They’ve played at Lollapalooza. They’ve produced music for films. They’ve even opened for Kanye West.
Now, the power-pop band Jukebox the Ghost is headlining SAB’s annual Centralhallapalooza. The band was set to perform at last year’s CHP but the show was canceled due to COVID-19. This is the band’s first in-person concert since December 2019 and the only show they will perform before they tour in the fall.
“No one had been asking because people weren’t putting on shows,” said Ben Thornewill, the band’s pianist and lead singer. “This was as early as we could conceive of doing it. The timing was right. It was like, ‘Yeah let’s go for it.’ It’s this cool, island outlier, and we’re going to put on a great show,” Thornewill said.
Jukebox the Ghost will perform this Saturday at 10 p.m. with the three CHP Showdown winners — Full House, The Sad Dads, and Art Morgan & The Rumrunners — at 7, 8, and 9 p.m., respectively. The full event will run from 6 p.m. to 12 a.m. Standing tacos, ice cream, and chicken tenders are all on the menu, along with a beer tent for students 21 and older. Students must bring their IDs to enter the event.
The band’s top songs on “Fred Astaire,” “Girl,” “Everybody’s Lonely,” and “Victoria.” Their latest album, “Off to the Races,” came out in March of 2018.
Senior and former Student Activities Board Member Ian Brown introduced the band to SAB at the beginning of last school year. Their concert in Omaha was his first, and though he knew they would be harder to get than other artists, Brown said he kept planting the idea in all of the members’ heads.
“I would put their songs as the first, the third, and the seventh on our playlist of potential CHP artists,” Brown said, laughing. “That way, if people didn’t get through the whole playlist, they would at least hear them.”
Thornewill calls their music “feel-good anthemic piano pop-rock,” and the three-member band has played together since their college days at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Thornewill, guitarist Tommy Siegel, and drummer Jesse Kristin met in their freshman year, where Thornewill and Kristin were neighbors in the dorm. The two discovered Siegel sophomore year after finding his poster in the music hall. He was looking for a band.
At first, the band performed concerts on their campus quad. The crowds started small. Before they performed, the guys would print off posters and put them under everyone’s dorm doors. They also spent hours on weekends messaging people on MySpace, Thornewill said. At one of their last performances in college, the band hit a 500-member audience at the Black Cat, a music venue in Washington, D.C.
“That was one of the first moments when we were like, ‘holy crap, this could be a thing,’” Thornewill said.
After graduating, the band performed 170 shows all around the country in one year. The crowds kept growing. Now, 15 years and 5 albums later, the band performs for audiences of thousands.
“Those first few years, we were sleeping on floors, we were asking people for a place to stay from the stage,” said Thornewill. “We never had one watershed, ‘you’ve made a number one hit song moment,’ we’ve just had lots of little successes which have helped get us to where we are.”
Each member draws from different musical inspirations. Thornewill, who graduated GWU with a music major, is classically trained in piano. Pianists and singers like Regina Spektor, Ben Folds, and Rufus Wainwright are all on his list of musical role models. The Beatles and the Ramones inspire Kristin, while punk music headlines Siegel’s playlists.
“The three bring all of their music choices to the table to create a Queen-esque, luscious, vocal-strong sound,” said senior Phoebe Fink, a fan of the band. “They had these moments where they feel like they’re getting inspiration from really amazing artists from the past, but then they’re kind of putting this new musical theater twist onto them.”
The concert on Saturday will be a walk down memory lane for the band. Years ago, they were the college band that opened up for the headliner. Now, they’re at the helm of Saturday’s show, and Thornewill said they’re ready to perform.
“I know that feeling of playing a show and saying ‘I can’t believe I get to do this,’” Thornewill said. “We’ve played so many shows for nobody, and we’ve played shows for thousands of people. And it’s all a great feeling. A show is a show, and I miss that experience of community, and event, and excitement. Music is something so unique to the human experience, and we’re going to go all out on Saturday.”