Biography

Roger Joseph Manning Jr. wants to take you on a trip. Not just any trip, mind you, but one that the noted keyboard wizard/producer/arranger/songwriter would prefer to offer to you and your respective ears as an escape from the humdrum nadir and stress of everyday life and instead launch you into a world of pure sonic imagination. To do just that, Manning — whose palpable aural résumé includes co-piloting the likes of Jellyfish, The Lickerish Quartet, Imperial Drag, TV Eyes, and The Moog Cookbook, in addition to his continuing role as Beck’s touring keyboardist for 24 years and counting — will soon be serving up a trio of solo reissues for albums that have long been out of circulation and/or hard to find. This catalog threesome consists of 2006’s THE LAND OF PURE IMAGINATION (DELUXE EDITION), 2008’s CATNIP DYNAMITE, and his 2018 PledgeMusic EP, GLAMPING. All three releases have been dutifully remastered by longtime compatriot/mixing engineer John Paterno under Manning’s supervision. “These albums were all really very personal experiments I was conducting,” Manning says about his remastered solo triple replay. “Obviously, there are songs on each of them that I could just do with an acoustic guitar and a vocal, but there’s so much more fun to be had by exploring all these densely layered journeys I made.”