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The romance, he says, was inevitable.
"Having a voracious appetite for collecting records, I had sort of collected all the blues records there were already. And classic-rock records, I had all of them. Went into country music. Got all that," the famously dapper singer-guitarist for Toronto rock group Big Sugar recalls in an interview.
"So I started getting into reggae music and, man, once I scratched the surface, I just found a treasure trove of great stuff.
"I just related to it all on a level playing field. I didn't differentiate between what's reggae and what's country and what's rock and what's blues. It's all music, so I'll have all of it."
Which explains the genre-blending approach Big Sugar have taken over the course of their nine-year history.
It also explains Alkaline, a new Big Sugar side project dedicated to creating "dub" versions of their songs.
Dub is a reggae subgenre where a song is essentially stripped down to its bass and drums, leaving a pulsating bed track over which minimal instrumentation and strange sound effects are laid down and tons of reverb applied. Jamaican studio icons Lee (Scratch) Perry and King Tubby helped pioneer the form in the mid-1970s.
The Alkaline record, Extra Long Life, is a collection of dubbed-up Big Sugar songs that Johnson and Co. have recorded since 1993.
Now Alkaline -- all four members of Big Sugar, augmented by five other musicians -- are touring across Canada.
They'll be at The Palace tomorrow. Expect to hear the Big Sugar version of a song, followed by a dubby Alkaline reworking.
Johnson, 35, says he would create these dub versions "for my own amusement at the end of a long day (recording).... Some of these things made it onto European singles. We always put a little bit of dub as a hidden track on all of our records. And I have been collecting this stuff and cataloguing it over the years."
Then Big Sugar's record company, Universal, heard the dub material.
"They said: 'Why don't we release it?' which caught me offguard," Johnson says.
Especially since Extra Long Life is guaranteed not to break any sales records.
"They know I'm going to give them some more radio singles and more videos and more records they can sell," says Johnson, who hopes to have a new Big Sugar record in stores sometime this year.
"So I think it's kind of a courtesy to me, too, to release stuff that I happen to think is interesting and probably our fans will think is interesting."
But perhaps too "interesting" to release under the Big Sugar banner.
"I didn't want to create any confusion," Johnson explains.
"I didn't want people to think we had suddenly taken a sharp left turn. People count on there being big guitars and memorable songs and rock 'n' roll on a Big Sugar record."