Stewardess is a downtown-based goth-pop trio featuring players from Ilya, Spanakorzo, and Focus Group, including Grant Reinero on bass and vocals, percussionist Matt Fowler, and John Mattos on guitar and keyboards.

Reinero walked away from music for a time, working for an ad agency, after his band Spanakorzo released a few records and toured the U.S. and Europe. “Myself, Ian Woodward from the San Diego band Arms Away, and Brian Cook ran a record label named Wrenched that release most of our stuff,” he says of the label, which also signed local groups like Boilermaker and Short Wave Channel. “We signed a press-and-distribute deal with Cargo Records that might have contributed to our success and ultimate demise.”

“When I was a kid, I was forced to go to church. I remember swearing that when I grew up, I would never do anything I didn’t want to. This childish declaration evolved into a bad habit of walking away when something got complicated. I still fight the urge to just take off. It’s no way to live.”

Life as an ad-man was good for awhile, but then “I had told myself that I was done with music. Then, about two years ago [2012] I picked up my guitar and wrote a song that was different than anything I had ever done before. It was spare, catchy, and it moved. Over the following weeks, new songs kept coming. When I played them for Matt and John, they were very supportive. Since then, those guys have taken those early sketches and fleshed them out into the best stuff I have ever been a part of.”

Reinero is also an independent filmmaker whose first film Bug debuted in August 2015 at the Ken Cinema. The movie, featuring music by former San Diegan Duane Pitre and by Demetrius Antuna (Ilya, KATA), also credits former M-Theory Records owner Eric Howarth as an executive.

Reinero's next film Deadline was produced in response a challenge issued by The Four Points Film Project for filmmakers to create a four-to seven-minute film in just 48 hours, within certain guidelines.