DC: Axess and Aces, which I was listening to yesterday or the day before, is all in one tuning, right?

JM: Right, it’s all one tuning, although, there are a handful of different instruments. It sounds as if there’s one guitar, but sometimes there’ll be a tenor guitar and an acoustic guitar – they sound very similar because of the way it was recorded. The guitars bleed together and make it sound very complicated, but its actually not.

DC: When you tour, are you restricted by what you can bring with you?

JM: Absolutely, I can only bring one guitar. The Magnolia songs are basically in standard tuning just by necessity. But if we get to point where we can each have several guitars in working order, I’d be able to introduce a lot more material into the set.

There are a lot of things to overcome, especially when you’re playing with a traditional bass, drums, guitar arrangement. There’s no way you can switch guitars for every single song. I’m not trying to make spacey music, I’m trying to make it tight and melodic. It’s not like I’m hitting the distortion and strumming an open chord, I’m trying to make it sound fluid and it should naturally sound that way. So it’s difficult, in a live setting to do a lot of Ohia material.

DC: Do you need isolation to write? Do you need to be sedentary to finish an entire song?

JM: My ideal writing situation is I get up at four a.m. and just writing for a few hours. Sometimes it’s just like mechanical exercises. I’m just writing, there’s no song in mind. After an hour or two of that I start to concentrate and pick out what seems interesting. That’s when I sit down at the keys or get the guitar. I ignore the lyrics I just wrote and try to see if I can come up with something musically interesting. So, I’ll try to see if they fit together and if they don’t, I just give up right away. I move on to writing a new song, because the best songs, for me, are a quick and easy match. Even if it seems like it’s going to be a really strong song, I don’t force it.

DC: I’m completely blown away that you get up at 4 in the morning. I don’t know how many other musicians can say that, but it almost sounds like farm work to me.

JM: It’s sort of like farmer’s time. That’s me going to work. Working that much is a tool you need to keep sharp. And if you don’t, you have to take a lot of steps to get sharp again. After doing this for so many years, I’ve trained myself. If I have a free hour, and I don’t have to run across town to do something, I can sit down and start to have something if I just concentrate. I have tons of ideas already just sitting there.