Jaedyn James takes on Basilica Block Party this weekend

Jaedyn James can pinpoint the exact moment when she decided to get serious about pursuing a career in music.

Three years ago, she was frustrated her efforts to put a band together weren't going well. So, she tried telling her boyfriend how upset she was. He told her, "Well, it can always be a hobby."

That didn't work for James, though.

"'Hobby?' No, that's not it. This is my life," she recalled. "This is what in my mind I thought I've been this entire time."

James broke up with him that night.

She's since poured all her energy into working on music — aside from Sunday dinners with her family.

This weekend, Jaedyn James and her band The Hunger have one of their biggest opportunities to date when they take the stage at the Basilica Block Party, opening for the likes of Brandi Carlile and The Shins.

James admits she didn't know a lot about putting together what eventually became an 11-piece funk-and-soul band. However, she had a sense for the kind of people she wanted to recruit.

"We weren't looking for experts. We weren't looking for geniuses. We were looking for people that needed to be in a band and wanted to be in a band," she said. "And a lot of people have used this band because they needed something to kind of save them. I know it saved me."

A large ensemble like The Hunger led James to create some rules: no hard drugs, practice at least once a week and no "bandcest."

That third rule proved hard to enforce.

"We've like totally failed at that. That's not worked," James said. "I just don't know how I ever thought I was going to be able to manage people loving each other or being attracted to each other."

It turns out that attraction isn't a bad thing for the group, James said. "You kind of want that too in a band because it creates this whole other dynamic on stage and in the music writing."

Unlike many other funk and soul bands who play mostly cover songs, Jaedyn James and The Hunger fill their sets with original compositions, often with a message.

For example, a new song called "My Body" is about feeling comfortable in your own skin.

"I think that's there a lot of power in being a voluptuous female and I also don't believe that to be a woman you need to be curvy," James said. "I want everybody to feel really good about their body. And that's why the chorus of that song is 'My head, my head's so good you wish you could handle it.'"

James was the primary songwriter for that track, but most of the band's original compositions are written collaboratively.

One of the collaborative songs "How Much?" was created in reaction to the death of Philando Castile, a tragedy that hit particularly close to home for the band. James grew up in St. Anthony, where Jeronimo Yanez, the officer who shot Castile, worked. The mother of one The Hunger's backup singers is a teacher at J.J. Hill Montessori School where Castile worked.

James' ultimate goal is to play for a national audience, like on a late-night TV show ... or Sesame Street.

She sees the Basilica Block Party as an important step toward that goal.

"All of the bands that come out of Minneapolis that I knew that were doing big things had played the Basilica," she said. "So, that was like, if I can do that, then that's a check off of the list of like you're doing something right. Keep doing it."