JM: There’s no comparing London to Chicago. I love Chicago and I wrote so many records there. Actually most of the material I’ve written over the years was in Chicago. I don’t know what about that place made me write so much, but a part of it is that everyone there in the musical community is always working. No one ever seems to be just sitting there. All the Chicago bands are always gone because they’re touring bands.

I haven’t been here very long. I don’t really have a sense of how the local and regional musicians work. Culturally, it’s night and day. In that way it’s a very difficult adjustment. I’m burying myself in work, because that’s a good way to adjust to the change. Pretty much every time I’ve done a record, it’s been right on the cusp of a move to another city, to another state, to a different apartment.

DC: You’ve always been compared to other American singers. The Neil Young comparison is used a lot, even though he’s Canadian. Do you see yourself in some sort of progression from Woody Guthrie to Ramblin’ Jack to Dylan?

JM: I look at it this way. I’m not a music historian by any means. I don’t really keep up on many contemporary bands, and it’s not because I want to lock myself away and be a hermit. It’s just that I find if I’m listening to a lot of contemporary stuff, I gravitate quickly and a little too easily to accidentally sounding that way. If you want to look at as a progression, I feel comfortable in a line of songwriters. And I happen to be an American songwriter, but it’s entirely beyond my imagination to see how exactly that progression goes.

I’ve just written songs out of the blue since I was a little kid. I didn’t grow up around a musical family. No one showed me how to play the guitar. I have no strict concept of how a song should sound. I never sat down and tried to learn other people’s songs.

DC: How’d you acquire knowledge if you never paid attention to other music? Or does even matter?

JM: It has a lot to do with being very isolated. People who are from bombed out towns with no spark of any artistic scene - these are the places I grew up in. Getting music was like searching for the Holy Grail. We didn’t have record shops: none in Ohio and definitely none in West Viriginia.

We were the kids with the devil’s locks. I have this great jean jacket that I used to wear and it just shows how desperate we were to find new music. I had no idea what bands looked like, because I’d never seen them in a magazine and I’d never seen the real records. But I had a jacket with a “Fiend Club” patch on it, a ‘70s Rolling Stone patch, the Beatles, Black Flag. To me it was all just music.