Strong words. These days, when the pop skies look more like a meteor shower of fast-fizzling comets than a fixed firmament of genuine stars, critics tend to hedge their bets when musing about The Next Big Thing. "Star material," they might venture, or "has all the tools," or the ever-popular, "potential." But pundits seem made of sterner stuff when it comes to The Push Stars.

On the eve of their first major-label release, After The Party, the normally staid New York Times anointed their sound "...classic pop perfection." The Birmingham Weekly put all their chips down: "The sky is filled with yearning, young pop bands, and The Push Stars are the next big thing in it." In 1997, they were named "The Best Unsigned Band in America" by EMI Music Publishing and Radio & Records magazine. Their hometown's Boston Music Awards named them 1998's "Outstanding Rock Band" and the band's singer and songwriter Chris Trapper won for "Outstanding Song/Songwriter."

Why is everybody so sure about these guys? Well, to borrow from modern political jargon, it's the songs, stupid. Trapper writes songs that burrow deep into people's lives, that are greeted at first hearing like old, familiar friends. His understanding of classic pop melody is organic and highly infectious--his lyrics accessible but never easy, smart but never clever, honest but never pandering. He writes about real folks coping with real lives--people whose far-flung People Magazine dreams never pan out--laced with a properly jaded sense of humor and the essential survival tool of not taking yourself too seriously. Trapper may be singing in the first person, but he is always singing our song, the way we would if we had his gift.

Trapper always knew he had the gift, or at least since the time his 9th grade music teacher in Lockport, New York, said to the shy, halting adolescent, "Chris, you can sing!" It meant more to him then than it might to others. In fact, it meant everything.

"I'm a stutterer," he says, "and I used to get picked on a lot in school. One day, after I'd been called on to answer a question and just couldn't spit it out at all, and the whole class was laughing at me, I went home and picked up my brother's guitar and started writing this kind of whiny song about how everyone picked on me. It wasn't a very good song, but I'd found this incredible outlet to express how I felt. So that's how it began, just a couple of chords and a bad day."

Trapper thought long and hard about how much that song, and the others that began to pour out, meant to him. The empathy that now makes all his songs so kind and powerful quickly bubbled to the surface. "As a kid, if you have a hard time conversing with people, you start to create this other world where you talk to yourself and imagine what you would say to that girl you can't approach, or that guy who picked on you. Everybody does that a little. Writing songs was a way to say what I felt, completely, purely, and in a way I couldn't until that point."

Trapper went to college in Fredonia, New York, where he started a band called Awake and Dreaming. After a couple of years, he took the band to Buffalo and then Boston, but they eventually broke up, and Trapper got a job at the Copley Plaza Hotel, assuming his music career was over. But he'd left stardust in his wake. Awake and Dreaming became something of a legend in upstate New York, and among its most devout fans was Dan McLoughlin. "People were always talking about that band," he said. "I got a hold of a tape of Chris' songs that I listened to over and over and over."

McLoughlin, a talented bassist and keyboard player who had never found the right band, went into studio production after college, landing an engineering job at the prestigious Dreamland Studio in Woodstock, NY. He still had Trapper's tape and still listened to it over and over and over. So, when he was told he could start thinking about producing records, his first thought was of an obscure hotel worker in Boston.

In the meanwhile, Trapper's hotel boss had found song lyrics scribbled all over the boxes in the wine cellar, and gently inquired if Trapper felt he had really found his niche in hotel work. He admitted he hadn't and decided to give music one more full-tilt, go-for-broke shot.

One night, Trapper opened for an aging rocker he found unimpressive but for his creatively austere drummer, Ryan MacMillan. The feeling was mutual. "Chris' songs had such a nice feel to them," MacMillan recalls. "He goes for a certain simple feel, and I think he thought that's how my drumming is. I'm not one of those masturbation drummers, playing a billion things all the time. If you play what's within the song, adding little textures here and there, that's what makes a drummer unique. I just play the song, and I think Chris liked that."

When McLoughlin finally tracked Trapper down, he invited them to Dreamland to lay down some demo tracks. All three remember something magical happening the moment they counted off their first song. "Right from the start," Trapper said, "it was simple and honest and the best thing I'd ever done."

Trapper hadn't thought up a name when he was offered a job opening for the hot Boston band Morphine. The promoter wanted him solo, but Trapper said he was working with a band now. "Oh? What's it called?" Crunch time. A name, Chris, now. He'd been paying bills over the phone, listening to recorded voices say, "If you wish to record a payment, push star now."

"I just told the guy off the top of my head, uh, it's called The Push Stars. He said, O.K., it's booked. Then I thought about it and liked it. I have a big fascination for oldies music, groups like the Ink Spots, and it sounded like that. And I thought it had kind of the same meaning as Awake and Dreaming. To push stars meant to reach for a dream, which was pretty much what we were doing."

That was 1996, and they haven't had time to look back. The Push Stars pride themselves in being a working band, not languishing in industry towns and getting their look and image down while waiting for The Big Break. Their sound is driven by Trapper's pulsing guitar and whiskey-and-gravel voice--sinewy, passionate, but always with a self-deprecating twinkle in his throat. MacMillan sets the beat rock-solid but lean, as does McLoughlin with liquid bass lines and subtly colorizing keyboards. But the real trick to their irresistibly organic, pure pop sound is that they all, even Trapper, take a back seat to the real star of The Push Stars: the songs.

For Trapper, it all traces back to those first, halting, joyful songs, when he found another language in music--a deeper one that could connect his most private self to the most private selves of anyone who took the time to listen. "Especially when I was a kid, but it's still true--I'm kind of desperate to get thoughts out in a complete way. Songs do that for me, so I know how much they can mean. It's important to me to be inclusive, rather than perceived as intellectual or clever or so creative that people don't get it. I really want to reach people and do it in a way that makes them feel part of what I'm trying to say. Because, like I said, I know how much songs can mean."