The Jaguar Club: a Basement, a Barn and the Open Road

Photo by Jen McManus

A hardworking band that thrives on live performances, The Jaguar Club are no strangers to the road. “A touring lesson we’ve learned is that we do not do Delaware,” says Will Popadic, lead singer and guitarist of the Brooklyn-based trio. “We’re pretty loyal to the good people at Motel 6 around the country, however we do always cheat them by booking a room for one person and then sneaking the other two in (we feel that our very repeat business offsets this in some karmic way) and this has never been a problem except in Delaware where we stopped one night very, very late coming home from DC. This particular Motel 6 had a security guard who caught Yoi and myself in the van while Jere was checking in. So Jere stayed there and Yoi and the van of gear and I went across the street to a by-the-hour place where the guy at the desk told us ‘you guys had better take the room next to the office,’ as if we were a couple of little kids. But the place was crawling with strange individuals and hookers, so we were slightly sketched out. We laid in our shared bed wide awake, afraid to sleep in case the van would get busted into. We were only there for like four hours anyway. It was a very large, nice motel room actually, with a kitchenette in case you wanted to cook dinner for your hooker I guess.”

Popadic (vocals, guitar) is from Massachusetts, Yoichiro Fujita (bass) is from Greenwich CT, “though born someplace in Japan,” and Jeremiah Joyce (drums) is from western Michigan, but it’s Brooklyn The Jaguar Club has called home since they formed in 2006. During this time, the band has released two EP’s of self-proclaimed “danceable pop tunes,” and played a laundry list of East coast shows from Maine to Florida, with bands including The Duke Spirit, The Cinematics, Scissors For Lefty, Mobius Band, Pela, Bear Hands, The Shaky Hands and Love Of Diagrams.

Although recording allows them to hone their sound, The Jaguar Club can’t fully express themselves unless they’re onstage. “In the end the boys in the band still love putting on a good show more than anything,” the band’s bio reads, “with energy, and sweat, unmatched by many of their contemporaries.” “We’re just excited to get out there and play a lot and hopefully reach some people with our new album, and then make another one,” says Popadic.

The majority of the band’s activity in 2008 was spent in a Hudson Valley barn recording their first full-length album with producer Kevin McMahon (French Kicks, The Walkmen, Titus Andronicus, DieDieDie, Frightened Rabbit). The album finds the band stepping away from their New Wave influences and employing more varied dynamics, but maintains their vital energy. “The album was written in a basement with no fresh air and recorded in a huge barn in the mountains, so it’s a nice mix of the two hopefully… We finish mixing it this month. We’re really, really excited to finally get it out there. We think it’s excellent.”

The Jaguar Club has always been a pure collaboration between its three members, fleshing out songs around basic sparks of ideas as they come. “We write as a group, the three of us in our practice space,” Popadic says. “We get a song close to finished instrumentally and then I take it home on my own and write vocals and lyrics to that, sometimes with minor changes to song structure but usually not… Because our writing really is truly collaborative and democratic, there’s a big chunk of each person’s personality in every song. Yoi will tell me a crazy story about what he thinks a bass line is about, or what it sounds like, that is so far off from what was in my own mind working out guitar and vocal parts but in the end that’s what makes us, us. We’re all invested in every moment of every song.”

Although each member of the band draws musical influences from different sources, they can agree on “90’s Britpop, 60’s Brit Invasion bands, 80’s American ‘college rock,’ some Post Punk and New Wave stuff, some electronic music,” and modern bands such as “The National, Idlewild, Band Of Horses, The Walkmen, Radiohead, British Sea Power and The Doves.” (Popadic’s “holy trinity” is Blur, Pavement, and Neil Young.) Lyrically, Popadic is inspired by David Byrne and Bob Dylan, books by Haruki Murakami, Herman Hesse and Charles Dickens, National Geographic, nature, forests, oceans, animals, dreams, New Wave and Owen Wilson movies. “The usual stuff I suppose.”

“The songs tend to be about somewhat general things expressed through details that are personal to me – mostly me wrestling with the necessary evils of technology and modern life,” explains Popadic. “I use the lyrics to clear my head of whatever is stuck in it. I have high blood pressure which occasionally freaks me out and makes me imagine I’m having a heart attack, and of course this anxiety is probably half the reason I have high blood pressure, so one of the new songs is quite literally about having high blood pressure but from the angle of being a pretty serious hypochondriac… It’s fair to say that I fall into the David Byrne school of lyric writing: he’s a guy who always just seems to write what’s on his mind however grand or mundane that topic may be.”

The Jaguar Club are at their most creative during the day. Popadic points out, “Midnight practices after working a ten hour day are not the best time to be creative.” A successful music career for the singer, guitarist and lyricist is “really just the ability to pay my bills by being in the band, which is a tall order these days, but practicing and writing during the day is pretty great so I’d love to have that be our regular day: get a coffee and a bagel at 11am on my way to the rehearsal space. And actually see our girlfriends some nights of the week.”

The Jaguar Club have a very clear, direct view of the music industry. “Bands now have to have really good minds toward business and self-promotion,” Popadic believes. “It’s equally as important as musical or songwriting ability if your band is going to go anywhere. We’re trying to get better at things like selling merch online, doing a certain amount of our own recording to cut costs, etc. But I am no longer hoping to sign to Capitol like I might have been when I was 18. Though they can still feel free to wine and dine us. And if Matador wants us they just need to ask.”

by Dan D’Ippolito