Jukebox the Ghost’s Ben Thornewill: thecheappop.com interview

By Shannon Carlin

On a sunny day in July, Ben Thornewill from Jukebox the Ghost sat and reminisced about the night before. The pop trio that combines subtle theatrics with classical piano training had played a few (not so) secret shows. One was in Union Square with the whole band and the other was on a Brooklyn rooftop where Ben played alone and apparently not very well. “At the end of the party people kept asking me why I kept on apologizing,” he says. “It was a party so I think standards were lowered and they didn’t seem to notice the mistakes.”

Since releasing their LP in April, Ben along with drummer Jesse Kristin and guitarist Tommy Siegel have been gaining fans left and right. They have toured with the likes of Ben Kweller, Regina Spektor and Tokyo Police Club and are getting ready to jet set (or drive) around the United States visiting places like San Francisco and Santa Fe for the first time. In between bites of his sundried tomato sandwich on ciabatta, Ben was nice enough to talk about his mom’s psychological experiment, their band name and his many guilty pleasures (Hint: It involves 14-year-old girls and vampires).

You guys are getting set to tour the US. Do you guys just get in a van and go?
Ben Thornewill: Yeah. There’s only three of us and we’ve been touring in a mini-van. Not a van, but a very mini-van. So all the seats are out but three and we’re all within an arms reach of each other and it’s packed to the ceiling so that’s not very glamorous, but we are going to be getting a van for the big tour. Otherwise we’ll kill each other.

Has it ever come to blows with all of you having to be so close?
True blows? No. It gets tiring though. There’s no space and you’re sitting up the whole time. You make do, you make the best of whatever the situation is, but it’s hard to not have space and to always. We’re as close as we are now (Less than a foot- ed) 8 hours a day. And dudes in bands smell bad.

Well I thought you’d just get used to the smell.
You do. It’s good and bad, because then you don’t know how bad you smell. You’re standards become so greatly lowered.

You went to school in Washington DC and are now based in Philadelphia. Why the move?
We graduated and we didn’t want to stay in DC. Boston was too cold. NY was too expensive. Baltimore was a little too ghetto. So we ended up in Philly. Not that we really wanted to live in Philly, but we had a reason to not live anywhere else. We’ve been there for a year now.

Jukebox is kind of a reincarnation of The Sunday Mail. Do you think you’ll ever go a different route and change the name again?
Change the name? No. Reinvention? Yes. Like the big point of changing the name was we got stuck with it. We picked it because we were playing a benefit show freshman year and we needed a name and we thought, “Oh that would be great!” and that was it.

So we wanted to change it. We’d been blacklisted from a lot of DC venues and we weren’t getting anywhere because they knew of us as this crappy band. Not that we were terrible, but any band in the first year isn’t going to be that great. So there’s not a need to redefine like before.

How important do you think a name is to a band?
I don’t think it matters at all. I think every band name sounds stupid until they get a little famous. I mean seriously Death Cab for Cutie? What the fuck does that mean? I mean come on, Modest Mouse? That’s really stupid. It’s Mighty Mouse.

I don’t mind that one.
I don’t either, but it’s stupid. You just have to think about it. Every band name is kind of stupid. Radiohead? Kind of stupid. I mean name a band.

Rilo Kiley.
That’s a stupid name.

Is there a band that you think has a good name since you seem to be such a connoisseur.
No, I think our band name stinks, but it looks good in writing and you can Google search it and that was part of the criteria of choosing it. Because think about the band Stars, you cannot find them online. Stars music, you get like Christina Aguilera. You cannot find it. Stars on tour? Come to the Planetarium.

You are a classically trained pianist. When did you start playing?
The summer I turned 7 I started taking piano lessons. I had done music before, but the story is that my mom said, “If you take piano lessons for the summer and you like it at the end of the summer you’re going to sign a contract that says you will take piano lessons until you graduate high school.” She believed too many kids stop taking piano lesson because they turn 13 and it’s not that cool or they’re tired of it. It was really a psychological experiment more than anything else. It worked and there’s a little piece of paper with my little 7-year-old signature on it.

Did you always think you would become a musician?
My elementary school teacher would say that I said I wanted to be a concert pianist when I was 8. I went to school to do politics. I didn’t take a single politics class. I just realized music was what I wanted to do, but I didn’t want to go the conservatory route. I always wanted it to be a career and I always went back and forth because I didn’t really think it was a practical thing to do.

Considering you’re classically trained would you ever want to do something with an orchestra?
Desperately. In fact I recently have gotten into a huge orchestration kick and I have Rimsky- Korsakov’s Treaty on Orchestration and a book that has like 40 pages on what strings sound like in unison. And yesterday for my birthday I got a book called The Contemporary Arranger. So absolutely and I want the next album to have a lot of strings and arranging.

In almost every interview you are compared to Ben Folds Five. How annoying are the comparisons?
So you haven’t stumbled across the interview where I said, “I’m not annoyed about being compared to Ben Folds Five, but I’m annoyed about being asked whether or not I am annoyed…”? It’s a fine comparison and it’s a good comparison. There aren’t a lot of people who get compared to Ben Folds Five and there are even fewer people who have a career like Ben Folds Five. So it’s fine. I’ll take it.

Well I’m sorry about asking.
No it’s fine I’m not actually bothered by it.

You are.
I’m just livid.

You have also been compared to Queen. Do you think it’s an odd comparison?
You wouldn’t do it?

No.
I think the only reason really is because I can sing really high. That’s it and I play piano. But I don’t listen to Queen, I’m not a Queen fan. I actually don’t own any Queen records. I know who they are and their catalogue.

There is a theatrical element to your music. How do you balance it so that it doesn’t become cheesy?
I think that’s total chance. You know next week I could go to the edge and it could just be awful. It could be really cheesy. As long as it’s true to the music the theatrics are directly for what’s been sung or what the music sounds like. I think we’re okay. Anything else is too much and it feels forced.

You often perform a cover of Nightmare Before Christmas. Are you a huge Danny Elfman fan?
I am a huge Danny Elfman fan.

Even in his Oingo Boingo days?
I’ve been trying to get into Oingo Boingo, but I don’t have an Oingo Boingo record. But Danny Elfman orchestrator and composer is awesome. I sort of have this fantasy of taking Nightmare Before Christmas and making it a one man show. The voices are so awesome. I think it would be cool to be totally schizophrenic and just do it all.

Balloons. They are everywhere in your photos and on the album cover. What is with the balloons?
Shervin Lainez. It was his idea. It was our first press shots ever and he said you know balloons would be good. So we did balloons and it stuck.

I wasn’t insulting his vision. I just wanted to know if there was a deeper meaning to the balloons.
Balloons are fun. They’re kind of playful.

They give you a younger edge.
The edge of a 10-year-old.

Maybe 15.
The angst.

When and where did you open up for Kanye West?
Oh man, that was The Sunday Mail days at George Washington. We won the battle of the bands and we won that spot. And it was awkward.

Yeah, I would say. What kind of crowd was there?
Very little. It was an outdoor thing at GW and no one really shows up ‘til the main act and this are the very early days. I remember we sort of shared a backstage and his tour bus pulled up and his posse was a lot of huge dudes. I don’t think I even saw him it was just these massive guys. We probably wouldn’t have had a lot to talk about. That was it. I went to get a burrito while he played, I didn’t even see him play because he wasn’t massive yet. That was right on the brink. Most people hadn’t heard of him, now everyone’s heard of him.

Is there a particular person or band you’ve toured with that stands out?
We just had a great tour with Via Audio. That was just fun even though I got food poisoning and Jesse got Lyme disease. All these factors made it a rough tour, but we had a really good time. I don’t know; all the tours have been really great times. Some shows you play for nobody and those are the best shows. Other times they are a couple of hundred people there and that’s pretty good too.

Is there a band you’d like to join if you could not be a part of Jukebox the Ghost?
It would be really cool to tour with Tom Waits. It wouldn’t be lots of simple chords it would be really fun and I’d probably get to play a toy piano.

Described as piano pop and there’s always a guilty pleasure aspect to pop. What is one of your guilty pleasures?
What’s really embarrassing? On a train ride I listened to the whole Shrek Soundtrack and thought about it musically. I guess that’s a guilty pleasure and it wasn’t even that pleasurable. It was just guilty.

I guess that’s fine, but it should be something you like.
don’t know I was really into John Mayer. That’s kind of guilty.

What’s you’re favorite John Mayer song?
Umm “Stop this Train” on his album Continuum. That was a massive guilty pleasure I was listened to that album everyday for like 6 months.
::Pause::
Oh I have a really good guilty pleasure! It’s better than all this. Do you know the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer? I got hooked. My sister got it and then my sister’s friend Drew Dingledine, who has a funny name, but he’s really cool. He kind of looks like Ron Weasley. Actually no the twins, he read it and then I was like okay I can do it. It’s a book about a teenage girl who falls in love with a vampire and it’s really good. So I’m listening to the NPR special on it and all they could say was 14-year-old girls love it. That’s all they could say. It’s all the rage with 14-year-old girls. “Oh my God I love Edward! Oh my God!” and I’m sitting there like, “Oh it’s really good!” So the guilty pleasure is that on one tour I listened to the second book of the series on audio books. I put it on when I was driving and I’d fade it up into just my speakers and listened to it. And Tommy and Jessie were not into it.

That’s because they didn’t read book one.
And they never will and that’s okay.

For more on the band, check out www.jukeboxtheghost.com/