Bootstraps wakes a 'Sleeping Giant' with live video series [WATCH]

"Pull yourself up by your bootstraps."

When Jordan Beckett broke his arm within the first six months of his collegiate baseball career, that's exactly what he did. He was given a guitar as a graduation gift and decided he would learn to play during this downtime. He cut into his cast to allow him enough range of motion to play and immersed himself into learning the instrument.

Not many people knew about Beckett's passion for music, but that all changed when he met his next-door neighbor, Sam Jaeger, best known for his role as Joel Graham on the NBC series Parenthood.

The two became friends and began exchanging mixtapes of the music they were into. One day, Beckett gave Jaeger a mixtape that accidently included two GarageBand demos of his original music.

"I saw him in the elevator and asked how he liked the mix CD I gave him," Beckett told Music Times. "And he goes, 'It's pretty good, but the last two songs on the CD are great. I love those two songs. Who is that?' I thought he was kidding around, but he didn't really know I did music. I told him, 'Those are my songs.'"

After that, Sam became the only person who really knew about Beckett's musical talents and would give him feedback on the songs Beckett wrote.

Jaeger got around to directing his first movie and he came to Beckett and asked him to record a few songs for the soundtrack. Beckett agreed and assembled some college friends to join him in the studio to record three tracks. When they went back to listen to the tracks, they decided that they had something pretty great going on.

The first song they recorded, "Guilt Free," was picked up by ABC's No Ordinary Family, and the royalties they earned allowed them to finish a full record. Once the album was finished, some of Beckett's friends in the music supervision world approached him to use his music in their projects. Bootstraps' music has now been featured on shows including Private Practice, Elementary and Betrayal.

"That was a huge for me," he said. "I felt like it was a sign that people were genuinely responding to the music, which was a big deal to me — that I would find people who responded to it for reasons beyond the traditional thing of having a record label pitching your music for shows or having a publisher or something like that. Those people were just like, 'This is good and we want to put this on [our shows]. We don't know what you look like, we don't care about what label you're on, you have no representation, but we like the music.' That to me was more meaningful than the actual money I got for the placements. It was amazing."

The songs that Beckett ended up writing for Jaeger's first movie, Take Me Home, became his first full length. The album as a whole has a "road-trip" vibe to it, thanks to the film's theme of a cross-country trek.

"[Jaeger's] movie sort of got me thinking about what I wanted to do thematically for the record and how I wanted the album to work as a cohesive piece. Some of those songs really worked for the film," Beckett said.

Going from the studio to performing live has been an exciting challenge for Beckett. He originally recorded the album three years ago, but re-released it after signing to Harvest/Capitol Records, who brought on Skip Saylor to produce it. However, the live incarnation of the band has only been around for about three months.

"It was weird because when we started rehearsing, the songs sort of evolved from where they were on the record," he explained. "The record was done live, but the band I played with on the record, we didn't really rehearse the songs that much. We went through them maybe once or twice then went into the studio and recorded them. So the album's life has evolved. I think they have a higher energy than they do on the record. It's a little bit more of a rock show than a folk thing or a singer-songwriter thing. I think this incarnation of the songs live is — I'm not going to say better than the record — but we have a better handle on the songs, so when we are performing them, we have a better grasp on the dynamic."

Now that Boostraps has become a full band, Beckett decided it was important for listeners to put a face to the sounds they've been hearing on TV and in movies. Instead of opting for more cinematic or narrative music videos, they partnered with their director/friend Vern Moen for a live video series at Pulse Studios.

"Bootstraps was like this mysterious, hidden kind of project that we had no pictures, no PR no representation, we had never played a show," he explained. "We just felt like it was more important for us to play live and show that this is a live band and show the songs in their current forms."

Boostraps has now embarked on its first-ever US tour in collaboration with Communion Music Club Night Series. It's playing alongside the bands Neulore and Busy Living across the East Coast and Midwest.

Once that is finished, it'll likely tour the West Coast and eventually head back into the studio to record new material, which they hope to have out later this year.

Check out the current tour schedule and listen to his debut album below. For more information, head to the band's website and Facebook.

Bootstraps Tour Dates:
5/16: Atlanta, GA @The Vinyl*
5/17: Knoxville, TN @ Barley's+
5/20: Minneapolis, MN @ Varsity Theater*
5/21: Madison, WI @ Frequency*
5/22: Rock Island, IL @ Rock Island Brewing Company*
5/23: Columbus, OH @ Rumba Café+
5/24: Charlottesville, VA @ The Southern+

* = Communion Music Tour (Neulore + Busy Living)
+ = w/ Neulore only