DB- You mentioned your next studio album. Will that material focus on all those songs you wrote a couple years ago but never appeared on The Green Sparrow or songs you have written since then?

MG- There’s a combination. In ‘07 I set out to write 3 albums worth and I basically succeeded. So on one hand I’m wanting to move on and on the other hand, I’m really attached to some stuff no one’s heard yet. I’m still finding it fresh. So there’s a bunch of stuff that was recorded. I ended up making these demos that sounded so good, I ended up working with them as the basic tracks and adding to them. Some of the songs on Green Sparrow are like that. So there’s a few more like that and a few that I wanted to redo or I’ve done since then.

I went to a studio in Vermont this spring before we did the Phish album and recorded a handful of tracks with this band that I’m playing with. Actually Craig was in Europe, so he wasn’t playing percussion and Tom Cleary played on a couple things but we also did a few things as a trio with me and Todd and Scott, all these different configurations. So there’s a few tracks from there and usually with these ventures, it’s a matter of experimenting and seeing what works. I might not use everything I recorded at that session.

I think most of the basic tracks are done. I have about 15 songs that I would really like to use on a 10 song album. So I have some choices and really what’s left to do is the fun part, which is creative editing and overdubbing. So it’s still possible that maybe I’ll record one or two more or actually it’ll be rerecording one or two more.

DB- Do you have target dates in mind in terms of when you’ll be done and the album will be released?

MG- I wish that I could finish this year and put it out at the beginning of next year but I’m finding that it’s requiring a fair bit of time when we’re not playing. So while it seems like there might be a few months in this year available, it’s actually not the case. So it’s just cramming when I can.

DB- In terms of that earlier era of songwriting, were “Sugar Shack,” “Only a Dream,” and “Can’t Come Back,” the three songs on the two new Phish releases, composed during that period? [The first is on Joy , the latter two will appear on Party Time ].

MG- “Sugar Shack,” that also was one from October of ‘07. I really loved the demo a lot and it was definitely going to be on my next solo album. But I’m glad it turned out as it did because the band and [Steve] Lillywhite liked some things about it and they didn’t like other things about it. I’m glad they liked some things but I’m also glad they didn’t like some things because I learned a lot about watching a song evolve.

Steve really liked the guitar melody when he heard it. On the demo you hear that first. You hear just the drum beat and then you hear a Caribbean-sounding melody and the strumming is like the guy from Brazil who did the David Bowie songs in The Life Aquatic movie [Seu Jorge]. It’s sort of the way he would strum, this kind of Latin lilting rhythm. But what Lillywhite didn’t like were the verses. He liked the chorus and he liked the melody. The verses were very sparse with only a few words in each, so I worked at it and took the same vision I had and fleshed it out.

We had too many songs to put on an album and up until the end, it wasn’t going to be on it. We had a few songs we wanted to try again on the very last day and that was one of them. It was actually the last one on the last day that we were trying to do again. It really hadn’t sounded so good the first time we had played it, which is why it wasn’t going to be on the album. But at the last minute, we decided to throw away everything about the demo. We did have one idea to use the drum beats from the demo and Fish said, “Now wait a second. I love this drum beat and I’ve been practicing it for weeks but I don’t want Joe Russo to have a cool drum beat on the first Phish album back,” which was a good point because we wanted to internalize stuff and make it our own. So we abandoned everything about the demo and just did that funky reggae groove which is different from how the demo was.

That’s the long answer but it’s from yet another Mike and Jared October ‘07 session. We wrote about 19 songs and about half of them are being used for something or other. Actually a couple more were used on the bonus tracks on Green Sparrow. There were four bonus tracks, for Amazon, iTunes. They’re harder to find and they’re stranger. There’s one called “I’m Doing It Anyway” which is a very quirky odd song.

“Only A Dream,” that was from the same thing October ‘07 session. I had recorded that for Green Sparrow with Trey, Chuck Leavell and Bill Kreutzmann and it just didn’t come together. We used other stuff with that group but that one just didn’t feel right. Then I recorded it again with my band. So I just keep recording it over and over again (laughs).

But with Phish, again we changed some stuff around, like the drum beat. Obviously many of the songs on Party Time were in consideration for Joy but when we all listened to what we had in the end, I didn’t vote for it myself because it didn’t seem to sound right in the context of the other songs on the album. But I really like the song. My band started playing it last December and we’ve had a lot of fun with it becoming a high energy jam vehicle.

I really like the Phish version and I think it’s the best version but it occurs to me that I can imagine a different kind of version, which I may also put on my next album. I’ll have to see how I feel about that.

And “Can’t Come Back,” again that was Mike and Jared Slomoff, October ‘07. We had a very fruitful month. Everything stemmed from something else and that had stemmed from a guitar lick that I recorded in ‘93 while walking around South Boston that we had archived.

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