-It was symphonic music (The PEI Symphony) via his brother’s ‘indie collection’ via an ‘under practiced’ violin/viola.
-Then it was pretending to play guitar on keyboards in a cover band in order to actually be able to play live somewhere.
-’Small town roots’ moves to California (LA).
-Yes, music school (The Grove School of Music). 12 months and wondering every week ‘why he was there’ and not transcribing Motown hits instead (which he would do later).
-Back to Canada. Finding a bunch of friendly poets (The Secret Swarm), Reagh found his first ‘venue’ to perform his own songs publicly at: their meetings. This grew into finding places to play in a small city of 30,000 people (Charlottetown, PEI) where fate had once again landed Reagh (he grew up there and a week long contract just never ended as a radio producer when he came back from California).
-First CD: Half Dozen of the Other. Some rave reviews both locally and nationally but not quite the flavor of the month and frankly Reagh was less than satisfied with the outside help he’d received. Everybody meant well but whatever he was hearing in his head (god help him), wasn’t exactly making it on to CD. What to do? Move to Vancouver, of course!!
-More demo cassettes, fighting for gigs in the big city and finally Cathode Ray. Reagh had grown tired trying to explain to people how to pronounce his name (now you know too!!), hence a band name which phonetically took care of the problem.
-At it’s peak, the band had a live DJ (DJ Splice), a drum ‘n bass drummer, and various bass players. Between keeping up with members’ Rave schedules and university careers, Reagh disbanded the project (an ambitious cross between Neil Young and DJ Shadow) and moved to Sweden.
-Various demos grew into songs like ‘Colour of The Birds’. While definitely not a mainstream hit, a very ‘cred’ hit within a certain crowd of the Swedish indie community and on national radio (played shows with Jens Lekman and El Perro Del Mar).
-Taking that sound, born out of cut and paste, to next level (read: making it sound better), took more than a few years. The result is ‘The Ed Harris Masters’ (This Is Pop/Border) being released as 10 separate singles.
