Swag: Side Project Gets Serious  The members of Swag never
intended their nifty little side project — a series of low-key
sessions in which friends would drop by to write and record
music with little or no consideration for releasing or selling
the resulting tunes — to turn into a "real" band.  But as an
album began to take shape and schedules cleared, the group —
whose members include Robert Reynolds (the Mavericks), Jerry
Dale McFadden (sideman to the Mavericks and Sixpence None the
Richer), Tom Petersson (Cheap Trick), solo artist Doug Powell,
and Ken Coomer (ex-Wilco) — began to take on a life of its own.
"I'm not saying we didn't try to make a groovy little record or
have groovy little songs for the record," Reynolds says, sitting
in a Nashville park on an unseasonably warm March afternoon.
"Sometimes I think when we're talking to different press people,
we downplay that to accentuate how much of a lark the whole
thing was. It wasn't as though we weren't trying. But this was
mainly about escaping our mu