CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Cleveland musician James Douglas has found new life in his old songs with his band Canterbury Arts Club. The recently formed band will put out its first EP this week.

Canterbury Arts Club started to form when Douglas came across a posting about a drummer on a Cleveland music page on Reddit. Drummer Mark Bradbourne said he had influences from indie-rock band Jellyfish, and Douglas, a fan of Jellyfish, was immediately interested in connecting.

The musicians brought on guitarist Brandon Lichtinger and bassist Rob Carter to round out the lineup of Canterbury Arts Club. The group started reimagining Douglas’ previously written songs, some of them decades old, for the new band’s music.

“These songs -- some of them are old,” Douglas said. “One of the four songs on our EP, I wrote when I was 18. I’ll turn 36 three days before our release party. I doubled my lifespan before that one came out.”

Douglas has been performing music since he was a toddler, and he got serious about songwriting when he was in middle school. As a teenager, he put out an acoustic EP and performed solo shows. For seven years, he lived in Columbus -- but he recently relocated back to Northeast Ohio.

Acoustic, singer-songwriter music wasn’t what Douglas always wanted to create, he said -- his songs didn’t always call for it.

“You need a really good band to pull off the songs I was writing the way I wanted to, but you kind of need to have proof to recruit those people,” he said. “I’d become really sick of playing solo.”

Canterbury Arts Club -- named after the street where the band rehearses -- combines the bandmates’ influences to create a throwback rock sound. The name also harkens back to arts collectives like Kokoon Arts Collective in Cleveland.

Douglas thought the name gave the band leeway to pursue different kinds of sounds in the future.

“Canterbury Arts Club is a little more open,” he said. “People won’t be surprised if we put out an acoustic record under that name.”

For its EP -- titled “Eponymous” -- the band has found a sound tinged by Americana, grunge, indie-rock and alternative influences.

“Alternative rock doesn’t really mean anything anymore,” Douglas said. “The best way I can describe our sound without picking a genre is that we play pop songs, but you beat the [expletive] out of them and put some distortion on them and it comes out playing something different.“

You can hear it on “Welcome To My Town,” a single the band released last month:

The band’s upcoming debut EP is only the beginning of Canterbury Arts Club, Douglas said. But the four songs chosen for the EP -- representative of his entire life in music -- were a good place to start.

“Eponymous” was recorded at the Lava Room with the help of engineer Mike Pfaff.

“I had not been in a studio with a full band since 2007, when we did ‘Cellar Door Vol. 2,’” Douglas said. “Everybody’s pretty efficient. I have the luxury of playing with three really great musicians. That makes all of our jobs easier collectively.”

You can catch Canterbury Arts Club on Thursday, Dec. 12, at the Beachland Tavern, performing with friends The Morning Bird and Neilston. You can find more information at the venue’s website.

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