Jellyfish’s Roger Joseph Manning Jr. to Release ‘Glamping EP’
Keyboardist Roger Joseph Manning Jr., who rose to prominence in the '90s power pop band Jellyfish, will put out his first new music in nearly a decade when his Glamping EP arrives on May 18. He also revealed plans for a Deluxe Edition of 2006's Land of Pure Imagination and a re-release of 2009's Catnip Dynamite.
Manning referred to the writing of the four Glamping tracks as "very natural and very gratifying for me. I like the architecture and assembly process of it all -- getting a song from its raw form of acoustic piano and vocal into this whole other world. I love that process, even though it can be very time-consuming for someone like me. It’s like putting together a sonic jigsaw puzzle."
All three projects are available for pre-order at PledgeMusic, where, in addition to the music, Manning is also offering some other items for sale, including signed and handwritten lyric sheets, promotional material from his tours of Japan, four keyboards and outfits he wore in Jellyfish's videos.
"I’m doing it this way as a big experiment,” he said. “One of the reasons I’ve been most excited about jumping back into doing more original music, and getting back in the saddle again after 10 years of various life trajectories, is due to sites like PledgeMusic, and how they help projects like mine come to fruition. These kinds of Pledge campaigns seem to do really well for a certain level of artist -- and this really, really seems to meet my needs. We had no middle-ground fans in Jellyfish. They completely understood what we were doing. I’ve found my fans to be the most loyal fans out there, and that’s a worldwide thing. I look forward to seeing their support for this EP, and how they're going to react to all of the extras I plan on offering through PledgeMusic."
After the 1994 breakup of Jellyfish, whose two albums were reissued in 2014, Manning founded Imperial Drag, who put out a self-titled record in 1996. He also founded the Moog Cookbook, a project with Brian Kehew where they covered alternative rock hits on analog synthesizers, and has been part of Beck's touring band for many years.
In addition to several solo releases and another as part of TV Eyes, Manning's keyboards have been heard on works by Eric Clapton, Roger Waters, Johnny Cash, Cheap Trick, Blink-182, Interpol and Red Fang.