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It’s never quiet on the set for local pop band Jag Star

by Leslie Wylie

Either producer Travis Wyrick just likes movies, or he had something else in mind when he set up a movie projector in his studio and subjected Jag Star to continuous muted screenings of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Braveheart and Gladiator during the recording of the band’s new album, Cinematic.

Perhaps he was using the films as a visual aid, a reminder to the band of its musical strength. Jag Star’s first full-length album, Crazy Place, was a brave and muscular testament to what pop music can be, but rarely is. The genre—slick, simple and catchy by nature—harbors a tendency to cheerfully slide into ditches of its own making, and Jag Star’s strength to date has been its ability to maintain a pop sensibility without the fluff and fake varnish of its contemporaries.

Vocalist Sarah Lewis explains that her songwriting has always been visually motivated, and the presence of that kind of stimuli in the studio appealed directly to her long-time aspiration to write a movie soundtrack.

“I used to write instrumentals when I was little. I was definitely a weird kid,” she says, laughing. “All my friends would be playing, and I’d run to somebody’s mom’s piano, and I’d be making up this whole thing in my head, like, ‘Doesn’t this sound like girls walking down a beach, and then this guy comes up...’ and they’d be like, ‘What are you talking about?’ and get so mad.”

With Cinematic, Lewis and bandmates J Lewis (guitar), Jay Daniel (bass) and Brad Williams (drums) found themselves probing means through which they could incorporate the creative desire to link image with sound. The album itself even doubles as a DVD, featuring a video tour diary and a documentary of the making of Cinematic.

“I’ve always liked movie music,” Lewis says. “It’s not even necessarily epic kinds of movies that I like, but I like the music part of them. Some parts of these songs on Cinematic make me think that they would fit in on a soundtrack in some dramatic moment somewhere.”

Excerpts from Crazy Place were used in episodes of MTV’s The Real World and Lifetime Television’s Strong Medicine, and Lewis recently signed a three-year licensing deal with Musik Deluxe, a Hollywood-based company that selects music for movies. She’s sent copies of Cinematic to several music-for-movies contacts and hopes that it will be well received by music industry professionals and fans alike.

“You know, I personally really liked the last album,” Lewis says. “I really didn’t think I was going to like the new one as well, but as it turned out I think I even like it better.”

Whereas Crazy Place drew its signature glossy grit from a set of very localized, very personal influences, the crux of the new album is more challenging to isolate. Cinematic comes off as a roving tour of where the band’s head has been at for the past couple of years, a scrapbook that melds the new—Lewis’s newfound fascination with sampled trip-hop beats, for instance—with Jag Star’s inborn propensity for bright, magnetic melodies.

The transitional re-centering seems only natural, considering all the band has been through since the first album—including trips to both the Middle East and the South Pacific to perform for U.S. troops in 2003, its present tour opening for ex-New Kid on the Block Jordan Knight and the acquisition of top honors in several national songwriting competitions.

Lewis says that those experiences, especially the Middle East military tour, affected the content of the new album, which was written and recorded shortly after the band returned to Knoxville.

“It made us think about what was important to us,” Lewis says. “That was the big thing—everything that’s important to you gets magnified and becomes even more important to you.”

That mentality has pushed Jag Star through the inevitable rough spots familiar to any band struggling to make it without the aid of a record label. Jag Star, to its members, exists as its own kind of movie, and they seem content to enjoy the experience as it passes rather than get too worked up about when and how the plot will climax.

“It’s so strange to do what we do and put so much into it, and it’s so much harder than people think it is,” Lewis says. “The fun and frustration are almost equal, but there’s nothing else we’d rather be doing.”

May 20, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 21 © 2004 Metro Pulse