Photo by Zack Blum
Mike Gordon’s solo career is vast and varied. Set aside from the monolithic Phish legacy, his output has fluctuated from album to album, an approach which continues with his new psych-rock effort, OGOGO (out September 15 via Megaplum/ATO Records).
As Gordon explained in a recent phone call, he enlisted friends both old and new for OGOGO, calling in longtime songwriting partner Scott Murawski and acclaimed producer/engineer Shawn Everett to create a comprehensive, layered record that refuses to lean on Gordon’s jamband origins. The songs are clear and concise, yet they have a deep, synth-laden sound that is unlike Gordon’s earlier releases.
“The songs are kind of short for someone in an improvisational world,” Gordon explained. “I like to get onstage and stretch some things out, but the way I see it is some of these songs are written from jams. We’ve taken away the ten minutes of searching, or noodling, and just used the part that the jam led into.”
Recorded in Boston, the album features the newest iteration of Gordon’s touring band including Murawski on guitar, Robert Walter on keys, John Kimock on drums, and Craig Myers on additional percussion. In a wide-spanning interview, Gordon discussed the creation of OGOGO, his songwriting process and the dynamic between improvisation and composition.
During the album’s listening session at Electric Lady in New York, you said you didn’t want it to sound like Phish, you didn’t want it to sound like the Dead or the Meters. So, going into this project, what were your goals and inspirations, stylistically?
Well, sometimes it’s hard to put into words. As artists we just veer ourselves around the corners until it seems right. But there were some goals. Those bands that I mentioned are bands that I love, and I hope that the inspiration stayed in there somewhere. Scott and I wrote all the songs and recorded Overstep and we also did this one together. We thought that Overstep, in retrospect, was…We just wanted to rock. We wanted to be kind of rootsy. And this time, we said, “OK, we don’t want to be rootsy this time.” The music that we’re listening to is a little more current or recent and experimental in some cases.
One thing I wanted was more space between the notes. More air. And not that Overstep is bad. Often, I think we make albums that are reactions to our previous albums. So OGOGO is a little bit less rootsy. A little bit more air between the notes. There was a real inclination to be sparse. For example, with the basslines, I just had really been enjoying basslines that are simpler. To sing over, I think it’s more powerful when there’s less notes. Even in the middle of big jams, I end up finding these little patterns that are really simple. So I thought, “Well this is how we should be writing, if this is what feels good.”
I was just feeling like I’ve heard a million electric basses and electric guitars and pianos, but sometimes I hear the more interesting treatment, where an instrument doesn’t sound so familiar, and it’s not necessarily being weird for the sake of being weird, it’s just allowing itself to match the song. That’s where Scott and I had made a lot of demos and done a lot of writing and so we had more songs than usual to choose between. When we hooked up with Shawn Everett, it was like all those different goals coming together at an apex, because everything he does is interesting. It’s recorded in a really experimental way. When we were recording the album, every single vocal and instrument was recorded in a way I’d never seen before, and I’ve been doing it for a long time. I’ve seen people be a bit experimental here and there, but to do it across the board, and then also to have it be a fat groove and bass that requires space between the notes and some sparseness. It’s pretty amazing, with Shawn, that he actually does layer up a lot of sounds, more than I would have thought to. Every instrument, every vocal, is layered with a lot of experiments, where something might be the same part but higher, or with a different effect on it, or more distorted, or more something else. And they’re mixed together, and I don’t always think to mix like that. And then when all the mixing is done, there’s still room for the low ends of the groove to come through, and more importantly than anything, for the song to come through.
And whatever was emotional to us as songwriters, sort of to pop through without it being drowned in too many sounds or too many ideas. I guess that would kind of be the list: wanting to simplify, wanting to follow our inspirations. We’ve been listening to a lot of indie stuff, and some electronic stuff, and my daughter plays a lot of pop songs in the car so that was sort of seeping into my system indirectly, et cetera.
How did you come to work with Shawn Everett, who won a Grammy for that Alabama Shakes record, Sound and Colour?
MG: Well, I usually end up putting out the feelers and people give me ideas and people give me lists and then this name comes up. But what I’ve been trying to do this time is use my brain less with every aspect of the process, searching and decision making, and kind of use my gut and intuition. And all the signs just started pointing to Shawn. Someone would give me a list of people or a list of albums, and if I liked them I could see who the producer was. And then lo and behold Shawn was involved with it. And it just kept happening like that. Where I looked around the corner to something I liked and there’s Shawn. And actually, at one point I said, “Okay, this name keeps coming up, not just in my lists, but in my heart. There’s something that’s resonating here.”
So Scott and I sat down with Bob Ezrin who did the last two Phish albums because Ezrin had worked with Shawn twice, and we said, “What do you think about this guy?” and he said, “Well, he’s the most sonically innovative producer that I know of. He’s not going to be the person to tell you that you need a second chorus.” Which is something that we were thinking about; we wouldn’t mind having input from people getting involved on the songwriting end. And then, at a certain point we said, “Well we don’t really need that. We’re confident enough.” We spent a lot of time writing and rewriting and sort of getting things so they felt right.
Then, we got in with Shawn and on the very first day we were working on the songs and he said, “You know, you’re gonna need a second chorus here.” Another person had told me the same thing, that he wasn’t going to be the person to do that, and he was the person to do that. So you never know. Ezrin also said, “Shawn will be the person that you’ll be grabbing your notebook to write down what he says because he speaks in a poetic language.” He likes to mix and think about a photograph he saw in a museum or a building or a painting. He’s very visual and very abstract and emotional in his ways. And I thought, “Okay, I like to think in terms of dreams anyway, and if someone can speak the dream speak then why should I want anything more than that?” I don’t want someone who’s more of a traditional nuts-and-bolts about putting an album together. I want somebody to say what Shawn said after a keyboard pass and he said, “Robert, that sounded like 2 a.m. blue kitchen light as refracted through a prism.” Or something like that.
It ended up being one of the most incredible experiences of my life. It was just so fun, just deeply fun. And Shawn was one part, but the band having gelled, and the band trying to forge whatever our sound is, and be away from all the other influences, experiences, a little bit to find out what was unique about this band. And that was happening. And then to have this producer, and then to have this studio in Boston, Q Division, it was just really joyous. There were skylights and colorful gizmos everywhere and couches for our family to hang out. Then there’s like a hundred vintage keyboards that are hiding in closets and coming out one at a time every half hour, and Robert’s trying these sounds. Robert is so deeply amazing at adapting his talents to every situation. When a new keyboard comes out—there’s one that was made by Radio Shack in the 80s, and it had the most incredible sound ever as soon as Robert and Shawn started experimenting…
So it was like being on a playground. I had done a lot of homework, a lot of preparation to get the songs ready, and also some tracks that were recorded that we were using to stem from, and that helped, because it went quickly. But it was just a chemistry. I’m just really thankful that I got to have that experience and now there’s this thing, this album that I can share from it.
Robert Walter and John Kimock are the two newer guys in your band. Was their addition a conscious effort to change your sound and switch things up, or was it just a natural evolution that turned out really well?
Yeah, it’s probably a lot of little things rather than an overarching thing. Not like, “OK, now we’re going to change our sound.” The other two guys we had were really incredible musicians, very deep cats. And just various thoughts led Scott and I to want to change things up and then we just started meeting people. But I would say that was kind of like the beginning of this era of following our gut more than our mind.
There’d be these ideas and lists of people and someone just says a comment and something tweaks inside and there’s a resonance and there’s a “Oh yeah!” and then there’s an audition. It doesn’t take much when you’re willing to follow your gut. It’s tricky because maybe I’m just saying that a lot because I’m a list person. I have hundreds of lists. And I used to only live my life inside those lists. There’s different programs on my computer and on my phone and file cabinets. I would be very business-like about it. And at a certain point, I just realized that wasn’t serving me, that I would get lost in the quagmire of information.
So now if there’s an idea, whether it’s as a musician or anything, I don’t really put it down on a list. I try to be like the other people that just let it sit in their head and their body. So we did a few auditions, but there’s just a clicking that happened. Actually, some of the other people who auditioned were really amazing, too. We weren’t going to be considering, and not to harp on this moment from three years ago, of course we would consider talented people. But at the end of the day, it’s all about chemistry, I guess. Certainly in the world that I come from, after 34 years of chemistry with the Phish guys, there has to be a certain chemistry.
You’ve described OGOGO as your “band” record. So what was that like, sharing the creative energy back and forth with these guys?
It’s really cool because there’s just this full circle. There’s this trajectory that you feel, that you’re on this ride together, where, like I said, some of the musical ideas came from moments in live shows, and the rest of them came from moments in the studio. But the ones in the studio involve experimenting together. And then there’s a lot that Scott and I do together. We have weekly stuff and we’ll go for a year and rewrite lyrics. We like to take our time and have fun with it. But it really stems from the stuff that’s from the five of us. Then to be in the studio together, and to be in rehearsals together, and then to be on stage, there’s just something really cool about that. With Phish, we’ve done it sometimes. But other times, the individual band members will bring their stuff. And we’ve done some writing from jamming.
One of my favorite books when I was in 4th grade, it’s not the best written book in the world but it resonates, was called The Mad Scientists’ Club. It was just these four or five boys that got together in this clubhouse and made up these inventions they were going to build or adventures they were going to go on. And I just really liked it. They were a little bit off the grid. In a remote, tucked away in a cabin, on this sort of mission together. And so that’s what happened in this case. We had these rehearsals, and normally a couple people might record and then share the files, and John had made some recordings and he just called them “OGOGO Rehearsals.” Now of course that makes sense, but in the past it would have been called “Fall Tour Rehearsals.” But that just shows that the album has created this journey together.
It’s hard to describe what that’s like, to be running around the rooms of the studio, and there Johnny is sitting on a couch with this new drum machine that he’s discovered, and it’s got all these weird purple lights coming out of it, and I’m like, “Cool, I’ve gotta get one of those!” And then I keep walking around another corner and Scott is experimenting with, I don’t know, mic-ing his guitar with the binaural head, an electric guitar with an acoustical mic. And we’re all just in it together. There’s just a feeling of teamwork that I really like, that reminds me of that book. And then to be able to think about going on tour and then to listen to the album together. I like sharing it. Honestly, just to say, when we were making Overstep, at first there was thoughts about not calling it “Mike Gordon” but calling it “Mike and Scott.” And then everyone, including Scott, thought it was a perfect idea to call it Mike Gordon. But we had written all the songs together and this time we did too. I mean, sometimes I have more time than Scott to follow through with some of the writing, but it’s always us coming together that makes the songs come to fruition.
We had some really cool experiences, just the two of us, getting the music ready before recording, doing the writing. There was one session we did in Boston at the Liberty Prison Hotel- it was a prison turned into a hotel. The bar downstairs are prison cells and the whole thing was really vibey, and the mood was kind of thick.
One of the other goals was to make sure that we’re being honest about what we want to sing about and what we care about. It’s something I’ve been thinking about and reading about in this Leonard Cohen book I’m reading. Leonard Cohen, if there was even a tiny inkling of a lie in a song, he wouldn’t even sing it. He’d just ditch it.
But we were at the Liberty Prison and I was thinking about what was going on in our lives and being honest about it and letting it come through. So even the first song, just as an example. I hope that songs can be interpreted by different people in whatever way, there’s no set meaning, but for “Equilibrium,” for me, it’s a really almost scary feeling that I get, and I imagine other people get. You’re in some kind of relationship with someone and something goes wrong in terms of there being a misunderstanding and there’s a conflict and there has to be a resolution, and because of the conflict, things just feel out of balance, and we keep singing “out of balance” over and over again. It’s not just the relationship, but the whole world feels out of balance, and you find a way to make it click. The equilibrium part becomes so fragile. It’s just a little spot in the middle where if it were to tip left or right then you’d be back out of balance.
I think that that analogy if sort of true of the music, too. There’s all these balancing acts, where, like I was saying, it could be too weird, and it could be too dense, and it could be just filled with sounds that are interesting but there’s just no song. Or it could be all about the song and it could be boring for me because there’s no attempt to let the sounds become what they want to be, and something interesting and new and fresh.
I want to explore your relationship with Scott a little bit more. You two have been together for a while. How would you characterize the intricacies of your relationship and what it’s like writing with him.
We’ve been putting little bands and projects together since maybe ’92. So I guess that’s 25 years. My relationship with Scott started with seeing Max Creek and liking his stage presence and musicality and a lot of things about what he believes in and stands for musically—including a certain kind of rhythmic play and a certain kind of handling of melodies and chords. It’s about the fabric of the music, and he does something that just feels good. And then, we started to get to know each other, and that felt good too. We’re very different kinds of people, which I think is good for our relationship. I’ve always said he’s a little more “go with the flow,” and I’m a little more “make lists,” and it’s kind of like Mick and Keith. Mick is known for making all the lists and Keith is known for doing all the drugs. I’m not saying that that’s what Scott does, I’m saying he tends to go with the flow. On the other hand, he also does computer programming and can he be very meticulous. He always shows up to practice knowing everything down. He’s very disciplined. So I wouldn’t paint the picture of just a carefree guy. He’s very thoughtful. I just enjoy shooting the shit with him.
You know he’s up on a lot of the interesting articles and links and things going on. Sometimes I live in a bubble and it’s people like him that sort of fill me in. But it’s also just fun. We’ll have these Skype sessions when we’re not together, and we’ll just be going through our song ideas, or if we’re working on something that germinated and has come halfway to fruition, we can see it online on a shared document, and it’s like a puzzle. We’re working with all the aspects of music and we’re strumming guitars too and rhythm and rhyme and all these things and trying to figure out what works. It stems from something almost mathematical, but it just has to strum your heartstrings if it’s going to work as a line in a song. Usually, we’ll be on for hours, and by the end we’re just laughing all the time. We just laugh a lot, and it’s just a good friendship that would lead to someone being able to plan these musical adventures and then laugh a lot.
I just really enjoy our friendship. It just feels good. It’s fun to hang out. If we’re gonna go to a restaurant, that’s gonna be fun too. But it’s not always fun and games, and sometimes we’ve got a song that we love, and it’s not working. And with any artist, there’s always struggles, and that feeling might last for four days. But often what happens is we’ll tweak it, and try to make it different, and try to figure out what could push it over the edge to where now it’s not blocked in some way. And then, it feels like we didn’t get there, like we failed, like “Well, this song is gonna be thrown out and that’s fine, because we have plenty.” And then, we drive away, and pop the tape in or something, either on the way home or the next day listen to it, and it’s like, “Oh my god, we did make it work!” We just didn’t realize it because we were so up to our neck in it, pulling our hair out, trying to figure out what’ll make it work.
The good thing is we have all these ideas. I don’t feel like there’s been writer’s block in my life for a long time, and I feel like I’m just approaching things in a different way. But sometimes, if we’re together, we’ll just get stuck, and it’ll be hours and hours, and we’ll just not know what to do. We tried going out, we tried coming back…but then making it through that kind of struggle just deepens the collaboration, the friendship.
It sound like your relationship allows you to have the time to let ideas germinate and let them come to you rather than forcing anything.
Yeah, it’s a funny thing, because music is such a strange phenomenon, as we all know. At any given point in time it doesn’t exist, it requires the passing of time. And it moves us so much when it’s working, and yet what I like to do, is I like to make a 9-5 job out of it. A lot of my favorite songwriters do that, like Paul Simon, for example. If he’s in a writing phase, then it’s maybe 5 hours a day, maybe 10am-3pm, and he’s got certain people involved, and certain gear involved, and it’s very regular and regimented.
I need that formalized schedule from month to month and day to day and goals and all that stuff. I come from a family where the dad is a successful businessman and the mom is a successful artist. Successful in that they set out to do a lot of stuff and they did it. And I like being the businessman a lot of the time. I love desks and files and lists and things like that. And at the end of the day, an album is only a certain length, and it’s a certain number of tracks, and it’s kind of like a document in a way. And yet we all know music can be nirvana or an endless dream or ecstasy of different kinds, and how do I take this businesslike process and end up with this thing that’s kind of a product. And make it not really a product, but a gateway to the unknown. I think that’s been the answer for me: to step away from the lists a little bit, like I was saying, and allow the gut feelings. If you’re allowing gut feelings it’s easier to throw out, because there’s a lot when you’re making something that you have to throw out, whether it’s a movie, or a book, or an album. And that can be hard, but if it just makes sense to, then it’s not really hard.
You decided to include “Let’s Go” on the album. I know that was originally considered for Phish’s Big Boat record. What made you want to revisit that and give it the Mike Gordon solo treatment?
I’ll avoid the long answer because the song has like a lifespan, and each era is different. Even working on it leading up to when I brought it to Phish, it changed a lot. And then with Phish, it changed several times. When we put it on the album, Ezrin and some other people in management just thought that it didn’t really hit the nail on the head in terms of getting the sound right. There’s something about the original demo that was really—it was like this trashy hip-hop groove with a drum machine and there were some tablas that were from a real tabla, and then there was some distorted guitars from a synthesizer. It was just really like a mashup. It had a chant in it, which had come from a live moment, from some random moment in Boston. And when Trey first heard it, he was like, “Oh, we loved having the ‘Fuego’ chant and there’s a chant, and we need that.” And then, “Oh, that little drum beat, sounds kind of modern, and we need that too.” We kept toying with it and in the end I think we didn’t really figure it out, but what I wanted to do was return to the demo a bit. I was kind of glad that it didn’t work out the first time because I think it needed more time to be figured out. It wasn’t the fault of Ezrin or the Phish guys or me or anyone. It just needed time and everyone who’s a songwriter has things like that happen. Trey has that all the time, where there’s a song and ten years later we pick it up again, and it’s the best thing ever. But it needed the time to incubate.
So with then Shawn, it was crazy. He took the vibe from the demo, with the really spare drum machine. In fact we started from a drum machine, but we didn’t use the drum machine in the end, we turned it off. It was an 808 or something. But then he had us layering, track over track of churning, like gurgling-churning, on five different tracks of bass. And then he’d go up and octave and do five more, and then do it on the Dobrato, which is a resophonic guitar with a whammy bar. And do five tracks on that! And then do it on the electric guitar! On the choruses! And the keyboards! At a certain point, I was like, “Woah, what are you doing here?” There were maybe 50, 100 tracks, doubling the same thing, and you could never hear any of them individually because it’s a mush, but it creates this kind of…I don’t know what to call it…I’ve heard it sometimes in indie pop, I guess you would call it this thunderous distorted churning. I think that’s what happens with the choruses, and the verses are more funky, but still with this totally overdone-Shawn Everett-ism.
I actually like redoing things. And sometimes we’ll stop playing an old song because maybe it’s too happy or maybe it’s too busy. And then some other year we’ll pick it up again and say, “Well, it’s a good song but maybe we can make it less busy or less happy,” and then we do it. I like doing facelifts of things. It makes it more interesting for me, anyway, where something can morph over time.
You’re coming off of this awesome summer with Phish, doing some amazing improv at the Baker’s Dozen. I was kind of curious-at what level does improv fit into the Mike Gordon solo equation? Are you trying to rein in the jamming? Are you trying to control it?
I’ve been thinking so much about that, more than you could believe. The true answer to that would take like six more hours. When I have these great jams with Phish, and then some that aren’t great, but when I get inspirations, I call Scott immediately. I share them. I write emails to my other band members and there’s a lot of inspiration that goes back and forth for me, between the two bands. But it’s really, really interesting to me, how improvisation works so that it becomes a religious experience. And I think it’s a lot of letting go, and that’s really hard to come by, to teach yourself, and what it takes to let go. And then whether I really want all that. Sometimes I feel like, “Well, I already have a jamband, do I need another one?” And ultimately, I think the answer is yes, because these peak experiences and these religious experiences are so deep that I just always want to have them when possible. So, like if you go back to “Peel” from Atlanta that we released with my band [from 12/3/16], it sounds utterly unique. No other band will play “Peel” like that at all. I mean there’s influences thrown in, and some are some African musicians and some are from Phish and our other bands, but it’s completely unique.
It’s actually getting to those magical moments that inspired this album, I think. Because we thought, “Oh, we’re getting to these places through improvisation and long jamming where it doesn’t sound like Phish, it’s influenced by Phish, but it’s influenced by a lot of other things too. Some of these indie bands that we’re listening to. And it sounds unique, because we’re trying to cultivate that and get to it.”
So then we’re at the point where we’re like, “Okay, we need to make an album.” But the album might not be the 10-minute jam, it might just be that moment that we got to. Which is kind of how I think of Radiohead sometimes. My favorite Radiohead show was at the Hollywood Bowl, and every song was three minutes, but it was so dreamy. It might’ve taken twenty minutes to get to those three minutes, but we didn’t need the twenty minutes. I really like things to go long sometimes, honestly. If I’m on a musical ride, I want to stay there. And other times, I don’t. So it’s really, really tricky. Knowing when to stretch and when not to has been hours and hours and hours of conversation with my band. I’m bringing my influences and inspirations and so are they. I wouldn’t say that I’m the leader, I’m just bringing suggestions. But figuring it out is just fascinating for me. That’s probably the best I can answer.
