“Gentle Giant were an extremely important band to me. I always felt like they had something unique in the way that they used counterpoint and rhythm. Nobody else was doing that. It was special, and it had a tremendous influence on me.

“I kind of saw it as the ‘rock-Bach,’ where you have all these moving voices and interesting lines going on. I spent a lot of time studying it, not necessarily in learning how to play the exact music, but just to figure out what made it tick. I really wanted to know: ‘What is that?’

“I used to follow them around in the old days and saw them probably eight times. I liked how Derek Shulman used to work his hands as the frontman, almost like he was a conductor. Wacky, great stuff.”