RJM: It does help me –especially if I get inspired by another artist’s music, or a particular feel, like a shuffle or something. It’s very natural for me to get into character and get out of myself. I don’t think, “I’m going to be Elton John for the next hour,” or “I’m going to be David Cassidy for the next hour,” but I think what happens is that if I start messing with chord progressions or melodic shapes, I might unconsciously go into some style of singing and do these imitations.

Now, sometimes they’re overt. It helped me to impersonate Ringo when I was coming up with song ideas to collaborate with Andy on. That was easy and fun for me to do, and frankly I think it helped me get into an area that maybe Ringo would be more interested in than not. Andy certainly had me do some impersonations and characters for some of the lyrics he wrote on Bellybutton and Spilt Milk. So, it’s something I’ve always naturally done, and I have to be careful because I have no interest in doing impersonations of everybody when I’m doing a solo record. Ideally, my unique version of this comes out the other end, and everybody who has inspired me comes through one filter when I sing my songs. I’ll make references and borrow arrangement ideas from classic records of the past we all know and love, but ideally I’ll always put my twist and take on it, and I think that’s what Jellyfish did.

BW: Your dad was a Catholic deacon, and you grew up Catholic. Is it true you played for a time in a Christian rock group at your church, and did you bring any of that background into your adult musical life?

RJM: It’s funny – I was just talking to someone about this the other day. I absolutely was raised in the Catholic Church, and though I took it for granted at the time, my church had an amazing group that would play most Sundays and sing us through the church hymnals. They were fairly young -- made up of college students, and I think the oldest guy was maybe in his late thirties. It was three or four guys and a woman, and they were always singing lead vocals together. They would share lead vocals or harmonize together, and I just thought this was how every band was. Like the Beatles, I thought everybody sang all the time, as opposed to there being a Freddie Mercury or Robert Plant frontman. I loved watching them harmonize, and they had an incredible blend, because you can have three great singers, and it doesn’t mean their voices are going to blend and sound good together.

Now, to set the record straight, I never desired to play with them, nor was I ever in a Christian rock group of my own. By the time I was proficient on my instrument I was going my separate ways from the Church, so that was the last thing that was going to happen [laughs]. But one of the younger college students in that group, who may even have been talked about in the Jellyfish biography that just came out, was named Pat Hagerty, and he would invite me to come in after school. He would sometimes go into the church and practice by himself, because you could sing through the big PA. He invited me to come hang out with no agenda – just jam with him. I think, unbeknownst to me, my mom might have encouraged him to do that. He was really patient, and we would play through Elton John or Doobie Brothers pop songs. That was the first time I was able to hear what my voice sounded like loud through a microphone, and it was really exciting and intimidating. I didn’t know what to do with that power, and it scared the hell out of me. But he was very encouraging.

I don’t know what we didn’t do it more – I remember we did it a few times one year, and then that was it. I was probably too scared, because I was overwhelmed by the whole process, and I certainly wasn’t writing my own songs. I was playing other people’s songs, and I thought that’s what you did. It never occurred to me to write something, because that’s what adults did. That’s what people who had spent years and years playing music did. I had this weird belief that you were only able to write songs if you had studied piano, guitar, or singing for twenty years. I didn’t understand that some of my favorite musicians and pop stars in history were virtually untrained and self-taught, and had barely been playing an instrument when they decided to form a band with their friends, and a few years later were on the radio. So I shied away from creating my own music for years, and that continued when I started playing jazz, fusion, and more advanced styles of music. I thought it was all about studying your instrument, which I enjoyed, but it had nothing to do with songwriting, because I was playing other people’s songs.

BW: Can you clear up once and for all that the photo people are persistently thinking is of Wendy Carlos is in fact of you? I think you’re hanging over a Moog.