The Morning Call -
In one of the season cliffhangers on the WB television network's top-rated drama ''One Tree Hill,'' Haley left her new husband, Nathan, to follow her ambition and join the singing group The Wreckers on tour.
Next Saturday, the tour will pull into Philadelphia's Theater of Living Arts — not on TV, but for real.
When Haley, played by Bethany Joy Lenz, hit the road, so did the One Tree Hill Tour, featuring Grammy-winning singer Michelle Branch and partner Jessica Harp as The Wreckers — the group they play on the series.
The twist is that Lenz has actually joined them, as has singer Tyler Hilton — whose character on ''One Tree Hill,'' aspiring singer-songwriter Chris Keller, has been trying to seduce Haley away from her husband.
In its second season, ''One Tree Hill'' — which is set in the North Carolina town of Tree Hill and centers on two half-brothers, their high-school friends and their families — is the WB's top-rated show and a hit among teen and young women.
''One Tree Hill,'' in the WB's youth-oriented style, relies heavily on new music to set the mood of its scenes, with every episode named after a song. And its influence can't be overstated: It made a No. 1 hit of Gavin DeGraw's ''I Don't Want To Be,'' which is the show's theme, and a ''One Tree Hill'' soundtrack is selling briskly with another single, The Wreckers' ''The Good Kind.''
The 23-city tour is a cross-promotion for both the artists and the show.
The artists on the tour say that it happened at all can be attributed to several twists of fate. But it's apparently working: Many dates, including next Saturday's, have sold out.
''I'm sure it came from the marketing department,'' Lenz says, laughing in a telephone interview last week from a tour stop in Las Vegas. ''I mean, I think it's just a brilliant way to market the show and make some extra money and get some new fans and get additional publicity.''
It helped that Lenz has a background in musical theater, and Hilton is actually a singer whose major-label debut, ''The Tracks Of ... ,'' was released in September. Lenz left tours with Hanson and MTV's Rock the Vote to join the cast of ''One Tree Hill.''
Harp, 23, in a telephone interview from another stop in Salt Lake City, says she and Branch wrote ''The Good Kind'' ''a long time ago'' and sang it at shows last spring, when she was a backup singer for Branch.
''It was just getting this huge response,'' Harp says. ''And we'd always kind of talked about, jokingly, doing a band, but when we saw what a huge response it was getting, we were like, 'Hmm, maybe there's something to this.'''
In June, Harp says, she ''was literally in my car driving to Nashville to sign my solo record deal'' when Branch called her and told her they should record ''before you sign with someone and it gets more complicated. And I turned my car around and said 'OK.'''
While recording last fall, ''we were just meeting with a bunch of different people and 'One Tree Hill' happened to be one of our stops,'' Harp says. ''We played for them and they pretty much immediately asked us to be on the show. And we were expecting just to have an appearance, but they ended up writing us into the story line and then turning it into a whole tour.''
The story for Hilton, 21, is similar. In a telephone interview after being awakened from yet another stop in Los Angeles, he says he was one date short of completing a tour with Hanson and joining MTV's Rock The Vote when his agent called him two years ago to say ''One Tree Hill'' was casting musicians.
Hilton says he had been a working musician for seven years, ''and I was like, 'Oh, I don't know what that is, this really doesn't sound like my thing.' I thought, I've been asking to do the Rock the Vote tour forever, and I'm going to leave it to go on a WB show? And they showed me the script and I thought, 'Oh, man, I've never seen the show, but this character is friggin' awesome. And the script seems really cool.'
''So that's what I did. I went to North Carolina and I started being Chris Keller. And I had no idea how this 'One Tree Hill' thing was going to happen — if the show [would be] popular. I know now that I was stupid, 'cause the show is huge, but I just didn't know.''
One concern for the artists on the tour might be that they'd be mistaken for TV creations, not true singers.
Harp, in particular, says she and Branch ''just wanted, most importantly, for people to know that we weren't a contrived thing — that we weren't just a television show band,'' and that they'd already recorded an album, due out in June.
But Hilton, who also will appear as a young Elvis in the upcoming Johnny Cash biopic ''I Walk The Line'' with Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, says fans know who they're seeing.
''I didn't realize that people would make the disconnection from the show that easily, but they have been,'' he says.
As for Lenz, 23, probably the most traditional actor on the tour (she previously had a part in the daytime soap opera ''Guiding Light''), she says she's not actively pursuing a career in music, anyway.
''I'm meeting with labels and I'm definitely talking with people, but it's nothing that I've gone really banging anyone's door down,'' she says. ''Music's something I'll be doing for the rest of my life, whether I'm just playing guitar in my living room or whether I'm playing for 3,000 people. So I'm just enjoying it right now and having fun.''
She says fans of ''One Tree Hill'' aren't above making the decision for her.
At the concerts, she says, ''the fans come up and they'll say something like, 'You know, you need to go back to Nathan.'''
- John J. Moser
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