Artist: Jukebox the Ghost
Album: Everything Under the Sun
Year: 2010
Grade: A-
In Brief: Jukebox the Ghost is one of the best bands that should have been on my radar in the 2010s, but weren’t. Their brand of energetic, piano-based power pop was highly engaging from the get-go, and their second album, dropped right at the dawn of that decade, might still be their signature work. There’s so much buoyancy and theatricality here, such a love of life that overflows from their songwriting, but also enough wit and charm and pathos to make it grounded, believable, relatable. No band can be all things to all people, but this record comes pretty close to being everything I could want from a band.
While my “Gap Year” project throughout 2023 was intended to cover two entire decades’ worth of music I missed out on, I’d be lying if I said that I gave the 2000s and the 2010s equal weight in my mind. I’ve already done Best-Of lists for the 2000s twice, and while I’ll probably always be uncovering new-to-me music that I missed from pretty much any of the decades I’ve been alive for, I felt that a lot of my interest there was in filling in the gaps for artists I’d since come to appreciate who were more prominent in other decades, trying to understand some of the critically acclaimed and/or Top 40 stuff that I turned my nose up at back then, or finally making good on promises to check out oddball recommendations from friends. Some of those missed opportunities turned out to be worth my while – I spent all of January going into detail on five of the best new albums from the 2000s that I discovered along the way. But once I made my way back into the 2010s, I honestly felt a lot more excited and invested in the project. The 2000s still feel to me like an era of growing pains – I learned a lot about my musical tastes then, but a lot of the things I liked back then seem to clash glaringly with the things I like now. In the 2010s, I seemed to find my groove. Indie rock, which had become my main area of interest by that point, seemed to have more clever ways of wriggling into popular culture even if it wasn’t what racked up the most sales or scored the biggest radio hits. The rise of streaming made it easier than ever to invest energy in horizon-expanding new bands that I found out about through word of mouth. Genres from my childhood and even before I was born that had been treated as passe for a while became cool again, thanks to shamelessly nostalgic bands finding fun and interesting ways to bring those sounds back to the forefront. I want to say that the 2010s are my favorite decade of music so far. This could be recency bias talking, but we’re almost midway through the 2020s at this point, and my feelings on this matter haven’t changed since we closed the book on 2019, so I think enough of that decade is firmly in the rear view mirror at this point that I can say this with confidence. Most people, by the time they get to my age (I’m in my mid-40s now), tend to look back on their childhood or their teens as the best era for music. I spent an entire year each on the music of the 80s and 90s, and while I wholeheartedly agree that both were amazing and the music industry as a whole made several huge leaps forward that reverberate through a lot of the music I love now, I still feel like, if I can have a stronger affinity for a more recent decade than I do for my formative years, something must be going incredibly right. And this is why I’m going to dedicate one review a month to some of those missed opportunities from the 2010s throughout the rest of 2024.
Sorry for the long and rambling preamble – I’m not really here to weigh entire decades of music against one another, I’m here to talk about Jukebox the Ghost, a power pop/piano rock trio from the Washington, D.C. area that probably should have been emblematic of my tastes throughout the 2010s, but that sadly wasn’t, because I’d never heard of these guys until 2023, when their sixth album Cheers was heartily recommended to me. It was a pretty easy sell, with its fun feats of piano wizardry, its theatrical detours reminiscent of classic rockers from decades past (particularly Queen, who they’ve masqueraded as for entire shows’ worth of cover songs, but also more contemporary piano-playing smartasses such as Ben Folds), and the band’s innate gift for crafting top-shelf hooks. All five of their previous albums were quickly added to my incredibly long “Gap Year” queue, with their 2008 debut Let Live & Let Ghosts being a bit rough around the edges but definitely an admirable attempt for a self-produced indie band, and their 2010 follow-up Everything Under the Sun really showing what they could do with the full support of a label. By this point they had signed to Yep Roc, a respectable “anything goes as long as it’s reasonably indie” choice for a quirky young upstart band like Jukebox, and they came through on this record with just the right amount of polish and potential to appeal to a much wider fanbase, but still with more than enough quirkiness to make it clear they weren’t going to pander for mainstream hits. The group has such a strong instinct for what’s catchy that they can probably write earworm-y pop songs with their eyes closed at this point, but even at their bounciest and and deliberately simplistic, it never feels like there’s a soulless, corporate machine using them to crank out mindless radio fodder. These guys clearly love what they do, and if that means their music is going to sound jarringly cheery at times, they see no reason to withhold their exuberance.
Everything Under the Sun has plentiful examples of the aforementioned exuberance, though it’s by no means a superficial pop record. These three gentlemen – Ben Thornewill on piano, Tommy Siegel on guitar, and Jesse Kirstin on the drums – have a fantastic sense of timing and each lock into what the others are doing with amazing precision. Thornewill and Siegel also trade the lead songwriting and vocal duties back and forth, and sometimes when bands have multiple creative forces taking turns at the mic, it can feel like whiplash between one person’s style and the others, but these two are peas in a pod in terms of how well they structure their albums to flow between both of their contributions. The general feeling that I get from this album is one of joy in the face of difficult circumstances, and of gratitude to be alive in this huge, never-fully-explorable world, but also one of nervousness and trepidation. How do I fit into these overwhelmingly colorful surroundings? Do I have what it takes to not only survive in this world, but make a creative and meaningful impact on it in any way remotely resembling how it has impacted me? Is there someone intelligent up there pulling the strings who created me with a purpose, or am I truly alone and subject to the random whims of the universe? I don’t know if it’s possible for music to be both melancholy and happy at the same time, but a lot of these songs come pretty darn close. It’s like they took all of the piano rock that picked up steam in the 2000s and that was occasionally a little too stuffy or concerned with sounding “classy” to fully let loose, wired it up to some of the more bombastic sensibilities of the heyday of power pop bands from the 70s and 80s, lit a match, and let ‘er rip. Jukebox the Ghost is by no means a hard rocking band, but they’re a hard popping band, if that makes any sense. I love ’em for it, I wish them many more years of fun-loving and engaging albums like this one, and I’ll be so bold as to say that if you’re new to them, either this record would make a fantastic starting point. (As would Cheers, but I’ve already written that review.) Let’s get into the track listing so that I can back up that claim a little better.
INDIVIDUAL TRACKS:
1. Schizophrenia
This manic opener, with its speedy piano runs and tricky drum fills, is easily the album’s most addictive song, and one of the best in Jukebox’s… um, jukebox. Ben Thornewill’s lyrics, which are delivered in a breathless rush, seem at first to depict a crisis of self-doubt: “YesIcanNoIcan’tYesIcanNoIcan’t…” and so forth. But it becomes clear that the title is quite literal once we get deeper into the song – this truly appears to be about a person having a conversation with, and frequently contradicting, himself. The upside is that he’s never without friends. The downside is that all these competing voices in his head make him immensely paranoid at times. It’s all delivered in such a playful avalanche of sound, particularly when the synthesizer comes in later, that I’m not sure how seriously to take this man’s mental crisis. But then I guess that makes the song itself schizophrenic, which is kind of a stroke of genius.
Grade: A+
2. Half Crazy
The first of Tommy Siegel’s songs bears a slight bit of pop-punk influence, thanks to the palm-muted guitar colliding with the bouncy, up-tempo beat. Like the track before it, mental illness may be a literal factor here, though in this case I’m less inclined to think that the narrator himself is on the verge of insanity despite his insistence that his worry is driving him to that point, and more inclined to think the person he’s worried about is the one in need of help, due to being in a depressive state to the point where they’re shut in and refusing contact from loved ones. This is a pretty dire situation, to the point where it makes the contrast between the music and lyrics a bit startling once you really stop to take stock of what’s going on here. But the urgency of the music and the inherently poppy melody are actually a pretty good fit for the whole “this situation’s so tense that it’s driving me mad” vibe that this song gives off. You could easily imagine the points of view of these first two songs being in conversation with each other (or even being different voices in the same person’s head, for that matter).
Grade: A
3. Empire
The four singles from this album are all very neatly stacked up at the beginning, though not in the order they were released – this was the first of the bunch, and while it’s still very upbeat, it’s got a more sane and easygoing tempo than the two tracks that precede it on the album. Thornewill’s lyrics springboard perfectly off of Siegel’s from the previous song, depicting a man who has so carefully built up a fortress of self-imposed exile, whose defenses are now threatened (from his point of view, anyway) by someone trying to make an honest-to-God human connection with him. His mock protest at how easily this person tricks his guards and bypasses his security measures is actually kind of cute – it’s implied that he might be falling in love, or at the very least making a lifelong friend, despite what he claims is his better judgment. Keeping everyone out so that you can stay “safe” and never get hurt isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and I think this song communicates that incredibly well, while serving as yet another slice of slick, easy-to-love piano pop.
Grade: A-
4. Summer Sun
This tricks us into thinking it’s a ballad with its gentler tempo, its softer piano chords at the outset, and its cutesy onomatopoeia involving the heart going “ba-doom, ba-doom, ba-doom”. It seems to be about learning from experiences and allowing yourself to feel rather than shutting out all the sensory input you’re getting from the world around you – another angle on the whole idea of not confusing what is safe with what is good. Midway through, the song shifts into a much rockier bridge section – and mind you, when I say “midway”, I mean about a minute in, since this track clocks in at just over two minutes total. The sudden change in tone almost makes it sound like a prog rock tune in miniature – and I’m actually a little bummed when it wraps up so soon afterwards that they couldn’t have made more time to explore the disparate sides of this song’s personality.
Grade: B
5. Mistletoe
This song is where I really get a Ben Folds sort of feel from the band – the hurried pace and slightly off-kilter syncopation are a big part of it, and while Jukebox’s chord progressions aren’t quite as inventive as Folds’ usually are, there are some colorful melodic turns in this one that make me think they’ve got to be kindred spirits. Folds is very good at finding the silver lining even in a situation like a breakup where a cynical rant might be his first instinct, and I think that sort of sentiment is echoed here. “My mistletoe called me up on the phone” is a hell of an opening line – what does it mean for a person to be a “mistletoe”? The holiday tradition states that two people caught standing under the mistletoe are supposed to kiss, which of course has led to a bunch of contrivances where hopeful romantics try to engineer such a situation. But if the mistletoe is a living, breathing human being (and one who it’s implied, though never stated, is an ex-girlfriend of the narrator), then the implication seems to be that she’s been in and out of a long string of relationships, and might be addicted to the thrill of falling in love, to the point where the newness of each experience outweighs the desire to remain committed to any one relationship for too long. Thornewill is forlorn as he recaps her describing these experiences to him during their phone call – maybe he wishes her affections could still be for him, or maybe it just burns his ego a bit that he was one in a long line of short-lived relationships. Or maybe he’s just concerned for her safety. But he takes it to heart that she’s learning who she is from these experiences and not just throwing her youth away on meaningless dalliances. She tells him very firmly, “Don’t look at me like another lost soul”, and the fact that the song’s chorus ends on this line suggests that it’s something he wanted to keep in mind whenever he thought of her.
Grade: A-
6. The Sun
Jukebox’s knack for hiding darkly existential lyrics behind manically upbeat music is in peak form here, with this ramshackle rocker hurtling forward as Siegel contemplates the inevitable decay of our natural world: “Everything under the sun is getting burned”. Much like the (confusingly) similarly named “Summer Sun”, this one feels like it could have been a more progressive and expansive song that got trimmed down to the essentials instead. Muse‘s epic “Knights of Cydonia” comes to mind when they question the very existence of God as a guiding hand in all of the universe’s chaos – or at least, they question the notion of a “bearded man on a fiery throne, with angels blowing trumpets below and calling out his judgment sounds”. Yet the final verse of the song seems to suggest that there’s some sort of god or goddess innate in the experiences that make life meaningful, a little spark of hope to combat the notion that we’re just meant bags ultimately destined to rot away: “What if it’s all just a black abyss and lips that kiss you/When you’re sick or feeling just a little out of touch?” It’s crazy that they had to drive us to the abyss only to suddenly find that sliver of meaning in life, but once again, the song does a great job of communicating the feeling that they’re trying to convey.
Grade: B+
7. So Let Us Create
Thornewill’s vocal range in this elegant piano ballad truly impresses me – if he’s not slipping into falsetto at a few points during the chorus, he’s stepping right up to the boundary, at least. This surprisingly sincere and passionate song lands somewhere between baroque pop and rock opera, which beautiful chimes accompanying the piano at a few points. The lyrics put a rather optimistic and artistic spin on the notion that misery loves company, observing that the narrator and the person he’s in love with are both victims of unwanted circumstances, but rather than just letting that life happen to them, they could instead choose to get together, take control of their own destiny, and create something to love about life rather than just hoping it gets handed to them. A bit corny? Perhaps. But I appreciate the notion that the act of expressing oneself creatively is a life-affirming one, a conscious choice to make the most of the cards you’ve been dealt, regardless of whether you believe there’s a higher power pulling the strings or it’s all just the cold randomness of the universe.
Grade: A
8. Carrying
Curiously, this song is the only one on the album where Thornewill and Seigel split songwriting duties. It’s possibly that Siegel’s contribution was the bridge, where he takes over on lead vocals, which are otherwise handled by Thornewill. But that’s only speculation on my part – and I should note once again that they complement each other well enough that I don’t worry all that much about which ideas came from whom. The main gist of the song is that two people, saddled with an enormous amount of weight and stress, both still choose acts of kindness as their means of rebellion against the bad hand that the universe has dealt them. The simple gesture of holding the door for a stranger is met with indifference when Thornewill tries it for the first time, while the person he’s singing to gets a smile for their trouble. Later he ends up holding the door for that person, and it’s implied that this is how they met. The bridge section suggests that they’re somehow bucking the trend of how God (or some people’s interepretation of God, I guess) wants them to view the world and humanity: “And why on earth should you do/What God wants you to do/When he’s got more than a few/Manuals from which to choose?” So yeah, there’s definitely a fair amount of skepticism about the existence of a higher power on this album, or at least the inconsistent ways various people have interpreted it. But the notion that we should treat each other with kindness regardless of what sort of cosmic consequences may or may not await us? I can get behind that. Thornewill’s nimble work on the piano is especially compelling here, with his triplets leading up to the bridge section flowing nicely along with the jumpy, syncopated groove – I’m getting a bit of an Electric Light Orchestra feel from this one, and I can get down with that.
Grade: B+
9. The Sun (Interlude)
This minute-long intro (which, even more confusingly, shares its title with track six, itself already the second song on the album with “Sun” in its title) seems like a sort of mini-piano concerto from Thornewill that got an energetic rock beat overlaid on top of it. It segues so perfectly into the next track that I can’t really imagine listening to one without the other.
Grade: B+
10. The Stars
The trio gels so incredibly well on this exhilarating song that I’m almost convinced it could take the crown away from “Schizophrenia” for this album’s most compelling performance. “Schizophrenia” still has a slight edge in terms of immediate pop appeal, while the pieces take a slight bit longer to fall into place here. But once you realize how effectively that tom-heavy beat Kirstin is laying down blends with the synthesizer and guitar playing the same melody in tandem as a counterpoint to another thrilling piano solo, it’s hard not to get swept away in the sheer flood of energy. Even better, the song is actually about a flood, making reference to some sort of cataclysmic events that were “Like the flood that Noah dreamed about, except bigger and more ominous”, leaving these guys surprised they even survived to see the dawn of the 2010s. I noticed throughout Cheers that there was a running theme of disasters, whether natural or man-made, drastically reshaping society while the band did their damndest to find the positives in those difficult times. I’m looking back now and realizing that this could be a topic they’ve played with all along. They’re very much pitching the end of the world (whether literal or figurative) as a chance to see a new beginning, to finally learn how to swim, to wonder if there isn’t a purpose behind it all for those of us with the willpower to not give up hope. For an album that, up until this point, has been incredibly cynical about the existence of God, it’s interesting to have them suddenly making an obvious Biblical reference here and to ask, “What if we were created to gaze up at the stars above?” Maybe a loss of faith and then a spark of revival is an intended part of the story ark here – wait, sorry, I meant story arc.
Grade: A+
11. The Popular Thing
As much as I enjoy Jukebox’s commitment to crafting upbeat and catchy tunes, I’ll admit that there’s a point where some listeners may grow tired of it and find it a bit insipid. This song, while I love it, could be such a breaking point for some people, considering how familiar its jaunty syncopation and the showtune-esque manner in which the lead and backing vocals come together are gonna sound not that long after hearing “Mistletoe” and “Carrying” in the same track list. It’s definitely a weird way to follow the climactic high of “The Stars”, and I sort of look at these last two tracks as a bit of an encore after the previous one has finished out the main portion of the band’s set. The lyrics to this one seem to be giving advice to a lover, a friend, or maybe even a child – it depends on which verse you focus on, I guess. Unlike a lot of “think for yourself type” songs that discourage going along with the crowd, this song isn’t overtly negative about the idea of doing something because it is popular. Rather, the lesson is to think through your reasons for doing something, neither jumping on the bandwagon because everyone else is doing it nor rejecting it out of hand just because it’s popular. Sheeple are annoying, but hipsters can be too, so if you want to do a thing, just consider the consequences of what you’re committing yourself to and don’t worry so much about who else is doing it and why. Wanna get a tattoo? Make sure it represents something that is meaningful to you in the long run. Wanna fall madly in love and kiss that person like crazy (OK, Thornewill might get a little excessive with the number of times he uses the word “kiss” in that verse) and have a baby with them? Be prepared for the dramatic change to your lifestyle that this entails. But don’t be scared of these things if that’s where your passions truly lie.
Grade: A-
12. Nobody
The closer might be the album’s weakest link – I still think it’s an inventive and intriguingly written song, but the more languid pace of it, Thornewill’s looser melody, and the odd decision to bring in a brazen trumpet solo near the end that sounds like a cross between Sgt. Pepper’s and a New Orleans funeral march, all seemed like they were playing against the band’s strengths on the first few listens. This is apparently a song about death, possibly one about wanting to be reunited with someone you’ve lost in an afterlife that you may or may not believe in. Will you still have a body or just float around in some non-corporeal form of existence? Who is listening when you scream your earthly fears frustrations at no one in particular during those last moments when you realize you’re being called to leave this mortal plane? I can appreciate how a record that’s flirted with belief in a higher power and also with atheism leaves these questions deliberately open-ended – nobody who truly knows the answers has lived to tell the tale. But as with most things Jukebox does, there’s an inkling of a silver lining implied amidst the tragedy, a glimmer of hope that a person who has spent their life longing for genuine love, connection, and compassion won’t be denied those rewards in the great beyond.
Grade: B-
WHAT’S IT WORTH TO ME?
Schizophrenia $2
Half Crazy $1.75
Empire $1.50
Summer Sun $1
Mistletoe $1.50
The Sun $1.25
So Let Us Create $1.75
Carrying $1.25
The Sun (Interlude) / The Stars $2
The Popular Thing $1.50
Nobody $.75
TOTAL: $16.25
BAND MEMBERS:
Ben Thornewill: Vocals, keyboards, piano
Tommy Siegel: Guitars, vocals
Jesse Kristin: Drums, percussion
LISTEN FOR YOURSELF:
MORE USEFUL LINKS:
http://www.jukeboxtheghost.com/
https://www.facebook.com/jukeboxtheghost
murlough23 
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