retire our biggest hit as I think that’s bullshit, and I think it’s disrespectful to the ticket buyer who came to see your biggest hit, but there are some album cuts that are deep on these two records that will be probably the last time we will ever unleash them. So that makes it, I think, a little bittersweet and emotional, and a time to honour when records were made and consumed as full albums. It has honoured a version of myself in the past that I had buried. It honoured some songs that I haven’t listened to in 17, 18, 20 years. And it was an opportunity to grow as a performer and a musician and to grow the relationships with my best friends in this band over doing something that’s hard. I think you grow from doing something that’s hard.”
Time changes any person and looking back at something you did, whether two decades ago or even a year prior, is the only evidence of that. There are some songs being performed on this tour that BOYS LIKE GIRLS will be the first to admit doesn’t reflect them as people now, with tracks like Chemicals Collide being, as Johnson describes, “cocaine anthems” written in 2008, a time he refers to as their “partying era”, and admits, “There’s a couple songs on that record (Love Drunk) that I don’t really remember making.” Yet BOYS LIKE GIRLS have decided not to shy away from the songs when performed live, as Martin explains. “When we play them back, and now that we’ve made them ours, I think a big piece of doing this type of tour is we take what we do live very seriously and we don’t phone it in. You have to get it in your hands, you have to get it into your feet, and you have to feel like ownership over what this song is in 2026 rather than what it was when it was written in late 2008.”
“That process was really fun and surprising, because now playing Chemicals Collide is one of our favourite songs to play. Like, it’s a laugh for us on stage who have been clean and sober for a really long time, and so this sort of cocaine anthem is like a little bit fun to laugh at each other on stage and jam through.”
Yet, on the other side of party anthems, there are songs that act as a reminder of a darker period in their life, as Johnson reflects. “There was this song called Someone Like You off the Love Drunk record and it’s essentially a suicide note. It’s begging the Lord for a place in heaven instead of in hell, or to save me and take me somewhere else. Like I was ready to go. And I couldn’t listen to the song for about 17 years since it came out. And I showed up to rehearsal for the US branch of the tour and the Genius lyrics are sitting next to my mic stand for the songs we’ve never played live. I look down at the lyrics of Someone Like You and I start to weep in front of the band, because, if it was an open-ended prayer asking to be saved from the rubble of hell, that prayer was answered and the amount of gratitude and connexion that I feel performing that song, it took a while to do it without just sobbing. It was really, really powerful to me.”
But in the end it’s all worth it thanks to the main driving force behind the anniversary tour: the connection the group has with their fans. Martin put it this way: “I think in a lot of ways, this music isn’t mine anymore. These songs are not mine anymore. They’re not. They belong to the listener. I don’t really even remember recording them. It’s so that, you know, like, and I’m a different guy, whoever I was at 17 years old, like finishing out high school, graduating early, living in some mouldy, triple-decker apartment with my buds, like… I don’t even look like that kid. And so, I don’t sing like that kid, I don’t act like that kid, you know, and in a lot of ways, I wish I had his tenacity, but, you know, these aren’t mine.”
“They’re not our records anymore. I don’t feel any ownership whatsoever other than just being a vehicle for spreading, hopefully, the joy that they gave people when they were maybe a little younger and they want to relive.”
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