A Conversation with Phish’s Mike Gordon – HuffPost 3.5.14
Mike Ragogna: Rumor has it you have a new album, Overstep, and a new single called “Yarmouth Road.” Is all that correct, sir?
Mike Gordon: That sounds correct, yes.
MR: How did you decide it was time to do a solo album?
MG: Well I guess I’ve said this once before, but I remember this moment I was in Saint Albans, Vermont, and I was walking around the town square, there was no one else around–it was like being in a ghost town-and I remember having that little feeling of elation when you take some time out for yourself and you’re all relaxed and you have a little epiphany. That’s what I had. I was just really enjoying my time with Scott Murawski playing music and being friends with him and I thought it would be cool to find some spots that are remote where we would not be interrupted and just work on songwriting because we just like similar stuff in music and songs and what if we could just experiment? Just enjoy each others’ company and creativity. That, for me, was the defining moment. Sometimes I have these little epiphanies and I get all fired up. I was driving, thinking about it, thinking “Where could we do this?” I imagined it being a New England thing because we’re both New England people and there are such nice little hamlets in between the hills where one could go and take a couple of guitars and tape recorders and notebooks. Also, the original vision was really just to sit there with just our sensibilities and see what grows from that. So we started doing those. I just realized last night that when we started doing that it was actually before my last album came out. But that’s how it worked, you get something in the oven and then something else starting. But we started putting stuff together, I remember that we were on tour and we were at this tea house in Charlottesville, Virginia and I was listening with headphones to all of the little snippets that we had put together from a handful of these sessions and really getting into it and just thinking, “Oh, there’s a lot of potential here, I really love this!” There’s probably so many different kinds of albums we could have made, because they were all just little snippets, just moments, some of them maybe implied a song and some were just a lick. But I got all excited and I thought, “We’ve got to keep doing this” so I said, “Let’s actually get together and instead of writing anything new let’s take those snippets and finish them. But it was always in the context of wanting to have fun. Some people go to an amusement park, we go sit in a room with guitars.
MR: Is music your amusement park?
MG: Yeah! As a Gemini I’ve already had a lot of interests. My other biggest one is probably film making, which has been a little bit on hiatus except for with a couple little video vignettes. Ultimately there was a certain point where all of my interests sort of stepped aside except for music. I started having some real peak experiences with music in my formative yeras and I thought, “Well, these other things will probably be part of my life, too, but music is where I feel like I’m at the amusement park, so I think I want a lot of this, please, thank you.”
MR: Let’s look at some of the tracks on this project. The first single is “Yarmouth Road.” What is the back story on that?
MG: Actually, I’m in a better place to answer that question today than I was days ago, because yesterday I was poking through some old files and this is what I found. Scott and I were writing some songs from paintings-not songs, even, we were writing poems. We were in a building that was a quarter mile long with four floors of painters and everybody had some of their work on the outside of their studios. Each of us wrote a poem for one painting or sculpture from each artist. There was one that had a record to Yarmouth Road, and 145 Yarmouth Road was where my grandmother’s house was. It was very significant for me because she was the hub for that family, and it was built by a very famous architect, it was a colonial house on a very interesting street near Boston. I have so many memories there and then dreams, decades of dreams after she passed away. The song is not at all about that house, but there was a moment that I remembered, something about that painting inspired me, I spilled ink on my grandma’s oriental rug. If you wanted to pick something that wouldn’t come out and you wanted to pick the worst thing in the world, India ink is that thing. It was the only time that she almost was mad at me, trying to scrub it up. The poem had a reference to that, and then the lyrics and the recordings, it wasn’t even reggae exactly, and it wasn’t called “Yarmouth Road,” but it went through permutations based on these fun experiments that Scott and I were doing. I’ve realized I’m not answering in a clear way as much as I’m painting a picture of how it’s interesting for me, these paths that we go down to discover something, like this song. Toward the end of the songwriting process we walked from Boston to South Boston and we were going to do some more writing on the roof of a building that my uncle owns, the building is filled with artists, and the one who’s been in the building the longest is on the top floor. It’s an old rum distillery, actually. The one who’s been in there the longest has roof access and we were going to just go through her place and go to the roof and do some writing. We didn’t even end up doing that. We were actually just scouting it out for the following day and while we were walking, we were talking about the song, which was really turning into something very different while we were walking to this spot.
But the woman had all these sculptures that were made out of skirt-making paper, they looked like honeycombs, sort of a yellow-ish hex pattern and they were hanging from the ceiling. I’m really inspired by that, so I kept thinking and thinking about the honeycombs. It wasn’t even thinking, something about it was just getting into my system. So we’re kind of working on it and talking about it and migrating the theme of the song in a different direction. In a way, the sentiment is always there, but it’s really the sense that has to evolve. So then again later that night after dark we were walking from our hotel to this Indian restaurant down the street and the chorus kind of came together while we were walking. A lot of songwriters talk about that, it’s when you sort of forget about the task at hand and go for a walk or a drive or a nap that the real idea kind of blossoms. By the time we walked back to the hotel from dinner the whole song just came up. Then I actually thought, “Okay, this has nothing to do with my grandmother’s house,” which of course was no problem, it didn’t need to have anything to do with that, but I thought, “Just for serendipity I’ll write a letter to my father and his brother my uncle Fred and I’ll ask them what Yarmouth Road meant to them, living in that house.” They each had interesting things to say, and there’s one thing that my dad said that ended up pretty much being a line in the song, so it kind of brought it full circle back to the house in question.
MR: And you road-tested that song and “Say Something,” right?
MG: Yeah, Phish played them. The songs were already written, they weren’t really finished yet, but when Phish went on tour last summer I thought, “Well it sure would be fun to try some of them out.”
MR: What’s funny is to watch your work with Phish and also what you’ve done with Leo Kottke and the Benevento Russo Duo, you are a Gemini, aren’t you?
MG: Yeah, I just have to reel myself in so that I don’t try to do too much at once.
MR: When one listens to this album top to bottom, does one get a clue of where your head is these days?
MG: I think so! I keep trying to mix this idea of having fun onstage, and what’s fun for me is when the music plays itself and it feels sort of heavier than it should and light at the same time. When there’s a feeling. Then, while all of that feeling is going on to just explore what more things I can do, or in this case what Scott and I can do with chord progressions and lyrics being approached from a different way and trying all the permutations within that context. I think it really represents that. I’m surprised that often people will make something and hope that it comes out a certain way and it comes out having a different flavor than they realized. I’m really glad that this one just feels light. At the same time there’s another thing that’s probably hard to analyze but there’s always a clue to how the next one might be, but I feel like we did everything we wanted to do, we wanted to have music that really rocks but has layers of subtlety and sophistication woven in there. I feel like in a way the song “Peel,” which Scott sang–there were some demos where I sang it but I love the way that Scott sings it–we wrote all the songs together, but that was an interesting one to see who was going to see what because it was really a collaborative thing and I really like his singing so I didn’t want to sing everything. Anyway, the point that I was going to make is that when play that song it has that clue in it for me, of what’s coming up in the next era where a song starts out not right into a verse but with a feeling and a texture and a groove, where it’s almost kind of like painting on a canvas with sound, and the lyric comes in in a way that kind of floats in and floats out as opposed to, “Here’s a verse that’s going to be four lines, it’s going to lead into a chorus,” where it’s a formula. For me it’s a bit of a personal journey, escaping the formula. It’s a reggae groove, but at the same time it’s so far from that and what would be done in reggae. With just a guitar and a bass and no drums it sounds like reggae but it’s not going to be handled like reggae.
MR: What advice do you have for new artists?
MG: That’s an interesting one. You know, I do this thing where I watch DVDs on the treadmill. I have a bunch of music-related ones. Usually the ones that people have given me, one promoter gave me thirty DVDs to promote his acts. Yesterday I watched Chick Corea Unaccompanied and the country duo Big & Rich on the show that may be part of World Cafe. Anyway, someone asked one of the guys from Big & Rich that same question, advice for new artists, and he sort of stumbled on the answer a little bit, but then he said, “Well are you playing your stuff?” He said he remembers talking to some people and the person he was talking to said, “No, I don’t play it in front of people” and his advice was, “You should play it in front of people, because even if it’s just a family get together or a coffeehouse or whatever, it’s going to be doing it in that way that makes the material develop. Music is communication.” I thought that was a good thing to say. I didn’t expect them to start philosophizing but they ended up being some thoughtful people and I thought that’s a nice thing to say. I had this mentor early on, Jim Stinnett, I used to go to these lessons and they were like life lessons about discipline and being focused and music and studying. He had such a positive attitude. He used to say, that when you practice, you should practice three things. Practice your technique, how your hands move; Concepts, which are new things to play so you’re not always playing the same stuff; and then just playing. If you skip the last part you’ll be in trouble because you’ll get on stage and you’ll sound like you’re just practicing. In a way that’s the same thing that Big & Rich said. So maybe instead of coming up with my own fresh answer I’ll borrow their answer and say to put what they’re doing to the test. Get it out there somehow. Maybe even just as a video blog or playing at the family picnic or a big jam session or something, but take all of your ideas and follow through with them all of the way. Do I really know how I got here anyway.
MR: What do you think the state of jam music is these days?
MG: Hmm… Everything is in danger of becoming a cliche. The term “Jam band” is such a horrible sounding term. It rhymes too much or something. And it implies noodling, where people just get together and play without really listening to each other just a whole bunch of notes. My stomach churns when I think about the idea of going to a club and hearing that. Of course jam bands are only one sector of improvisation, there are great jazz players out there. But I guess I would say that from my limited knowledge despite all the cliches it’s still vital. People are still showing up. Actually on my own tour that’s about to start we’re actually starting to sell out shows, the point being that people seem to have an interest in it. I certainly do because when something’s improvised and you’re in the room knowing that people are throwing caution to the wind, then it feels like you’re at the cutting edge of your humanity. For me, at least. I feel at home more on that stage than being at my house. I feel more of a human being than ever when I’m in that room and there’s the spontaneity going on and there’s this, “We’re going to go somewhere and we don’t know if we’ll make it or what it will feel like but we’re going to just set flight to where our jet pack takes us. That’s such an incredible feeling. I mentioned that DVD I watched… I watched another one today from Marco Benevento. I don’t know when this one came out, it’s from a couple of years ago, but it’s this residency that he did with a whole bunch of other musicians. I’m great friends with Marco and I love his playing but I didn’t know if I would love the DVD or not. Lo and behold, I really liked the DVD. There are these moments, I actually marked some moments to check again because they were so deep and they were just pure jamming. But they’re not jamming in that noodle-y sense, they’re jamming in that sense that everyone gets into a pattern on a certain lick and they’re playing it together and it kind of sounds like songwriting on the spot. So I think as long as we all avoid the cliches that we’ll turn into when we’re not careful and strive for the real essence of doing that and throwing caution to the wind then we’ve got a rich future ahead of us in the world of jam.
MR: I love that. This was great, thank you so very much and all the best.
MG: Thank you.
Transcribed By Galen Hawthorne