Photo by Kevin Yatarola
Mike Gordon hits the road with his band this weekend for the first of five select dates before year’s end. With Phish off tour this fall, Gordon has been working on a new batch of songs and even some secret recording projects, while also discovering a new “carefree” approach to his existence. Gordon is famous for his meticulous use of lists, documenting experiences and dreams etc, but in the following interview he reveals to Jambands.com he has stripped all of that away as he enters a new phase in life. While preparing to hit the road this weekend, Gordon took time out of his busy schedule to discuss this new phase in his life, Phish’s “subconscious” decision to stray from learning composed material and why he’s been experimenting with a new Fender bass.
I know you’ve designed this current time off the road with Phish around a songwriting phase. You have some select shows coming up at the end of this month and the beginning of the next. Can you talk about what form this songwriting process is taking and how you intend that to play into these select shows?
Well, songwriting is a funny thing. There’s so many ways to do it. Often times, it takes years to write a song—so what I’m working on now, you would hear in years. [Laughs]. It’s pretty indirect. That is usually the case. I mean, sometimes it can be nice when it’s more immediate and you write something and go onstage and play it. But, for most of the situations I’ve seen—not just for my songs but for other people’s songs around me—it’s taken years where the writing phase will be a few months or a year and then the practicing and learning and then the recording and then practicing with the band and recording…it’s very indirect. But, more than usual, I’m trying to have a very carefree existence.
I’ve got all the first born attributes of being a list maker and a goal setter and a perfectionist. I’m trying to get rid of all that—change my personality so that if I’m working on something musical, maybe it does creep right in. I have some recording projects going which are currently secret, [Laughs] but fun. At least I think they’re secret. That’s an interesting question.
Last year you told us that you were working towards a more traditional songwriting approach, using just a guitar to write bare song structures. Does that tie into this new carefree approach you’re moving towards?
Yeah. The problem with being the person that does interviews is that I end up talking about something so much that I might as well not do it since I’ve already talked about it, which would be a kind of crazy assessment of the situation when this is my creative process that I’m talking about. But I just keep talking about it. After 46 years of being one way, it’s taking a while to realign myself the other way.
When I say I’m looking to do a more carefree approach, it’s kind of like baby-steps. I still am having in my schedule some projects which involve more thoughtfully assembled writing and recording based on things that have existed in the past. So yeah, I said it last year and I’ll probably say it next year. It’s just a major overhaul of my personality that I’m working on.
How do you feel that overhaul is affecting some of the other areas in your life? You’ve been sitting in with lots of different artists in Vermont lately and have all these various musical projects on the go. Have you found a balance in your life that allows you to spend time with your family while also writing and performing on a regular basis?
Yeah, there’s a lot of balancing acts and that is definitely one of them. Fortunately, I’m able to spend a lot of time everyday with my daughter and when things get busy I end up wishing it were more time with her. But usually it’s a lot of time—we go on adventures, we go running, I drop her off and pick her up from pre-school and we have lunches together. My wife and I find time, and we find time for all three of us. It’s working out pretty well.
The problem with being a person with so many different interest—even within music I have so many different interests, not to mention things on the backburner like filmmaking etc…anyone who has a lot of different interests has to either do some sort of a juggling act and hope that the different projects will inspire each other, or cut some back and make some choices. Even with music I have a few things going and they are all sort of in the works where I can’t say too much more about them. But I think I’m doing some good balancing and I’ve even gone out to see some music lately, which I used to do a lot more of, and that, has been cool.
Have you seen anything good lately?
I’ve been doing the Honky Tonk Tuesday thing more often like I used to do—not every week—and seeing some bands. I actually went to the Spin Doctors—I haven’t seen them in 20 years or something, but I’ve been friends with Chris Baron a bit and have been doing some stuff with him. Oh, well Gillian Welch and David Rawlings—who I’ve seen a bunch of times—that was great at the Flynn in Burlington.
Sunday night I went to see Orgone and I forgot I had done a gig with them and Galactic in St. Louis at the Pageant. I forgot that that was them. I didn’t make the connection. I went and I really just had a great time. But the mystery thing is, I love the bass player—I mean I’m sure all of their bass players are great, but this guy was so fun to watch. And so I went home and I Googled them and all over the place, all their bios and pictures and videos, the guy that I saw doesn’t exist. He was a figment of our imagination. They have three or four bass players that they play with and none of them was the guy I saw. Not in videos, not in bio not in pictures or movies. It’s a mystery. So I ended up going to their website and trying to contact them to figure out, you know, the mystery—because I loved watching the guy so much. But as I said, I’m sure their other bass players are all great too.
Last year you told us that you had been going through a phase of listening to female vocalists. You cover Gillian Welch’s “Time the Revelator” among others in your own band and have now brought one of her new tunes “The Way It Goes” over to Phish. What is it about Gillian and these female vocalists that appeals to you at this point?
Since a year ago I’ve tried to move on to covering male vocalists. [Laughs]. I guess it’s that there’s sort of a rawness of intention where what she’s saying is uncluttered by pretences or fluff. It just seems to be a raw feel. She often goes for a certain style that’s reminiscent of older styles or, you think about…not cowboys…and it’s not bluegrass, but you think about mountain people and these sort of tragic or sad situations.
Maybe that’s what it is too. Generally, my life is so happy that one of my overlapping phases is sort of seeking the darkness because I think it’s important for people to allow their dark side…to embrace it and to hold it. As a musician and as a songwriter I want to look for that. So she has that. Her songs have a certain melancholy furiousness to them and they’re so open-ended since they’re not specifically bluegrass. I suppose they’re more like old timey music than bluegrass. They’re just kind of open for interpretation so that ends up being pretty cool too, in that you can do anything you want with them. But with “Time the Revelator,” we were seeing that in my band as like a Neil Young sounding jam—kind of an excuse to get raunchy but let the words tell a story in that context.
So when you enter a songwriting phase like this, do you distinguish ahead of time whether the songs will go to Phish or to your own band or is that a decision you make after they are completed?
Not really. I guess the way it works is, and I’ve said this before, I get a lot of encouragement from Trey and the other Phish guys to bring material. However, there’s only so much time in the setlist and in the course of the tour since we all sing, but Phish has a lead singer and it’s Trey and Phish has a principal songwriter and it’s Trey. So, I don’t really plan on what’s going to be for what.
Sometimes it’s counterintuitive. For example the song “Got Away,” Fishman played on the track on the album and I love the way it came out and it sounds like a Phish song. I think it was a success story in terms of taking some passages of music that are composed and making them sound, well, carefree to take that word back. I think that’s one of the things that Phish has done really well, which is to take music that’s got a lot of orchestration to it and made it sound tossed off or almost improvised.
And so that’s why I thought the song “Got Away”…I did a great job of writing it in a way that it’s not bogged down with notes so that it sounds like a mental experiment. It’s sort of that all of the notes that are written for it sound, to me, like they ebb and flow with the emotion of the song. I thought that would be great for Phish. On the other hand, my band did a great version and Phish probably doesn’t want to do it because we’re not learning composed stuff in this era. In a way, it would have been great for Phish 10 years ago. And so I kind of just put songs together and see what happens. Some might be for Phish, some might be for my band, there’s some that I might just record and not know who’s going to play them but just concentrate on getting an incredible recording and a good music group. So, I guess that’s part of the carefree Mike-era.
Can you explain what this new “carefree” approach entails for you?
What I’ve done a lot of this summer—I had a lot of extra time to do some soul searching…that’s a cliché term, but, you know, some contemplation. Halfway through the summer I thought the only thing that’s going to make this carefree…it’s not just a phase I think it’s really over a few years that I’m trying to gradually change my way of working. So I found out in the middle of the summer the only thing that’s going to make that work is to have very specific goals—higher goals and then the subgoals under them. Then at the end of the summer I did more contemplating and I realized that’s not true, I don’t want that at all. I don’t want to set goals.
I mean, people that inspire me are often people who set goals and are great at accomplishing them—so it’s important. But part of my ebbing and flowing with my creative work and my existence, I think, is going to be to not necessarily have a specific goal but just to be able to follow my views and inspiration as it comes. And if that’s to make a funky song then I’ll just see that through and not know what it’s going to be for. It’s hard to tell. Sometimes a funky song can become intricate enough that people aren’t really going to want to dance to it, but it will sound interesting. Other times, it will be pared down to such a raw essence that dancing to it is all you would really want to do with it. I don’t know and that’s what I’m trying to do—I’m trying to know less more often.
You mentioned that Phish is straying from learning composed material in this era. Why has the band made that conscious decision?
It might not be a conscious decision; it might be a subconscious decision. Well, with Phish the last thing that was intricate was “Time Turns Elastic.” We haven’t played that this year, I don’t think. I think I read in an article that Trey prefers the orchestral version and so maybe that’s why we’re not playing it. But it doesn’t really matter, I like playing it and I’m also fine not playing it. We learned that in the studio. The way we ended up learning it was with Steve Lillywhite kind of guiding us and recording it—learning it while we record it in one minute clumps. So that was pretty cool, it was really fun.
But generally speaking, I can’t really answer for the other guys because I’m not sure that we’ve talked this through, but I answer from my perspective. And my perspective is that, as we get older as a band we kind of get more knowledgeable about what works and what doesn’t. As a band and as individuals, often what I’ve been finding is what works is very simple. The simpler the framework for the music is, whether it’s a song or a jam even a composition I guess, the more we can do with it where it’s not just reproducing the notes—churning out the notes. It’s more being able to pour our whole soul into the passage of what’s happening, whether it’s the bass line or the rhythm or…just being able to really dig into it, I think, requires it to be a little simple to start with, at least in terms of seeing what makes for really powerful experiences onstage and feeling that. I’ve just been seeing that.
A lot of the music with my band is pretty intricate rhythmically and I love it that we’re starting to have some material that is very simple and we can just…I mean it juxtaposes back and forth. Well now to complete that thought, ‘cause now you got me thinking…ironically, when I say that, I don’t like music that’s so simple that I’m bored. I like people who are great, dazzling soloists and chord progressions that are interesting and take you to unexpected places and song forms that are unexpected. I like being taken on a journey in music and, for my taste, it requires some level of sophistication.
For an example of that, with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings it’s very pared down to its raw essence. But David’s playing is so interesting to watch from note to note and to listen to that that alone, is a level of sophistication. Again, it’s not a mental thing—it’ a level of intricacy and just an interesting journey to go on, even if it’s only four bars or eight bars when he’s doing the solo, it’s captivating for me. So that’s an example of music that’s very raw and paired down but still has a level of sophistication—it’s another one of those balancing acts, I think. But it’s picking and choosing which aspect of the song…
Here’s another thing, Trey is really great at having little—I’m getting really technical here—chords either ascend or descend in unexpected ways, but they sound so natural that they sound like water pouring out of a faucet or something. It might be unpredictable in the sequence—it might go up for three beats and then down for four beats and up for five and then down—but, you know, it doesn’t sound like numbers. It just sounds so organic.
I think it’s really cool when that can happen, where you get music that on one hand is very simple so you can dig into it, but on the other hand it’s not been made so skeletal that it’s boring. That could go for the music, it could probably go for the lyrics and it could probably go for the just the raw emotions, which are gonna move you. And if it’s gonna move you in a way that’s simple, whether it’s strumming your hard strings and making you think about a relationship or something that you’re passionate about…but at the same time, even emotion itself can have levels of sophistication where you realize, “oh well, it’s a little ironic that I’m in love with this person and yet I guess it’s not really good for me,” or the other way around. In all areas of music there can be that balancing act. I’ve been finding so much of life and of music are balancing acts.
You also pointed out that Trey is still the principal songwriter behind Phish. With you becoming more comfortable as a songwriter on your own do you intend to bring more songs to Phish in the future?
It’s not that it’s set in stone because over the years clearly I’ve done some writing and Page and I have both worked on our craft of writing. I really like some of the stuff that Page is writing, a lot. Some of his songs are some of my favorite Phish songs to play. There’s definitely room and the band does change. If you look at the ‘90s, there may have been one part of it where we were playing all Trey and Tom songs. But then at the next point we might be doing some experiments—to do some writing by jamming or writing in the practice room together—that we’ve dabbled in before. It’s not set in stone. It might be one way for a while and then it might be another way for a while. Trey’s a great bandleader in that he likes things to evolve, including methods and approaches and he’s very encouraging to bring out the talents of the people around him. So things can change.
But I also like to be realistic. If I want to write a lot of songs and see which songs and which jams are allowing the band and the audience to reach nirvana sooner, then my band is the place to do it because there is just time to try things over and over and over again, a lot. Often with Phish, we’ll learn one of my songs and we’ll play it once or twice and then sometimes over the years we’ll play it a bunch of times. But for me to want to take a whole bunch of material and really want to flesh it out and really make it incredible by seeing what is working—and get rid of what doesn’t work—then my band is the place to do it.
I just feel really lucky that I have my band and I hope that as with me getting to do some creative work in Phish, I hope that with the other people in my band that I’ve made them that see it as a creative expression. I don’t aim for it to just be the Mike show entirely. Clearly Phish fans are coming to see me, but the other guys have such strong personalities that I’m glad to make it a real band with five of us. Just finding ways to throw the energy around and see what happens.
You brought out a Fender Precision bass during some of Phish’s encores this summer. What inspired you to try out a new bass and do you have any plans to use it more in the future?
A couple of things inspired it. Learning the Little Feat album [ Waiting for Columbus ] last year where Kenny Gradney played a precision bass and it sounded so good. Also, I borrowed a bass which was Nick Forster’s bass—Nick Forster from eTown and from Hot Rize—and I played it for a soundcheck and maybe a little bit for the gig and it sounded so good. I think there’s an aspect of a Fender bass, it has a certain growl to it—a certain midrange warmth to it.
I mean, ultimately I kept coming back to what I’m used to, which is my Modulus. I actually did some switches of different pickups in my Modulus and in my spare Modulus bass and it would change things up a bit. But I keep coming back to what I’m used to. Sticking to something goes a long way and you don’t even realize how many ways you’re used to it and how many ways you can work it. So to bring in a Fender bass or any bass with single coil pickups throws me too much for a loop on the big stage. In the studio, I used a lot of different basses to record with. It’s kind of funny because usually at a soundcheck I’ll be playing a Fender bass or something different and have a great time. But then once it’s all revved up, it throws me too much for a loop.
Recently, with my band, we had this weekend where we went to a recording studio in the middle of nowhere on a farm and we just did freeform jamming—just as a bonding experience. I was talking about not having goals in mind, well, this was one of the times. It’s really interesting when everyone’s lives are so busy and then we get together for a weekend and what we do has no specific goals in mind—it was a really funny feeling and a great feeling. We weren’t songwriting, we weren’t practicing, we were recording but we didn’t necessarily need to be. We weren’t getting ready for the tour yet.
Anyway, I brought the Fender bass and I actually had an awesome time playing it. Actually, for part of the time, I was playing with my fingers which I rarely do anymore and so it was a lot more of a classic bass sound and I was really embracing that and getting into it. Sometimes with the really modern basses, they are the best tool for the task because they have such a wide range of reliable sound. But there can be a sort of coldness in the sound and by getting back to the basics—since the Fender bass was one of the first popular electric basses—it almost returns my consciousness to the original role of bass playing, which is also nice to get into by playing the original bass that everyone played. So, yeah, I like to dabble.
This year, I did a lot of switching up of things…more than usual—trying some different effects pedals and different basses and different ways of EQ-ing things. Then with my band, I’m trying different speaker cabinets. I’m trying not to get stuck in my ways so that I just can keep finding what’s best—it’s another balancing act. If you work with what you’re used to, you’re rewarded by having a good time and being able to go further from being used to it. But at the same time, it can get a little stale—even something like a bass tone where it can start to always sound too trebly and then you turn down your treble and that doesn’t help. Then it’s time to say, “Ok, well I’m just going to try a bunch of things and not worry about it but just see what happens. And so, that’s been a bit of an era and it’s been good. Even playing a Fender bass and then coming back to my regular bass, I can learn what about the sound is nice and dial that in to my bass and just learn from the experience.
