An interview with Mike Gordon of Phish

Mike Gordon likes to keep himself busy. On Tuesday, just a few short months after coming off of what is probably Phish’s most buzzed-about tour in recent memory, the quirky and ridiculously talented bassist released his fourth solo album, Overstep, and is embarking on a 23-date tour that begins Feb. 28 in Syracuse, New York. Gordon and his bandmates, longtime collaborator and guitarist Scott Murawski, drummer Todd Isler, keyboardist Tom Cleary, and percussionist Craig Myers, will be bringing their eclectic sounds to Union Transfer on Sunday (March 2). City Paper got Gordon on the line on Monday, where we discussed improvisation, figures in paintings jumping into the real world, and the evolution of his solo career.

City Paper: First of all, congratulations on both the new album and 30 years of Phish. It was a pretty big year for you. How does it feel coming off of such a celebrated and highly acclaimed tour?

Mike Gordon: It feels great. When something’s over, though, I’m not really thinking about it too much. It’s kind of like a flashback now. With Phish, there’s all this creative work being done on our next album, and so my focus is on that, and because my album comes out tomorrow and I’m leaving for tour in four days, my head is all wrapped up in that.



CP: Can you talk a bit about how Overstep stacks up against your past solo albums for you personally?

MG: Well, I loved Moss when it came out. It was kind of a little bit dreamy, a little bit sort of left of center. I think when Scott [Murawski] and I were starting to write stuff, we knew we wanted to try to put some stuff together that really rocks and that we could really let loose to on stage, since we play in the band together. I think we were going for a certain rawness, too — in writing, playing the stuff, and recording. I’ve used a lot of different methods to put songs together, but the last couple of albums were assembled from pieces of recordings and little jam sessions and kind of assembled together in a meaningful way, like going for the essence. They were put together in this way, like if you were making something for dinner and you go through all the stuff in the cupboard and the fridge and say, well, I’ve got fish nuggets and pine nuts, so that would be good.

But with me and Scott, we really wanted to face the new era head on and see what the muse wanted every time we got together to do some writing. We did get to assemble some little pieces from that process, but it was really starting from scratch. I’m going on a tangent now, but for example, on Moss, I love how “Babylon Baby” turned out. It’s nice and spare. There aren’t too many sounds, but the bass and drums were really intricate in a cool way, so I think that was a successful track. But looking back on how that came together, it’s a bass-and-drum jam between me and Joe Russo from ’05 or something. I was still living in NYC for a couple years. It evolved and stuff, but that’s where it came from, whereas with me and Scott, everything was started from scratch in all different ways. Sometimes we would just sort of jam. Sometimes we had a little lyric idea, and sometimes we had a little musical idea, but it was all done in person. Maybe we were closing our eyes and imagining ourselves on stage, and we were thinking, what kind of a feel do we want that we’ve never had before? Or when we were on the motorboat looking at the surface of the water and it looked really cool, so we wrote the song called “Surface," and we went through all the permutations of what that meant to us personally. So I think that might be the main difference — we wanted to start from the seeds and watch it blossom all the way through.



CP: It sounds like a lot of the songs on the album will lend themselves well to live improvisation. We all know that Phish’s penchant for improvising on stage is its trademark — so much so that fans debate over favorite versions of certain songs. When playing live, does your band tend to improvise and jam in a similar vein, or do you prefer to stick to more structured versions of each song?

MG: Yeah, of course there’s going to be similarities. What we love is going for a flight, or a venture through the woods — or whatever your vision is — and seeing where it can go. I always love that. And, ideally, it would not be in the same way as Phish. Of course, I’m going to be following some tendencies coming from 30 years of being in a band that I still love playing with, but the more ways it can be different, the more interesting it’s going to be. The idea is to not have it be a carbon copy of Phish. I want to be where improvisation can go and take flight with it, and the more ways it can happen a little bit differently than with Phish, the better. That’s the challenge — to make it so that when people come to see this band or listen to the album, they will have an experience they can’t get anywhere else, including with Phish. Of course, to do that 100 percent is difficult, but I think that’s one of the goals.




CP: One of the songs that I’m most looking forward to seeing on Sunday is “Paint.” The lyric that stood out to me the most was, “Perspectives are sort of getting contorted, my world is flat, I think I feel constrained, but who am I to complain?” I know that a large part of why you love working on your solo projects is to be at the forefront of the entire creative process, and being able to see something that you conceptualized all the way through to the end. Can you tell me if that line had anything to do with not getting to fully express yourself creatively as a member of Phish?

MG: That’s really interesting. Actually, a lot of times with Scott and I writing, we would sort of ask ourselves about our lives, and if what we were doing had personal relevance and resonance. But lately, people have been asking me about certain lyrics, and it never even occurred to me the ways that certain lyrics can be autobiographical, but now that you’re saying that, that’s very interesting. When Scott and I were writing this song, we were actually looking at paintings and writing poetry and gradually evolving the poetry into lyrics. In one painting I was looking at, I was imagining the figure wishing that it could become real and in a new dimension by jumping off the painting, and sort of exploring that and not thinking too much about what it means. Sometimes it’s better to not analyze things so that they can be in their own world without me having to infiltrate it, if that makes sense.

But now that you’ve said that, that’s really cool. I guess different things in our lives are there for different reasons. I remember when we were thinking about getting Phish back together, and we had done so much to jump-start our solo careers, we had these conversations where Trey was saying, you know, we’re going to be able to do everything. And he was very confident about it. And he was right. I mean, of course there are things that happen with a band that’s been together for 30 years that would only happen because of that chemistry, and for me, there are some things that only happen in situations that depend on me taking control and putting a lot of myself out there.

I guess the ironic thing about the person in the painting — Scott and I were kind of musing about what he might be thinking — is that he thinks the real world is so great out there, and he thinks the world in the painting is so flat. But then he just wants to run away with the painter to Jamaica and stuff, and she’s like, oh, I think my work sucks — and this isn’t even in the song — but he’s probably thinking, what do you mean your work sucks? I am your work! And then by the end, not only is she not selling any pieces, but no one’s coming to her show and she packs up her all of her stuff that she brought and he’s just shoved back onto the canvas. And it’s like, well, who am I to complain? I got to go to the real world. But yeah, the line “who am I to complain” comes from if I ever question any of my situations, like Phish or my solo career, or my family, I very quickly come back to how thankful I am. Like okay, this sucks, I got a bad review, but who am I to complain? I’m having so much fun.

Yeah, that’s an interesting one. I wonder if there is something more autobiographical than I realized about that. Like, I’m becoming three-dimensional instead of two-dimensional in a certain way. Maybe, as deep as my relationship with Phish is, and has been for all of us to some degree, it is what it is because there are the same four of us — the same relationship — and it’s based on evolving and growing, which is incredible for a band that’s been together for 30 years, and still it’s the same relationship. And all of the dimensions of it are sort of like a hologram, where every speck is the microcosm of the whole. So, of course, anything we do in our lives could become infinite, and if we surrender to the muse and flow, and if Phish can and something I do on my own can at the same time, there’s a certain infinity that’s contained in that one microcosm, so it’s only going to be what it is at a certain point after 30 years or 10, or whatever. I mean, the guys in Phish have always done their own stuff on the side. But at a certain point, you get to a certain age and it’s kind of like, oh, well I also want to do this. So yeah, I wonder if the guy in the song could come off the painting again and sort of reconcile his worlds more than just having to get flattened back.

CP: Going back to 2003, the year you released your first solo album, Inside In, if you had the chance to fast-forward for a fleeting moment to 2014 to catch a glimpse of where you are now, would your future self meet your expectations of how you envisioned yourself developing as a solo musician?

MG: That’s interesting. Inside In came from the movie I made, Outside Out. In terms of the musical side, I guess so. The music for Inside In was being put together in 1998, and then the album came out in ’03, and in ’01 I was working on assembling it. I was really enjoying mixing things that are textures and things that are songs and trying to see where the common ground is. In film, there are four stems in your sound mix. One of them is the sounds that come with what’s in the scene, and then there are the sound effects, and then there’s the music, and then there’s the ambient. But I wanted to mix and match them. Those people like David Lynch had done that, where the sound effect becomes part of the music, and the music helps with the sound effects, so I was really into that, and finding mixtures with different parts of my life. Even different parts of the music were funky stuff and others were kind of countryish stuff. There was a lot of mixing going on — mediums and textures and things.

I don’t know if I had fully embraced the idea of becoming a singer/songwriter full-time, but when Phish broke up, I thought, I’ve got to put on that cap. There’s no longer going to be Trey coming to band practice with 12 new songs. I mean, I always brought my own stuff, but there was no one else anymore. There was just me. I’m walking down memory lane here, but I remember at the time, I was working with Leo [Kottke], and I really wanted to follow through on a project that we had, and finally, when that was over, it gave me a chance to say, okay, I’m going to take a year and just write songs. Someone told me that when Jim Carrey got to Hollywood for the first time — and maybe this isn’t totally accurate — but he got to Hollywood and climbed the hill up to the Hollywood sign and said, that’s it, I’m going to take this town by storm, and then he did. Whether or not you like Jim Carrey, he did exactly what he set out to do. And I was having that same moment. It was a little bit after Phish broke up that I was doing that writing. In that era, there was kind of a shift where I thought, okay, nothing else matters. I’m just going to really, really go for it — just try to explore my abilities and what I need to work on — and if something seems fun, deep, or dreamy, or something that’s a big experience, that gets that stamp of approval for me. And, you know, I’ve had a lot of big experiences with Phish, but I can have them in a lot of other ways, too. So that’s probably the shift — around the time I was working on Inside In, all of these sensibilities were starting to germinate, and I got a kick in the butt around that era or a few years later, like, okay, I’m going for it.

Mike Gordon plays Union Transfer on Sun., March 2.

As always you can see more of Meredith Kleiber’s work at kleibography.com.