Cleared for takeoff

Blake Schwarzenbach has been through a lot.

The Jets to Brazil frontman has experienced the highs, lows, and the lows of getting high.

In an all-too-familiar trope, he and his childhood friend, Adam Pfahler, decided to start a band. They met as children, but were studying at New York University at the time. The whirlwind seven-year montage went like this:

The friends played together, recorded songs, formed a band with some additional musicians, shuffled the lineup, experienced growing pains, signed with a label, changed their name, moved to California's East Bay area, released an album, toured, signed with a different label, became icons in the hybrid genre of punk and emo, broke up, reunited, and toured with rock's biggest band, broke up before reaching the pinnacle of their fame.

Like any montage, though, this glanced over many important details that would benefit from a deep dive.

The band's original lineup was a four-piece with Chris Bauermeister on bass and Baurmeister's close friend, Jon Liu on vocals. They penned their music under the name Rise. When Schwarzenbach showed off a demo, "Shield Your Eyes," Liu was shown the door.

Schwarzenbach took over all frontman duties and the band was renamed as Jawbreaker.

He had very little range and would never be considered in the pantheon of music's best singers. That did not matter. What won the band over was his raspy voice and the unadulterated emotion that came along with it. A reason for that defining sound came at a hefty price.

Schwarzenbach's throat hurt when he sang and he lost his voice at shows. A visit to the doctors revealed potentially fatal polyps on his throat. The timing was terrible as the band was set to embark on their first European tour in support of their debut album, Unfun.

He opted to roll the dice. It was an incredibly risky move that worked in his favor.

"You have to be a band for about five years before you have any kind of audience, really," said Schwarzenbach.

The band was a couple years into their new identity, Jawbreaker, and the tour helped to kickstart that process, as did the East Bay area they called home.

The East Bay scene was growing and acts like Green Day, Operation Ivy, and Rancid were at the head of the movement and Jawbreaker benefited from that momentum.

Enough about Jawbreaker, though. That is what he would prefer anyway.

"When do I get to tell Jawbreaker fans to f**k off," he asked in our 2003 interview. "The band has been broken up for a long time now. They need to move on."

Fast forward to 1997. Jawbreaker was in Schwarzenbach's rear view mirror, and his next project was in the works. He connected with members of the recently disbanded emo act, Texas is the Reason to form Jets to Brazil.

A year later, they released their first album, Orange Rhyming Dictionary. The music was slower, cleaner, and a sign that they were no longer raucous teens.

"That happens with age," said Schwarzenbach. "Everything is slowing down."

The band crossed that five-year threshold and their audience is growing, but the flight that led him here was filled with ominous clouds, heavy storms, and low visibility.

"I was depressed for a long time," he lamented.

Schwarzenbach also discussed his battles with heroin addiction and getting sober.

"It's been a lot of work," he said.

That work included drummer Chris Daly's departure from the band and continuing to distance himself from Jawbreaker.

"We have a new drummer, Matt Torrey [from MK Ultra]. We're all trying to get the solidarity there, to feel that we're all people that belong together."

The Jets were moving slowly down the tarmac, but had a long enough runway to finally take off.

"It was good to stop everything and build it back up," continued Schwarzenbach. Jets had to be reinvented again, to figure out what we had."

The band's third album, Perfecting Loneliness, came out in 2002 and was a hit.

The skies are finally clearing and the parting clouds give way to a bright sun.

After six years with Jets to Brazil, Schwarzenbach’s band and audience have finally reached a cruising altitude the promise of clear skies ahead.

This article was originally published in the Colorado Daily in 2003.