Photo by Dean Budnick
In June of 2015, Mike Gordon debuted a new quintet. Joining the Phish bassist in this incarnation of his solo group were drummer John Morgan Kimock and keyboard player Robert Walter, as well as stalwarts Scott Murawaski (guitar) and Craig Myers (drums). The band has just embarked on a late fall tour, which will include stops in Chicago, Nashville and Atlanta, concluding with a three night stand at the Sinclair in Cambridge, MA on December 9-11. In the following conversation, which took place just days before opening night in St. Louis, Gordon reflects on the current state of the group and his songwriting, as well as his tour announcement videos, the “Jeannie blink” and the special ceramic elephant that he and his daughter Tessa, made for Barbara Eden.
On your Facebook page you’ve been asking your band members to name the favorite tune that they’ve been brushing up on for this tour. How would you answer the question?
There’s one new song called “Check Your Pepper”—that’s the working title. It’s almost like a vamp and a hook, rather than a song but it’s got sections and lyrics. I’m looking forward to it because it’s uncharted territory. It could become one thing, it could become another. We could play it for a whole set or we could play it for 30 seconds in between other songs. I like the open-endedness of that.
We worked on it a bit but then we left it, kind of like someone making a recipe or a painting who doesn’t do the finishing touches because they know they have to figure it out later. Sometimes the finishing touches can change the body of the project, the whole creation.
Scott and I have been doing a bunch of writing. I often hesitate to play the new stuff before recording it because I like to save some of the special figuring out for the studio, where the special spark comes with the first tries. I think maybe in the future I might change that up. Right now we’re in the process of saving a lot of stuff that we like, rather than playing it but with every tour we sprinkle in a little more.
Independent of whatever rehearsal you do with your band, I’m curious what you do to prepare for a tour.
There are so many inspirations that trickle down. Whether it’s something I hear on the radio, or some of these incredible playlists that my band members turn me onto, or experiences from Phish tour or art galleries, there’s a lot of inspiration that comes my way. Then it feels like tour is a place where anything goes and we can redefine the sound of the band. I like being in the role as the conduit for the energy aesthetically, spiritually and rhythmically.
What songs specifically surprised you or revealed themselves in a different way to you this time, as you came in with a different headspace?
I philosophize about this stuff so much and I talk to the band members when we’re in practice and through email and phone calls. Robert came to three of the Vegas shows and we just keep philosophizing because it’s more than chasing the groove, it’s chasing the path to nirvana. I listen to a lot of pop music with my daughter, and appreciate stuff that is very repetitive and catchy where you can’t get it out of your head, in a good way.
There were a couple days where I was reminded of the power of simplicity. For example, there was a moment the second night in Vegas, which was one of toughest ones for me because I felt tired. I still liked the second night because in the second set there were ferocious jams that had a heavy, massive and dark feeling. It came out of this intense amount of simplicity. It was one five-note bass pattern played over and over again for a long time. This isn’t a thing where I’m trying to be clever, or artsy. It’s not like I’m trying to be cool by using restraint. It’s the thing that’s leading to the power that music can provide. Stumbling onto this new way of using simplicity is a big theme for me.
When we did our first tour with this lineup, we started what I was calling the “non-varying exercise” because in different parts of my life I was getting inspiration to not vary. When this lineup first came together we tried everything but everything is too much, so we learned how to work with less. The non-varying exercise was interesting because it always led to some kind of peak experience or an idea for a song. Each person finds a little lick, and for five or ten minutes they stay on it. That doesn’t always apply to doing the gig but if you go in the opposite direction with so many jams, scales, licks, chords and rhythms all being used at once then there’s nothing to anchor it or hold it together.
That’s just one example. My role is to take whatever influences there are in the world that inspire me and funnel those. That’s the same with the rest of the band with their influences. We have to funnel it, even if we don’t understand how, into a band experience where we can get on stage in places we haven’t been to in a while, knowing that anything goes, but knowing that energy is fused into our systems. We try to harness that energy and refine it so we can communicate in discernible packets of rhythm and melody as simple as nursery rhyme.
On a metaphysical level, that’s my job. Taking all this information and influence and without analyzing it or planning it, trying to funnel it into what will become this tour.
Is there a particular era of your songwriting that you think is best suited to this band?
A lot of people call my hotline and say they miss Inside In.
Back at that time, I knew I wanted to mix the country and spacey stuff. I don’t want to throw that away, however I also like to keep moving forward. Although there might be some things I appreciate about an era or album that I might want to revisit, typically the aspects of the era represent a certain thing that I’ve moved past.
When I look back at Inside In, I understand that people might miss those songs and I do want to play those songs but not necessarily as much as some newer ones. In a way, I can look at every album in every era and pick out what I don’t like about that material. I can be a picky person.
For instance, I have so much love and appreciation for The Beatles, their incredible body of work and what went into forming it but I’ve heard the songs too much. I needed to give it a break. But then I went to the Beatles Cirque du Soleil in Vegas with my family, and I loved it. It’s just the perfect way to get that music back into my heart. It’s been rethought, there are visuals, but sometimes there are parts where you only hear the singing or the instrumentation, so it’s freshened right up for me. I’m totally into it again.
I need to go through that process of reinventing and rediscovering songs as I play the old ones from the old albums and eras. I’d almost rather keep evolving and keeping my eye on the ball and moving forward rather than thinking too much about the past. Yet I also want to keep the repertoire alive and get into the old songs in new ways.
When we practice we look for these secret weapons, these magic bullets. One of them and this is probably true of every band I’ve played with is just slowing things down. We’ll get on stage and there’s a live energy and a certain tempo of a song that feels natural, so we play it and it matches the live energy perfectly. Then when we hear it back, it’s too fast, you can’t enjoy the internal rhythm between the beat and the bars because they’re glossed over and it’s not heavy and it’s not moving. The only way it’s going to be those things is to slow it down more than we would like to, slow it down to an uncomfortable level and let nature speed it up at the gig.
It’s often less about each individual song than the sound of the band as a whole where we might say, “Let’s play everything slower” and it feels like a dream come true, like winning the lottery. But one song like that where it really just wasn’t really happening and then we changed it was “Tiny Little World.” That’s an example where it was a natural feeling but too fast and then we said, “We’re going to slow it down a certain percentage.”
So with “Tiny Little World” we said, “Let’s slow it down to the edge of where it feels uncomfortable” and suddenly it became the best song of the tour. It had a metamorphosis. It’s not that the slowing it down itself was the essence of the song at all, it was the key to open the door.
It’s all about finding a fine line on these various spectrums and that’s the spectrum of tempo. The one I was talking about before is the spectrum of how many ideas and influences and inspirations you can work into each few bars of music and how many you should and how many you shouldn’t and when do you experiment and when do you rein it in and non-vary.
All of this stuff is part of what I find fun, from the inspiration and philosophizing, kind of like putting it through this big ice cream maker and seeing what flavor ice cream comes out, which is the tour.
Why do we go through all this philosophizing? I think we do it because we love our jobs and we love going on tour with a band that is discovering itself and doesn’t know how it’s going to sound. Is it going to be a funk band? Is it going to be an ambient band? On the last tour Johnny and I went to see Godspeed You! Black Emperor. We’re not going to be that but there’s another influence—someone who can just use ambience most of the time and have it be beautiful. These are all influences and we’re figuring this out.
I think it’s less about each individual song. When I listen back to tapes from our tours I can hear us becoming a band. It has these influences but it doesn’t sound like anything else. For instance, it might sound like Arcade Fire for a moment but that’s part of the process while it’s all evolving.
My tendency would be to bring new 10 originals and 10 covers to every tour. But while we do bring new stuff to every tour, that would be too much. We want to really get to know the material by playing it a lot. I have found through trial and error that if we can do it that way, we can go deeper.
You just mentioned Inside In, which accompanied your film Outside Out. That leads me to the videos that you’ve made to announce your recent tours. You clearly place a lot of thought and energy into those. To what degree have you considered integrating film into your live performances? Or do you like to keep those two forms discrete?
I like to keep them discrete but I do like to have a visual element and clearly with the light boxes and the projections that we’ve had in the past with this band and more recently with Phish I think that there’s room. The audience is looking at something and they’re either going to look at people playing or some props or some projections and I really like the idea of challenging peoples’ expectations of a jamband or of me or whatever.
I like to keep it abstract. I feel like having forms and themes gives the audience members too much. It steals too much from their imagination potential. There are exceptions, though. I’ll always have a lot of ideas brewing that we haven’t had time to explore. There’s always a list.
There was an idea early on to make a fake video where it seems like it’s happening live where somebody is playing the Reel in the front row but then they’re flying through the air in other cities or other settings and it becomes clear that it’s been concocted.
I also like the idea where we show the concession stand or the street outside the venue and we’re playing to that. I saw Radiohead one time and there were a lot of video cameras mounted on people’s heads. Peter Gabriel has done this too, aiming the cameras at each other’s mouths or down at the keyboards, working with what’s already there rather than putting imagery in people’s minds. But this is all on the brainstorm list. It’s not that I need to keep them separate, it’s that I tend to be cautious about saying, “I like film, let’s just play some films.”
I do love making those tour announcement videos though and I do want to pursue that on its own more as time goes on.
Can you describe the process of creating this most recent video?
Well the shoot was all in the afternoon one day. It took a couple of hours but there was a lot of planning and editing and all that kind of stuff. It was pretty quick in the grand scheme of things but we had quite a few ideas from the brainstorming process.
Here’s how my brainstorming works: I’ll be traveling in a car or tour bus and I’ll make a voice note of an idea. Then I transcribe all my voice notes into lists and I’ll be sitting in a coffee shop—“Here’s a few ideas I had about tour announcement videos” and we’ll talk them through. Then we have a director—our friend Neil Ryan—and he’ll provide feedback.
I love coming up with ideas and I love the creative process but I don’t want all the ideas to come from me, I’d rather work in a team. In this case it was Julia Mordaunt’s idea—she’s my stylist as well as 10 other things—so she picked the 80’s outfit and then we had to find a location and my assistant Gretchen, who helps me with so many things, helped with that.
I love film shoots because there’s so much focus on the different aspects and you usually have to get it done quicker than you thought. Everyone was rushing and objects were being thrown across the room. There were more than were shown in the video. There was a table with 50 objects on it and then I tried to hit the ball.
I do love ping-pong and I’m okay at it. Recording studios usually have ping-pong tables. With Phish we’ve always had them. When you’re sitting around, it’s a way to get your blood flowing and your limbs moving.
I also like that it’s really mesmerizing—the way the ball goes back and forth but it’s contained within that rectangle the way that a movie is contained within a screen and a band is contained within a stage.
I loved that Johnny was able to come over and be part of it. He’s living in Vermont now. I love what Robert Walter did with the 80’s style soundtrack. It just came together quickly and the editors got to work and then we saw a couple revisions.
I met Barbara Eden so I had to put in the Jeannie blink. I try not to bother her too much but she said that she and her husband watched it more than once and they laughed, so what more could you ask for when you’re putting a Jeannie blink into something.
How did you meet Barbara Eden?
My daughter and I watched every I Dream of Jeannie episode. I was trying her out on some older shows and for some reason that one is the one that stuck, more than say Bewitched or Get Smart or Star Trek. We both got addicted to it as a before bed ritual. We watched all the episodes, something like 120-130 of them, all five seasons, more than once. Then I started to see that she was online and she was wearing the outfit sometimes and she was tweeting. So then I read her memoir, which I loved—she wanted to be a singer and then she switched and it’s really inspiring. After that, I gave Tessa the replica bottle from the second and third season as a Hanukkah present.
Then we made this incredible picture of Tessa wearing a nice dress and blinking next to the bottle out on the lawn. Our friends Photoshopped some pink smoke and it’s really cool because the smoke is so contrived and her expression is so blasé.
So I wrote Barbara a letter saying what an influence she was and letting her know we were going to be at the L.A. Forum. I said, “If you don’t want to come to a rock concert it’d be great to meet you.” We ended up having lunch with her. In her memoir she said she liked elephants so we spent over 100 hours with some helpers making a ceramic elephant named Tiger after an elephant in one of the episodes. Pink smoke comes out of the trunk and it makes the blink sound from the episodes. We were trying to give her the best elephant ever.
While I was traveling across the country on Phish tour, I would go to art galleries with Tessa on the back of a bicycle looking at elephants. We used all those to make a card and then we spent the other part of the card explaining how she’s so inspirational in her acting and in her career and how nice she is to her fans on Twitter. And then behind the writing there was a secret panel with a collage of us making the elephant.
My light-up guitar builder, Ben Lewry was the last guy to help. He had to shrink the electronics even more, rebuilding the smoke machine. While I was on stage at the Bill Graham Civic Center playing the third gig, he was still working on it in Berkeley during the second set. We were going to fly that night and meet Barbara the next day for lunch and he finished it. Then he rushed it over and we took a couple pictures of it and I flew it to LA where it worked beautifully.
Rachel Eng is this incredible ceramics artist who works with children and helped us make the elephant. We worked with her when Phish was in Boston and we were using Boston as the hub for our shows. It took several days and then we had to drill the trunk out even wider to get the wires in for the smoke.
We presented the elephant to Barbara and she was really nice. She gave Tessa a Jeannie Barbie doll and she signed it. Tessa was so happy, so I couldn’t resist putting the Jeannie blink in the tour announcement video.
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.
