Perception, for The Junction, is essential. While working on their 2004-released EP, the members of the Brampton, Ontario-based band invited their producer hear them play some songs from their repertoire in one of their basements. “Do you have anything new?” he asked, as singer-guitarist Brent Jackson recalls now. They had just written the music to a new track but didn’t have any lyrics yet. The producer loved the song and asked to hear it again. “Make sure you finish that song by the time we start recording,” he said, “because I strongly feel that the song can get you to a different level in the industry.”

Great, Jackson thought. But that scared him.

Jackson wanted The Junction to become massive, but for the right reasons.

“I immediately thought, if this is true I want to let people know that I am not selling out and I am very conscious of what could happen to bands,” Jackson tells andPOP. “If they do hear that song on the radio or it becomes a hit, I want them to know that I’m not doing it for any superficial bullshit reasons.”

So when he sat down to pen the lyrics for the song – “Frequencies” – he conveyed those very feelings. “Lyrically, it just expressed my want to be a bigger band for the simple fact that I want to reach more people, not to feed my ego or to become rich.”

The producer included that song on The Junction’s demo and shopped it to an entertainment lawyer. Eventually, Universal Music got wind and signed them to a record deal. Their debut self-titled full-length album will be released on Feb. 13.

For Jackson, being a musician is not just a job – it’s his calling.

“(People) put their faith into a religion. Music is my higher power. I just love it so much. I need it. I need it more than I need food in my stomach.”

Jackson and his bandmates – bassist Matt Jameson and drummer Mike Taylor – are hungry for all kids of music. Their record label bio sums them up accurately: the band “doesn’t put parameters on its music.”

And the proof is in the album, a rock record at the core, but one that bends genres, breaks conventions and flirts with divergence. They had no rules when creating each of the 13 tracks that they would eventually record in Toronto’s Metalworks Studios, in a large room so they could capture their live energy.

Some are pop, some are inspired by jazz and jam bands, some are under two minutes and some are almost seven.

“We’ve never tried to conform to a certain sound,” Jackson says.

“From an early childhood for all three of us, we’ve never closed the door on certain styles of music. We’ve always been open from the beginning to anything that sounds like it comes from a real place.”

It’s the attitude that could drive an A&R rep mad. But, and to Jackson’s surprise, there was no head-butting with his record label while going through the recording process. When they handed in an early version of the album, a label rep said he wasn’t feeling two of the songs, the same two that Jackson says The Junction weren’t crazy about either.

“Music is my higher power. I just love it so much. I need it. I need it more than I need food in my stomach.”

“I would have thought that maybe there would have been more pressure somewhere or more advice to do different things, but we were pretty much left to do it ourselves. That was a big relief.”

The Junction are experiencing something that new bands can only hopeful. The attention is on the music. They’re not the offspring of music legends, they aren’t sleeping with Hollywood actresses, they aren’t instigating feuds with other bands, they aren’t getting arrested for the sake of publicity. Their pitch is their music.

“A lot of people forget that music is first,” Jackson says. “It’s using your body as a way to get something bigger out of you. I look at the way that I write music as the most intelligent I could possibly be.”

And it’s his band’s music that Jackson thinks can help people.

“I could have conversations with people and I feel like I could enlighten them in some sense. I could help them open their eyes to different perspectives. On a level of music, you can reach more people that way. It is a universal communicator. I can’t learn every language in the world but if you take a band like Sigur Ros, who sings half-Icelandic and half gibberish, people all around the world feel what they’re doing. That stuff excites me. Energy captured in music can still reach people.”






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