How about Mike Gordon and “Arc of the Sun”?

That was another fairly easy one in that I wanted songs where it felt like they could make a meaningful contribution and that’s a bass-driven song. The bass part is the standout piece of that tune.

Did you record that live or send him the track?

I sent him the track and then I went up there. He had gotten well into it by the time I was there but I did go to his home studio and that was a lot of fun. First of all, it’s just a really cool studio. I got to hang out in his house, have dinner with his wife, meet his cat and make rock music. And then he came out that night and played the tune with us live at Higher Ground, so it was a really neat night.

So what did you work on at Mike’s studio?

A lot of it happened a couple days before I got there. He listened to the song and we talked about two approaches. The first was him going off and doing whatever he felt the song needed and the second was working from John Leccese’s bass part and then making it his own. So he tried the two approaches and he felt that the latter served the song better. To John’s credit, Mike was using John’s creative ideas as fodder for his part so that was neat.

Then I asked him to sing on it and there was conversation about the lyrics and about how he might approach it. And in this process it dawned on me how responsible he is for Phish’s sound. Trey definitely is the alpha male but when you hear the bass part and you hear the vocals [on “Arc of the Sun”] it’s like, “Wow, it sounds like Assembly of Dust meets Phish.”

So he had me over and showed me around. He’s pretty proud of that studio and if I had that studio I’d be proud too. Then he sat down at the board and brought up the mix and where he was at and played it screamingly loud. Talk about chills, I might have gotten teary-eyed. It was just so awesome. Not just the music but also the amount of energy and attention he put into it and the outcome was really powerful. That’s what led in part to my thinking about how much he contributes to the Phish signature sound because he did what came naturally and it was fantastic.

As I listen to the lyrics on “Arc of the Sun” and most of the songs on Some Assembly Required, there is much more emphasis on images and abstractions, as opposed to the more linear narratives of the story songs that have been a big part of your earlier work. Was this a conscious decision to strike out in a new direction?

It was intentional, just as the story-writing part was intentional. I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve always been a fan of Robert Hunter’s lyricism. I’ve always loved his story-telling element and the rich sense of place you always get from some of those songs like “Brown Eyed Women,” “Tennessee Jed” or “Scarlet Begonias.” So that’s something I’ve always tried to model after. But I think creatively I had an itch to do something different and I wanted this record to be more my own. I think one of the challenges of any artist in any medium is that human thought and creativity is built on the back of history and the real challenge is how you incorporate your influences and yet have a voice that’s your own. That’s what I was shooting for broadly and one of the by-products of that was the lyrical content was more amorphous and less literal.

In terms of tracks you sent out, who most surprised you with what they sent back?

Hands down Martin Sexton. I asked him to sing on it and he came back with an electric vocal part which was him singing through a microphone with a bunch of distortion and delay which sounded like a slide guitar. It’s mind blowing. If you didn’t know it was a voice you’d think it was an electric guitar, so that was really cool.

Were you concerned that with the different personalities on each track, the album might lack a certain unity?

There were a few things I was afraid of. First that it would be too schmaltzy, like the Ray Charles duets album Genius Loves Company, which is a cool record but there’s a cheese element to it. The second was that the guests would overpower the band, and it would become all about the guests. The third was that it would become some Frankenstein collection of songs. I guess people will interpret it as they will but from where I sit, it feels like a coherent statement, sometimes at the cost of the guest musicians nesting in the song. I think we downplayed them in some cases more than we might have.

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