MS: Didn’t you study guitar with Tomo Fujita when you were at Berklee?
JM: I had gone to Berklee’s summer session and learned a lot from Tomo. I had watched him play and saw how he did his funky right-hand slapping stuff like bass players do. I went home and worked on that and incorporated some of it into my style.
Everybody who starts out needs to have their work represent their abilities. The extent of—the totality of their abilities—or else they may not make it.
So if you're going to make your first record, it's got to be almost like a sampler of what you're capable of doing so that you can possibly wedge your name and your music or your work into people's minds. I feel like the work that I've done is still sort of lingering in the air for my fans and for, you know, for the public quote-unquote. So I don't need to do another song where I de-tune the low e-string and slap and do these sort of counterpoint countermelody things so that people can go “wow he can do that.”
I wrote this next song when I was trying to find ways to make a guy and an acoustic guitar sound a little more like two people playing. And I needed something to play at open mic nights. I don't think I ever told anybody this, but I thought this was equal parts song, and also ways to get people who don't care to notice. So it had a little bit of a firework-y thing to try to get people to go, like, what?
Cause I had started out here where I remember it was just the bar staff, like three people. And you know they had a conversation about this because they would all clap but not together, so that it was just sounding like one clap. Cause chances are—nothing is more pathetic than three people clapping in unison to you. So I think they fanned it up, "you go, then I'll go, and it'll sound like six people." So this was a way to kind of go, like, [desperately] Hey! Hey!