Next big pop thing

Kevin Reid wrote his first songs in the fall of 2006 after splitting with what he calls “the standard high school girlfriend.” Those songs could have easily remained locked in a bedroom, forever lost as free therapy for teenage heartbreak.

A close friend encouraged Reid to record onto a laptop what would become “Wishin’ That It Was” and “The Cigarette Song.” It soon went from acoustic bedroom project to full-blown rock band. Reid enlisted his brother Jacob on the keys and a few of their pals to form The Kevin Reid Project, a five-piece band making buoyant, jangly pop under the radar in Paradise.

It’s the song “Leave Me Alone"—with its piano, horns and full-on hand claps and tambourine—that elicits an immediate, “this came from a group of teenagers living in a town called Paradise?”

Over the last couple of years the band has recorded a couple dozen songs, most of them by Kevin and Jacob’s uncle, who built a small studio in Paradise. Several hiatuses have kept the young band from putting out a proper recording, but it looks like that’s about to change. The group recently reconvened to record a couple of songs with former Number One Gun guitarist and current Surrogate frontman Chris Keane, including “Death,” an eerie, lyricless track that clocks in at a mere 1:21. It looks like there’s more on the way.

“I have a lot of stuff falling out of me,” says Reid of his current output of songs, explaining that the band’s occasional lulls in activity give him time to work out new material.

The most interesting aspect of talking to Reid is his genuine appreciation for people who can write songs that will resonate with a massive amount of people.

“I really admire those who know how to make a good pop song,” he says. “It’s really intriguing to me.”

There’s a certain confidence in Reid as well. For him it’s just a matter of getting all the pieces to fall into place, something he says will happen in the coming year.

“I’m not going to give up until people get tired of it.”