Schooner

The history of rock music is cluttered with side-projects branching off from the larger family trees. More than a few of them – Slash’s Snakepit, Ugly Casanova, Mono Puff, Looper and Brad spring to mind – were doomed to fail on account of either poor artistic judgment or a fundamental inability to compete with critical reverence toward the parent band. Some of them, however, manage to hijack or at least parallel the primacy of the parent. Thus, Primus overtook Blind Illusion, Saint Low slowly eclipsed Madder Rose, and Tool found its career saved in a sense by A Perfect Circle.

Schooner falls into the latter category. After performing for several years with Raleigh, NC band The AM, frontman Reid Johnson set to tape some spare songs of his own with the intention of approaching them more seriously when the time was right.

“ I’ve been playing with The AM ever since I learned how to play guitar,” Johnson, 27, explains. “It was more rock: Replacements-y, Dinosaur Jr. stuff. It got started three years ago with me and my roommate Tripp (Cox). But there were a whole bunch of songs we weren’t doing with The AM. The guys in the band all have full time jobs, so I got my four-track and recorded twenty-five songs on my own. It was kind of a side project. I called it Schooner.”