‘People who like more experimental stuff tend to think of us as poppy, and sometimes people who like poppy think we’re too experimental’ — sadly, The Jealous Girlfriends can’t please anyone

Can “selling out” make your band more independent? In the past, most would say no, that licensing your songs to a car company or a TV show would place you firmly in The Man’s grip, and compromise the respect of your fans and your peers. Don’t tell that to The Jealous Girlfriends. They’ve had their tracks featured on such television programs as Grey’s Anatomy, The L Word and CSI: Miami, but sell outs they are not: the opportunity to license their songs came while the band was still unsigned and allowed them to continue making their shimmery indie rock gems independently, until they were good and ready to sign on the dotted line.

Now, with a full-length album out on small Montreal-based label Good Fences, and after tours with Nada Surf and Los Angeles’s Sea Wolf, the band is poised for a long, difficult life on the road, trying to find their audience and sell their CDs. Somehow, “selling out” doesn’t seem like the appropriate term. Then again, The Jealous Girlfriends have always been shifting expectations, whether in the ways they profit from their art or in pinpointing their audience.

“People who like more experimental stuff tend to think of us as poppy, and sometimes people who like poppy think we’re too experimental,” says drummer Mike Fadem. “I’m definitely into experimenting, and not being tied too much to rules.”

Formed in Brooklyn in 2003, the four-piece take the dramatic flare of Broken Social Scene and the expansiveness of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and mix it with the melodic playfulness of The Starlight Mints and The New Pornographers, all swirling around the heartfelt vocals of Holly Miranda and Josh Abbott. The result is an indie-pop sound that hits you where it hurts, but doesn’t feel like the confessions of a 14-year-old girl.

“We’re not worried about making sure things sounds the same,” Fadem says of the band’s mixed influences. “It’s just like ‘Oh! This came up. OK, let’s work on this,’ or ‘Oh! This turned out totally different from anything else we do, that’s cool!’ I think that’s one of the reasons why we like being in the kind of band that we’re in. It just makes it exciting for all of us.”

Though Fadem says that the band still hasn’t quite found their core audience, the attention that they’ve received, both from a corporate standpoint and from blogs and other word-of-mouth sources, suggest that their time skirting between spotlights, refusing to be pinned down by any one scene or sound wasn’t just avoiding classification — they’re creating their own musical world and their own rules to go along with it. What could be more independent than that?