Meet Cannon Rogers of CannonandtheBoxes in Athens

Today we’d like to introduce you to Cannon Rogers.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Cannon. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I started CannonandtheBoxes when I was 16 as a solo project; I would record demos to neon pink cassettes and take them to businesses or radio stations around my hometown of Rome, GA. Today, oddly enough, I’m back in Rome and mailing out C&tB postcards to friends across the country, two of whom are now my longtime bandmates. It can be hard for me to step back and look at how much this project has changed over the years, from acoustic shows in dorms and living rooms to shows at dive bars with horn sections and mosh pits. And I don’t mean to sound overly nostalgic, but being in the limbo that we’re all in right now and not knowing when shows or parties can happen again (for all of our safety of course) has been strange.

I think the most important step for CannonandtheBoxes was making the move to Athens, GA. I had wonderfully supportive friends in high school who I still record with today, but moving to Athens and attending the University of Georgia was a game-changer for us. I met our drummer, Hayden, because he lived across the hall of our dorm. Our bass player Ian lived in the exact same building the year before Hayden and I. The wild amount of connections that you can make to amazing musicians, artists and people in general in an environment like the university is crazy. We’ve tried to spend the past nine months or so making the most of this, and having the ability to play venues like the 40 Watt alongside frat parties and friends’ birthday parties have been the most fun we’ve had being in a band. We’re putting an album out in May that we recorded with Tommy Trautwein of the newly minted We Bought a Zoo Records in Athens, and despite all of the uncertainty of right now we couldn’t be more excited for that to be out.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
I really can’t complain because I truly love what we get to do, but I think now more than ever in cities like Athens or Atlanta music scenes can be fairly divided if that makes any sense? For the first few years of me playing shows it was just an acoustic guitar and a harmonica, and I learned pretty quickly that wouldn’t cut it at the types of venues or events I wanted to play in Athens. I wouldn’t want to go back to solo shows for anything, but I mean to say it takes a whole lot more learning about how to get the audience engaged than I had previously thought. I think this is sort of a blessing of a curse because it lets us go out on a limb and do stuff we wouldn’t normally think of/be comfortable with at the same time.

Can you give our readers some background on your music?
We like to half-jokingly call ourselves folk-punk despite that being pretty on the nose; I really like to play harmonica, yell about politics and make people jump around. I think as a writer the part I’m most proud of is that our songs are as political as they are without attacking people – to me slipping in something that isn’t overtly like “this is what I believe and you should too”, but that might make people stop and see something from a different perspective is the most important thing you could do with a song. I catch heat for it sometimes from my friends that are also songwriters and definitely from listeners as well at times, but my heroes are guys like Woody Guthrie and Leonard Cohen who perfected the art of telling those stories. I might catch more heat because I don’t come close to what those writers managed to do, but it’s a learning process.

What were you like growing up?
I was a super small kid, so I feel like I was one of those unnecessarily dramatic/sarcastic kids as a defense mechanism for sure. That lead to me being really interested in theater and drama though, and from early elementary school until I started CannonandtheBoxes my main focus was being in plays or musicals. In retrospect, I think being on stage in those situations was a massive help to being comfortable on stage playing music, and though I haven’t done anything like that in a long time, I loved that period of life.

My Dad is also a musician, and growing up his band from high school/college would occasionally reunite to play some Neil Young songs at one of their houses which had a massive impact on me as well. Most kids think their parents have the worst music taste in the world, but my Dad was putting me on to Cat Stevens and Joni Mitchell and stuff like that when I was in elementary school, which is absurdly cool.

Contact Info:

• Website: cannonandtheboxes.bandcamp.com
• Phone: 706-936-4118
• Email: cannonandtheboxes@gmail.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cannonandtheboxes/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CannonandtheBoxes/
• Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5sVRRygxoLDHNydy8kT967?si=ahBXMcX7TnG-IA3VKo6guQ

Image Credit:
Personal photo by Mallory Rogers
Two darker photos by doso.jpg
Photo with mirror/trumpet by Avery Brooks
Disposable photo (graffiti walls) by Cannon Rogers

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