Honor Society looks to earn an A+ in touring

Honor Society

Diesel Club Lounge

Oct. 3

Tickets $15-20

www.elkoconcerts.com

So what… Honor Society

Diesel Club Lounge

Oct. 3

Tickets $15-20

www.elkoconcerts.com

So what if your grades are less than stellar? Pop-rock band Honor Society still wants you to join it.

“We like to tell our fans that they’re in Honor Society, too,” vocalist and bassist Andrew Lee said. “We’re all in it together, all partying and dancing. We chose the band name because we wanted something that fit us as friends and individuals but also included our fans.”

The Pitt News caught up with Lee just before the band prepared to kick off its Fashionably Late tour, promoting the debut album of the same name that dropped on Sept. 15. The tour will be coming to Diesel Night Club on Oct. 3.

“We’re musicians, so we love to have a good, strong musical show,” Lee said. “Obviously when we aren’t making mistakes, that’s good. We try to involve fans in the show, make it a party. We like that atmosphere.”

Since RollingStone.com named Honor Society one of the six break-out bands from Bamboozle to watch, the band has been busy. Over the summer, Honor Society opened for all of the North American dates of the Jonas Brothers World Tour while simultaneously headlining the Full Moon Crazy tour.

“It got a little crazy,” Lee said. “Some days we did four or five performances in a day, between morning radio or TV appearances, a mall acoustic show, opening [for the Jonas Brothers] and then playing our own after-hours show. It was pretty wild.”

So, what was touring with the Jonas Brothers like?

“Incredible,” he said. “The whole tour was amazing. We were already really good friends with the Jonas Brothers, and we became friends with Jordin Sparks and her band. It was like traveling musical summer camp.”

The friendship between the bands goes way back. Honor Society drummer Alexander Noyes went to high school with Kevin Jonas and played with the Jonas Brothers before joining Honor Society. Honor Society is the first band signed to the Jonas Brothers record label.

“It’s really like a dream come true,” Lee said. “We went to Target the day the CD came out, and we all bought a copy. To have it finally be a real tangible thing that you can buy is really cool.”

The album followed the band’s release of the single “Where Are You Now” from the summer film “Bandslam.”

“You kind of work your whole life toward your first album,” Lee said. “We feel like it’s taken us a while to get to this point, but at the same time, we feel like its perfect timing for everything that’s happening with the band.”

Some songs on the new CD are co-written with the Jonas Brothers and other musician friends, but members of Honor Society wrote most of the songs. Lee said the band’s writing process is very collaborative.

“We often start with a song title or concept and then build the story around it,” Lee said. “Usually someone has an idea of the vibe of the song, like whether we’re going for a ballad or a more up-tempo, and then we put it all together. There are no real egos here. We’re all trying to write the best song we can together.”

Lee also said that fan connection and interaction is very important to the band.

“Since the start, we’ve tried to tear down walls between us and our fans through things like MySpace and Facebook. Twitter has been huge in making ourselves very accessible,” Lee said. “Our fans know us, and we know our fans, and that’s really cool.”

One night, while enjoying the West Coast frozen yogurt chain Pinkberry, Nick Jonas introduced the band members to the frozen treat on their first night in Los Angeles, and they fell in love with it. “We were like, ‘What if we just Tweeted that we’re here [at Pinkberry] and see who shows up?’“ Lee said.

The first “Pinkberry Parking lot Party,” which the band calls “PPPs,” had 50 or 60 fans come out. The most recent had more than 400.

“We started doing it more and more. We’ve been known to put on some music and do parking lot dance parties too,” Lee said.

Upon being informed of Pittsburgh’s own Pinkberry equivalent, Sweet Berry on Meyran Avenue, Lee said the band might just have to stop by.

Honor Society