Charlie Lowell could be the most successful keyboardist you've never heard of.

Owing to the smashing success of the singles "Flood," an urgent cry for help set to churning acoustic guitars, and "Liquid," a brooding look at the Crucifixion begun by the menacing growl of Charlie's B-3, the self-titled 1995 debut CD by Jars of Clay is approaching triple-platinum status. 1997's Much Afraid distinguished itself from its predecessor thanks to an evolving approach to songwriting and the lush London studio production of Stephen Lipson. Much Afraid has crossed the double-platinum mark. If I Left the Zoo, released in November 1999, is near gold.

If I Left the Zoo paradoxically delves deeper into and walks away from a few Jars of Clay hallmarks. Symphonic strings scale down to Beatlesque quartets. Rattly pawnshop guitars barge in among the pretty Taylors and bring with them roaring tube amp sounds. Introspective vocals acquire a bluesy edge. And Charlie weaves more comps, pads, flavoring, and leads in and out of the mix on a greater variety of keyboards than ever before.

Charlie described the beginnings of the latest effort: "A lot of the new songs came from a time of prayer and writing during a songwriting retreat; it was just the four of us, a few instruments, and an Akai 12-track machine in a little house in Iowa. And then Dennis came along and messed everything up!"

Dennis? "Dennis Herring. We recorded in his studio down in Oxford, Mississippi. He produced the last Counting Crows record and Glow by Innocence Mission, which we all really liked. It turned out great, but the first couple months of it were really hard. Dennis did things that were like, 'No! You can't do that!' … things that were contrary to what we'd learned in Nashville."

For example: "There was this old upright piano there. I kept asking, 'Hey, can we have that thing tuned?' Dennis kept saying, 'Yeah, I'll call the lady,' and he never did. We started 'Sad Clown,' and over this broken-down, out-of-tune piano he hung up a little microcassette recorder and used its line out, so the mic and whatever compression the thing had is what you hear on the record. I was nervous about it. It sounded terrible. He was convinced that it was exactly what the song needed, and it was. Dennis has that foresight. He had the piano tuned after that."

Onstage with Charlie in San Francisco were a B-3 rescued from an Indiana basement, a silver Wurly ("It has these two sour keys up here, but I don't play up that high"), a Hohner accordion, and a Roland A-70 controller MIDIed to a JV-1080 (loaded with Vintage Keyboards and Keyboards Of The '60s And '70s expansion boards), from which came Farfisa, vintage synth, and Mellotron sounds. "I've never played a real Mellotron," Charlie tells us. He used an Electro_Harmonix Memory Man at one point in the set to transform the B's percussion into a sonar ping, and he occasionally funkified the Wurly with an E-H Q-Tron.

A Sony MiniDisc player seemed a curious inclusion in the setup. "We use it for the chants on 'Flood,' loops and distorted vocals on 'Unforgetful You,' and a ReBirth sequence on 'Liquid.' That's about it, really." Contrast this cheap and clean solution with the refrigerator-sized racks found backstage on the Mariah Carey tour.

Charlie's Hammond stops stray a little from the kinds of sounds that have been most strongly associated with the instrument. "When I was first learning how to play B-3, I heard some people say, 'The Hammond is most interesting when it's always kinda changing.' So I'm always tweaking the drawbars a little throughout the songs. It's probably from being insecure when I was first learning, feeling like I shouldn't just sit there. I should be doing something!"