JJ: You’ve mentioned before that you’re thinking about doing another film, and you’ve got this chunk of time off now, do you have any specific plans?
MG: Yes and no. I’m just trying to prioritize some different projects, and I want to make room for the most important ones — that being one of the most important. That would be the film project I wanna do, and the rest would be music projects. But there are other projects which are also interesting that aren’t quite as high-priority. I’m trying to figure out what I should be spending my time doing. I haven’t allocated all the time yet. Not too specific. I have a lot of specific ideas that I’ve had for years for the next film, but they haven’t solidified to speak of.
JJ: What kinds of connections do you see between your various creative endeavors, between music and film and “Mike’s Corner” and other stuff? Kind of a broad question…
MG: There are different ways to answer it. I guess the most profound way, for me, is that I believe that consciousness is something that can be explored — with or without drugs. With music, my favorite thing is when the music takes you to a different place. It doesn’t have to be an exotic place, it can be one room over, but it takes you into a part of your mind, or the group mind, that you didn’t know existed until you were there. With film, it’s obviously like that too and with dreams it is also, where you’re brought to a different place with its own emotions and flavors and sounds and everything. The “Mike’s Corner” book also, I was saying, was sort of visual.
I used to have this fantasy of having a little environment simulation room, it’d be tiny, where you’d go in and there’d be screens on all the walls and then there’d be sounds in quadraphonic sound and everything. They have things like that. But I thought it would be cool to make one of those in my home. That would be the total simulation. That’s what ties it all together for me, this chance to get into different parts of the soul and the brain.
Creatively – obviously, since it’s a film about music and I spent a thousand of the hours doing the soundtrack – it’s very music-related. There’s some crossover. The creative process is a bit different for me in that I get more intellectually involved with film stuff than I do with music. I like to kind of work the left brain and have that chance to do that. It’s a different feel for me. Actually, you could look at it from the other side. When we’re on tour, we watch movies on the tour bus, or if we go to the theater, and that inspires this music. There’s a lot of back and forth. It’s sort of related.
JJ: Were there any sudden incidences playing music where you were suddenly informed by something you were working on with the film, or vice-versa?
MG: (Long pause.) It might be kind of indirect. The days of filming, if we get into a certain groove, then it’s kind of like a music groove in a way, and everyone working together, kind of a little team of people. Not to mention, recording the soundtrack, where I got to be in more of a leadership role. Definitely, with all the Phish experience, I knew when to keep to take or when to keep going or how much to plan out and how much to let happen in the studio. I don’t know if I can remember being with the band in specifically being inspired by scenes from the film. I don’t think I remember specific examples of that but probably, more indirectly, some of the concepts in the film were pertinent.
JJ: What was the process of scoring and writing songs specifically for the film like?
MG: I had a couple of different bands come in. Mainly, it was one band – which was Gordon Stone on pedal steel, [Burlington jazz musician] James Harvey on trombone, and Russ Lawton on drums [Gordon Stone Band/Trey Anastasio Band], and me on bass – and there were different musicians that came and added this and that. I wanted there to be that country pedal-steel sound which goes throughout, and I wanted a funky drumbeat which Russ provides. It’s kind of a good mixture of those three, actually, because James is a great jazz piano player. It mixes the slightly jazzy, slightly funky, slightly country. It never occurred to me that it… anyway… not to throw genres around when it’s all meaningless.
We went into the studio. I just finished building the studio. Jeff and I – Jeff’s my partner and producer – spent a couple of years building it and equipping it and wiring it. Just in the nick of time to record the soundtrack, we were ready, and we had the band come in and we had different musicians come in. I also did a bunch of bass jams with just bass and drums with Fish [Jon Fishman] and then I did it with this guy Gabe Jarrett [ex-Jazz Mandolin Project, presently playing with No Glue].
JJ: The JMP guy.
MG: Right. And we used some of that and added. In my studio there are a bunch of different instruments just always miked up and computers and this and that, so I can sit down and just add some textures. It’s fun: it’s like an arts and crafts of sound room.
Then, actually, what was much more tedious: we actually taped a lot of our own sound effects and we also got a sound effects library, so we used both — from CD and tapes. But, to do the sound design, which was 32 tracks of sound, including mix downs of music (the music was mixed down to 16 or 12 of the tracks) and then the rest were for production sound, which is the dialogue and all that, and sound effects, ambiance. Putting all that together was very time-consuming, tedious, but fun.
The rough cut was all silent. For each scene, I had this thing on the computer, which was a list of a million different jams that we had, and I would just keep plopping them in — like 20 at a time, or 25 different ones. The music changes the emotion of the scene so much. I would just try to see what seemed to work best. Usually, it wasn’t intuitive. It was more following the gut. There’s a difference between intuition and following the gut, maybe, because I thought that something would work and then it ended up not working and then I would just have to go with the feeling.
For some scenes, there wasn’t anything that worked, and I was pulling my hair out. And then I started to worry that there were too many different kinds of music, which some people have said, and not enough silence anymore. Originally, the whole thing was silent. There was something nice about that that went away with adding so much background music.
It was a big learning process. At all the different phases of the project, I was reading books about that part. I read a film sound book and watched a lot of independent movies and movies with my wife, just getting all inspired and experimenting. That was pretty much the process.
I wrote out some charts – just basic chord progressions and melodies – for a few of the tunes. One of them, actually, between the background flavored marshmallow scene, there’s this thing I always wanted to write, that I wrote, for pedal steel and trombone, because they both slide — and they kind of slide in and out of each other. I’m reworking all the music for a CD release, but it’s been – actually – nine months since I’ve been able to work on that. I need to get back to that.
JJ: Do you have any time frame on that?
MG: I had advertised sometime this year, but I would probably guess the end of the year.
JJ: Would you be re-recording entire songs or just remixing what you have?
MG: Not just remixing, and not just re-recording either, but reediting. I’m doing things like taking a jam, and editing it into a song, and making up lyrics that weren’t in the movie. It’s fun. It’s just fun stuff.
JJ: Oh, sorta like the process for [Story Of The] Ghost” in that way.
MG: Did we do that? Yeah, we sort of did do that. Yeah, exactly. Right. (_Laughs._) Yep.
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