Richard Cheese is the only person I will ever interview who will talk more about his wardrobe than his music. In a phone interview I had with him recently, he went into detail about his various cuff links and his different tuxedos. He stressed that his favorite tux is tiger-striped, not any other animal, because "when you go to Vegas you don't see Siegfried and Roy getting eaten by Jaguars. They are eaten by tigers. If you are going to be a Vegas lounge singer you've got to wear the Vegas colors, which are tiger-stripe."

Don't let this fool you, Cheese is also a connoisseur of the soon-to-be-classics, or as he says, "the standards of tomorrow." And he may be the only person in existence with a fine enough ear to hear the beautiful love song in Snoop Dogg's "Gin & Juice."

"What a beautiful love song that is," he says about Snoop's classic. "It's great to hear it now and realize 30 years from now your children are going to be playing that at their wedding, saying, 'Oh, they're playing our song.'"

Cheese makes his living by taking your favorite pop songs and turning them into swinging lounge tunes suitable for the swankiest joints in Vegas. It's a very simple formula, but it has yielded five hilarious albums, with the most recent being 2006's Cheesified Christmas album, Silent Nightclub.

His ambitions don't stop there; Cheese would love to do an album of ballads (he mentioned Weezer and Gwen Stefani/No Doubt as possible subjects) and looks forward to doing an album with more whistling in the future, "The problem is with iTunes: the frequency, the dynamic range, the MP3 quality isn't good enough to capture the depth of the whistling, so I'm waiting for them to come out with a higher resolution technology."

This gag has worked successfully since its start. "The first few shows we did back in 2000, they didn't necessarily know what to expect... [but] we don't necessarily have the luxury of playing to strangers any more."

Since he is no longer playing to strangers, he must be playing to someone, right? "We get a lot of people of every age group; what we don't get enough of are hot chicks. We get probably a 70/30 mix of dudes to girls, and the girls who do come out to the shows are usually gorgeous, but there just aren't enough of them."

He goes on to further explain a problem that stems from his Vegas roots, "We have a lot of problems with the guys who show up, they're expecting a lot of hookers and strippers, and in Vegas, you know, you get that, but when we do a show in Oregon we aren't able to bring the harem on the bus. So there's usually a lot of disappointment."

Luckily, that's where the disappointment ends, for me, anyways. I think most people will enjoy the time they spend with his records, and we could all benefit from his unwavering affection and hope for popular, top 40 music.