San Diego’s music community is growing by leaps and bounds, to the point where many musicians are now performing in two or more bands. Such is the case with Ocean Beach-based Andres (Dre) Ponce, frontman for popular local rockers Jagged Lines, and now also guitarist for San Diego Music Award nominees, Kick the Princess, which is led by Angela Alvarez. “We’re both rock bands,” Ponce said. “Jagged Lines, which also includes Jared Haines (bass) and Bill Schattner (drums) has what I like to call a whiskey steamed rock ’n’ roll sound. Meanwhile, Kick the Princess has a more pop edge to their music, more light, a wider palate of colors, but the biggest difference is in the lead vocals,” he said. “I use the whiskey analogy about our sound, because it follows a lineage, it’s a great American tradition, it’s down home and rootsy. Jagged Lines just wants to take rock ’n’ roll and remind people why they played air guitar or used badminton rackets as pretend instruments when they were young,” he said. The union with Kick the Princess is perhaps inevitable. The two bands first met in 2014 when they shared the bill at a local bar. “It was a good match up. Even though our sound was a little different, I could tell right away that we breathed the same air, they wanted to rock as much as we did. When they asked me to play with them a couple of weeks ago, I knew it would work fine, even before we rehearsed.”
Ponce next performs with Jagged Lines at the House of Blues on April 28. “I’ve been playing guitar since I was 12,” he recalled. “Just the usual making noise in basements until somebody’s parents kicked us out,” he laughed. “I was in band by 17, influenced by blues players. I like open tunings so I listened to a lot of Elmore James, Robert Johnson and so on. Anyone with interesting tunings by way of rock ’n’ roll can be reverse engineered back to the blues and I’ve always been fascinated by that,” Ponce said. A native of Connecticut, Ponce moved to San Diego in 2010 from New York. Ocean Beach soon became home. “Since I’m so into music, people have often asked me why I didn’t go to Los Angeles, but I was coming from New York, so I wasn’t interested in another place with a big-city atmosphere. I visited the area and fell in love. I was always attracted to the bohemian feel of the area,” he said. “It reminded me in a way of a part of lower Manhattan, in that it’s a very artistic place, very non-judgmental. I also like that there are a lot of musicians in OB.” Jagged Lines has released one album to date, 2014’s “Free Yourself to Pieces,” partially dealing with Ponce’s transition from East Coast to West Coast. “The album deals with the notion that sometimes to find freedom, you have to let go of pre-conceived ideas about yourself. Things are great now, but there was a lot of culture shock for me when I first arrived, things were difficult. Music was my anchor, as it always has been and the album is the end result of that,” he said. Ponce is clear on what he enjoys most about being a musician. “It’s that there is always more that you can do,” he mused. “There is always something more to aspire to, another song to write. Music is a great tool to communicate with,” Ponce said. “You can play a minute of a song and convey so much more feeling than you could by just trying to talk about something.”