Boys Like Girls
"The Great Escape" blasting out of every car in the high-school lot in the summer of 2007, and a Taylor Swift duet two years later. Boys Like Girls were the MySpace-era pop-punk band that did it the MySpace way — demos uploaded from Andover, Massachusetts, a record deal within months, and a debut that sold under 1,500 copies its first week before going gold.
Boys Like Girls formed in Andover, Massachusetts, in late 2005 — Martin Johnson singing, Paul DiGiovanni on lead guitar, Bryan Donahue on bass and John Keefe on drums, briefly under the name Lancaster. They did what a new band did in 2005: uploaded demos to PureVolume and MySpace. Talent agent Matt Galle and producer Matt Squire found them there in 2006, and Columbia Records, through its Red Ink imprint, signed them. AllMusic's verdict on the result was "unafraid to wear their heart on their collective sleeve" — Boston-based emo-pop.
The self-titled debut came out on August 22, 2006, and debuted at number 179, on fewer than 1,500 copies. Then radio caught up. "Hero/Heroine" reached number 43 on the Hot 100 and went gold; "The Great Escape," released March 3, 2007, climbed to number 23 by that September, hit number eight at pop radio, went platinum and was number one on MTV's Total Request Live for nine days across the summer and fall of 2007. The album eventually peaked at number 55 and passed 700,000 copies by June 2009. The band played the Vans Warped Tour that summer, headlined their own Tourzilla run that fall, and in 2008 opened for Avril Lavigne and toured with Good Charlotte, while "Thunder" became a third gold single.
Love Drunk, released September 8, 2009, opened at number eight on the Billboard 200 with more than 40,000 copies in its first week. Its title track reached number 22 and went platinum, and "Two Is Better Than One," a duet with Taylor Swift, reached number 18, went platinum and sold 1.7 million copies in the US. Donahue left in November 2011, Crazy World in December 2012 peaked at number 134, and the band went quiet. They played a tenth-anniversary tour in 2016 and returned properly in 2023 with Sunday at Foxwoods on Fearless Records, led by the single "Blood and Sugar."
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