In terms of your songwriting, which is the final component here, do you ever write something that isn’t suited for the Mike Gordon Band or Phish but might be used for something else you haven’t quite figured out yet?
That’s an interesting question, maybe there should be. Maybe it would be for a film soundtrack or maybe it would be for another artist or myself in a different context. No, it’s not that but it’s quite a process of figuring out what works and what doesn’t based on my changing desires and values and aesthetics.
I always have something that I’d like to do more with. Some of it is less is more. I like to take a little hook that is a little melody and a little lyric and do more with it. Where you can hear it a thousand times but you don’t necessarily get bored because it’s like a fugue, it’s just swarming and swirling through passages of music. Or maybe it’s not so complex, maybe it’s just a pop song with a hook. I just really just enjoy doing more with less.
What ends up happening is Phish picks a few but the bulk of my material will be for my band because there’s more room in the set for my material [Laughs]. Actually, room is the wrong word because the Phish guys are very encouraging and I appreciate that but the way things unfold, we have a big repertoire and everyone’s writing but Trey’s the principal writer. I like to have my band be ready for anything that Scott and I really like. That way we know it’s going to see the light of day.
It’s not so obvious as, “This one is Phishy.” Someone might say, “Well, this one has an atonal fugue in it and that’s what Phish is known for so, of course it’s for Phish” but that’s not really the right answer because maybe Phish has had enough of that and my band has not had enough of it and is ready to dabble in that. That’s not something that’s going on right now, my point is that someone might try to say this thing’s for this band or that band but it’s hard to predict.
Sometimes I think with Phish what works the best is the stuff that’s simplest because we have so much material coming in and if it’s quicker to learn than it’s quicker to play. I’ve been really enjoying in Phish how there’s a lot of room in the arrangements for people to put their own stamp on things. Some of the stuff that’s not like that from years ago where I made my own bass line, I made too much so there’s no room anymore to discover. So I like that with Phish now, how there’s a lot of room.
I like in Trey’s writing how much space he leaves for the players. He’s a great leader in that way. The greatest talent of a leader is to be able to bring out the best of everyone on the team and he’s great at that. Sometimes without realizing it my stuff will have a lot of changes, a lot of sections and bridges and than I come to the realization, “Oh this is a little dense.”
What I really like about the Beatles Cirque du Soleil is that they took “Here Comes The Sun” for example and just went to the bridge, where they sing “Sun, Sun, Sun…” for like 5 whole minutes so you get to bask in that bridge. I really like that concept of, “Let’s get into the fabric of the music and the singing in a way we haven’t before where we can bask in it.”
With Phish sometimes it’s also good to say, “Let’s provide a different kind of groove, one that we haven’t done in a while.” Maybe that’s why “Yarmouth Road” worked out, because we haven’t had a reggae song in a few years or maybe it’s just a good song, I don’t know.
But I think the other way works too where I could say we really end up playing a tempo or groove really well but rather than go outside of that, why not go inside of it. Why not make something simple so then we can make a 20-minute jam one day and just be ourselves.
You can see by the picture I’m painting here that it’s not so easy to say, “This should be for Phish, this should be for that.” Instead it’s just like, “Here are some songs that are good, do you want to play them?” or, “Well, this song is good, I love it to death but it’s not quite finished yet so let’s not learn it now.” It all just sort of comes out in the wash.
When Phish was first getting back together Trey said, “You know, I think one good song you wrote was “Andelman’s Yard,” so let’s play it.” I told him, “I’m glad you said that, it’ll be fun.” We learned it and practiced it and then when we got back for rehearsals later that year in ’09, “Andelman’s Yard,” was something I was playing every night with my band so I said, “You know, that’s kind of one I lean on a lot.” Trey understood immediately and said, “Okay, let’s choose a different one” and maybe it was “Babylon Baby” or something. One great thing about having two bands is that one band can rediscover something in a song, and then I can bring that idea to the other band. It has gone both ways before.
What’s more interesting for me than which band is gonna play the stuff, is this working with what I have, for instance taking smaller hooks and using them in more ways. It sounds technical and I don’t want to make it sound like a science project. Songwriting and song playing comes from passion and the heart or it doesn’t work. Every song lyric has to be indirectly related to something that the songwriter, the singer, and the audience cares about or you might as well not do it. It’s not a science project, yet I love the science project aspect of it where I just have these goals, and I’m hungry to have material that works in a different way so get all excited about writing.
I always bring Scott into it. It’s been great having him in the mix. I hate the time delay, but I think I’ll figure out ways around it. I have a bunch of goals this year to write some songs. As it is we need more songs, so we’ll spend another year to write more songs, and then those goals from two and a half years ago aren’t the goals anymore but we’ll have the body of material that came from it. So what should do we do with those songs? Should we forget them? Well, no, because we like them and some of them are pretty good songs.
How would you characterize what you and Scott are doing these days?
It’s hard to characterize it because we have a lot of material. It’s in different batches. Some stuff I think has a little more pop influence, mostly from what I listen to with my daughter. That’s not all I’m listening to though, I listen to some indie stuff and I’ve been listening to Can. So I take what I like about those things. Scott is bringing in influences along the way as well.
Again, that’s only one handful. Then there’s some of that indie stuff—it’s hard to put into words—indie pop, or whatever I enjoy about that. Then there’s some stuff that’s just left-field quirky, which might just be the process of songwriting where you want to push yourself pretty far in a different direction and this is just what came out. And maybe it’s too weird to enjoy so we’ll leave it behind or it’d be good to do something weird now, so we’ll use it.
The last time we were working on something, the very last time was one of the songs that was sort of poppier but not like any current pop artists, it’s just my own personal light push in that direction. The goal is not to try to write pop music per se, it’s to try to take some of those aspects that I’ve been appreciating and weave those into what Scott and I do. I’m just describing the latest song, as an example but I wouldn’t say that that’s the overall emphasis.
That’s another thing about the time lag—I think you get better at something and you get a lot of good material by doing a lot of it, so we try to do a lot of writing. Some of the ideas are half-baked and when there’s a lot, there’s going to be different categories, and when it spans over a bunch of time, there’s going to be different phases. So it’s really hard to say that “this” is the era of “this.” What I can say is that I try to keep pushing in new directions as an artist and that this is the era where I’ve been enjoying it more than ever before.
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