Musical Influences

RY: I've heard a lot about your musical tastes and seen musicians that have inspired you, but are there any musicians that inspire you that you don't often speak of?

JM: The sort of easier answer to the question would be more like, what I listen to now. I've gotten back into the Counting Crows in a huge way. That is some of the most brilliant music to have come out in a really long time. It's really amazing and it inspired me last week, consciously, to start working on my next record. Listening to the Counting Crows from LA on the way to Colorado was a huge moment. This music makes me feel something big, like something really big. Forget the guitar player being out of tune some of the time or forget Adam Duritz always singing about California or not sleeping in the rain. Their music makes me feel great, but at the same time, makes me frustrated because it's better than I am and I want to be that good. That's really inspired me to start on my next record. When I go home (back to my hotel room) that's just what I'm going to do.

In terms of people I listen to. There are definitely records you can pick up where you can hear me ripping off, such as Charlie Hunter. He's one of my favorite musicians and he's a jazz guy. He plays a really innovative guitar, an 8-string, and he plays guitar and bass at the same time and its very, very cool. I'm completely inspired by him. I say Ben Folds a lot. I love Wes Montgomery's guitar playing. There is a record called Boss Guitar. I had not heard it for the longest time. I traded it in or sold it or lost it at some point in time and I just recently got it back. Rufus Wainwright, Martin Sexton, David Mead has a great record, the most recent one.

I just think of the music that I can still go back to, like Ray Charles or Jimi Hendrix or Buddy Guy or Eric Clapton. These are guys who just dug into the ground, you know? And I think of the music I loved two years ago, and I don’t love it anymore but I revisit it and go, “Wow, that was fun two years ago.” So I’m just investigating [that difference].

RT: Did you grow up playing along to Clapton discs? The record goes on and you just pull up the guitar and sit on the bed for an hour? 

JM: Yeah, yeah. I would just keep playing the CDs over and over again. And for years I would pretend that guys like, Buddy Guy, or like anybody playing guitar, I would pretend—and I think the other guitar players up here would tell you that we had an amazing ability to forget there was a guitar track on the record we were listening to, and pretending that what we were doing was the only guitar on there.

The fall of '97 and the spring of '98 were two very different semesters. The first semester, I wanted to be the best guitar player I could possibly be. . . . But I never felt like I connected with anything or anybody because I just wanted to be the best. It was an expectation that was so broad that it was indefinable and therefore, unreachable. I went home for Christmas break and questioned everything. I went back to the pop side of things . . . to Radiohead's OK Computer, Erykah Badu: Live, Ben Folds Five. I thought, this is what I want to do. I want to be listenable.

Interviewer: Do you have a favorite, any particular reason for the change?

Well I've always loved both, right, so I grew up in the golden era of the eighties, and this is where I have to really tread lightly because I don't want to put any music down. But in the eighties, there was better music. [Laughter] There was just more—it was more music per square inch in the music. So it's very rare nowadays to have a hit song also be musically complex. They're almost sort of antithetical to one another. But in the eighties the biggest hit in the world could be one of the most well composed, beautifully played things. Like, you know, Genesis, and The Police, that's really complex stuff, Stewart Copeland playing the drums. If The Police came out today they wouldn't be popular for some reason or another because of the way they play. They’d sort of intimidate the listener, you know. And so I grew up in a household where just the normal everyday turning the channels you were hearing really incredible well-composed, well-performed music. So I was always weaned on that. I always came up on what I didn't realize was very dense music composition. 

But then I discovered guitar. So that was the other half of this thing was like I always loved pop music, and I always loved Huey Lewis and the News. Huey Lewis and the News is a blues band! Phil Collins is an R&B freak. There was a strain of musicality of a heritage R&B, blues—really a strong presence there. Then when I picked up the blues this sort of became the big quest in my life, and the answer is to put them both together. That's when I'm the happiest. 

If you ever see me do a blues thing, it's because I did too much pop thing. Yeah and I really shouldn't have to do that if I compose correctly. I should be doing both at the same time. And in all the songs that I look at on a setlist every night and go I can't wait to play that those are the songs where the mix of the two is perfect, and when I hit it it's fantastic, and when I don't I have to play one song after the other to get the same effect. So I have to actually play a pop song and then a blues song to get that same effect. That when I am at my best I can play one song that combines the both of— 

Interviewer: Like in the eighties. 

JM: Like in the eighties. Yeah, I mean no one thinks that stuff is corny. It survived because it still was connected to the heritage of—even metal bands right, like you could take a metal band, the guy had hair out to here, you can say well those guys were sitting on the edge of their bed for hours. They were sort of the original nerds, they were the original cool nerds. All these guys from Rat and Poison and they were shredding. And shredding means sitting in a room yelling, “Mom! I’m practicing!” For hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. And I really think that ethic was very important.