Rock favourites Sloan bring One Chord To Another tour to P.E.I.

Rock group Sloan has long been a favourite East Coast act, and they even have an anniversary to celebrate on P.E.I. Thursday.

The group is playing a special show in Charlottetown to mark the 20th anniversary of the release of their hit album, One Chord To Another.

A staple of radio and video play, it featured the hits Everything You've Done Wrong, The Lines You Amend and The Good In Everyone.

It's always meant a lot to the band, as bass player Chris Murphy told Island Morning's Matt Rainnie.

"The story of this record is my favourite story of any of our records," he said. "First of all, it was our biggest commercial success, and it was done just with our own money. We spent about $8,000 doing it, and we sold, I dunno, 80,000 copies or something in Canada, maybe more now, that was kinda in the first year or two. That was as big as we got."

Almost last album

However, it was almost the group's swansong too, as they had decided to split up before it was done and out.

"When the record came out, we had broken up for real," Murphy explained. "We had decided we weren't going to do anything else, but we had a record label (their own murderecords), and we said, 'Well, let's do one sort of posthumous record, to put money into the label.'

"We didn't hate each other, we were just frustrated. We had been signed to Geffen Records in the States, which was big news and a big leg up for us, but the record we put out before, Twice Removed, which has since been lauded by critics, but it was a commercial flop."

The group felt let down by the big American label that had promised so much, and they no longer felt like they had a future.

Success revived group

But One Chord To Another made them stars in Canada instead, and brought them back from the ashes to become one of the country's longest-running and best-loved bands.

"We went through this process of becoming a band again," said Murphy. 'Let's make a record, oh we got a video grant, let's make a video. Let's play a couple of shows.' And then it was just gradual, and then a couple of months into it, 'What's going on here? Are we a band, or what's happening?'"

The group is playing a series of East Coast dates to mark the 20th anniversary of the album, and a trip to Charlottetown is always an important one for Murphy.

It turns out the famous Halifax musician isn't 100 per cent Nova Scotian after all.

"I was born in Charlottetown, and my grandparents lived at 201 Water St., and that's the house I lived in when I was a baby," said Murphy. "My dad's from Georgetown and my mom's from Charlottetown."

Murphy and Sloan will be playing the appropriately-named Murphy Community Centre in Charlottetown Thursdayat 8:00 p.m. No relation, he said.

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