A year in the pop-music world can seem like a lifetime.

Just ask Andrea Henry of Canadian female pop quintet Sugar Jones, which opens its tuneful candy store at the Halifax Metro Centre on Friday.

A year ago, the 23-year-old Hamilton native was an aspiring singer and part-time model in Toronto trying to get her foot on the lower rung of the music industry ladder when she found out about auditions for Popstars, a TV program designed to follow the creation of a bubblegum band, from a cattle call of 4,000 applicants through a weaning process and musical boot camp that would yield five finalists.

In March, the lineup was announced for Sugar Jones, with Henry joining Sahara MacDonald, Maiko Watson, Julie Crochetiere and Mirella Dell'Aquila, after finalist Marla Joy Berman was shown the door for pleading guilty to credit card theft. (Nothing like a whiff of scandal to add a little excitement.)

Now the machine was really in motion. Soon there would be a self-titled debut CD through Universal Music, hit singles Days Like That and How Much Longer with spicy videos in constant rotation on MuchMusic and a summer slate of public appearances and promotion.

But now Sugar Jones's vocal chops will really be put to the test with this full-scale cross-country tour, the most daunting task yet faced by the fearless five.

"It's still very, very new," says Henry from her Vancouver hotel room. "But it's interesting being on a tour bus. Who'd ever think you'd be on a bus touring across Canada?

"And right now I think we like the bus a bit more than flying, what with everything that's going on."

After two months in rehearsal, Sugar Jones were set to hit the road for a handful of opening dates with red-hot R&B trio Destiny's Child, starting on Sept. 11.

Naturally, the tragic events of that day led to a mad scramble of rescheduling, and even caused some pundits to muse whether the days of pre-fab pop were numbered as the nation adapts to a more sombre mood.

Instead, Sugar Jones has learned a skill that pays off in music, improvisation, in its response to the tragedy and in its plans for the future.

"We dedicate part of our performance to that, and we just hope we can bring people a little happiness during this trying time," Henry explains. "Those people are in our thoughts and our prayers every day.

"Music's a universal thing, you're always affected by it. You'll remember a time when a song was playing and the memory brings you back there. You either feel sad or happy, or just something, and we're hoping that people will just continue to make music."

With the tour now underway, Henry says she and her bandmates can finally strut their stuff for an audience and prove that despite the plastic process - inspired by MTV's Making the Band, which gave us O-Town - it's their voices and personalities that give Sugar Jones its sweetness.

"People know the singles, but they don't always know the other songs," sighs Henry. "Hopefully people who haven't heard the whole record will get a taste of what we're capable of doing.

"We're all singers, each of us separately, that's what we love to do, and we take time during the show to focus on that and our favourite songs."

Each of the members of Sugar Jones gets a moment in the spotlight during the show when they get to perform a personal favourite, learned either from their childhood or through their parents. It's an indication of the greater autonomy the band hopes to have when they head into the studio to record their sophomore effort.

"Yeah!" Henry says with a burst of enthusiasm. "The time was so short for the first album, we had to get it out. A lot of us write songs, but we didn't want to just throw a tune on the album so we could say 'Yeah, we wrote it,' if it wasn't going to represent us properly, or didn't come across the way we wanted. "Universal let us have a lot of input in picking songs. They saw the voices that we had, and made sure that we agreed. It was a team effort in that regard, and despite the short time period we're happy with the way it turned out."