Mike Gordon, the unflappable and adorably idiosyncratic bassist for the unstoppable rock band Phish, may be pushing fifty, but like the group that made him (sort of) famous, he's still determined to break new ground. Your average middle age millionaire rocker might be content to coast along as a nostalgia act, but this month Gordon releases his fourth solo album and hits the road with his band and an arsenal of compelling new material. Overstep, which drops February 25th, is a slightly reggae-dusted sunburst of uptempo tunes packed with eclectic instruments, very danceable grooves, and vivid lyrics that sometimes sound surprisingly personal, at least by Gordon's standards. (This is still the man who wants to come to your house and weigh all the prickly hairs stuck to your razor.)

The inimitable Gordon and his excellent four-piece band will be in NYC on March 1st for a gig at Webster Hall—if you're curious, check out the opening track off the new album for free here. This week he spoke with us via telephone from his home in Vermont, where he says he's happily spending as much time with his five-year-old daughter as possible before getting back out on the road again.

I actually left you an awkward voice mail message on your hotline a couple weeks ago. I hadn't called in a long time, and just for some reason called on a whim and was able to leave a message, which is rare and always disarming, because you're like "Oh no, now I have to try to say something that isn't totally awkward." I failed. What's the ratio of awkward to actually illuminating messages on the hotline? There's all kinds, and 'awkward' isn't the only way things go bad. Some of the people are the meanderers; it's definitely a journal for them and they probably don't care whether I'm listening or not—although I am, I usually listen to everything. And yeah, there's definitely some awkward on there.

But you know what, here's the interesting thing: there are regular callers, the interesting people, the boring people, but what I've found if that when someone gets on and says, "Um, I'm a first-time caller, I don't really know what to say," my first inclination is "Oh, I'll just hang up, this is going to go nowhere." And I've found that those are the situations, ironically, where people stumble upon some nugget of wisdom that changes my day. I think because they didn't know, that sometimes their openness from not knowing what they're going to say lands them on something more genuine than if they've had it all planned out.

Maybe that's a good way to segue into your creative process! On this album, in the first song, "Ether," there's the lyric, "I found a good way to get my head unwound." Is that a reference to your approach to songwriting? That's interesting, I hadn't actually made that direct connection, but yeah! In a way yes, because I'm such a first-born, making millions of lists and having file cabinets since I was five years old and typed documents from when I was five years old and I'm an archivist and a perfectionist and all those horrible things. It's amazing that I ever get anything done, especially with music—or maybe it's the arts in general—where you want to follow your muse, there's a "letting go" that's hard to do for such an organization-person.

You know, having a mom who's an artist, a painter, and a dad who's a businessman—maybe that's where my split personality comes from, where I want to let go, I want to get my head unwound, and I really enjoy that as maybe my favorite stuff in life. But I feel like I get as much or even more enjoyment from the organizing and the file cabinets or all the musical ideas I've ever head, putting them on a tape and playing them for Scott [Murawski, guitarist and longtime collaborator].

Years ago [Phish drummer] Jon Fishman said something to me that meant a lot, that was inspiring for me. He said, "You know, when Trey's writing songs, even if it's a fugue that he's spending three years composing, he's jumping up and down and dancing. He's throwing it into his body, he's throwing it into his soul." And you know really, I have a lot of respect for that. It was years ago that that comment was made, but I've thought a lot about that. There have been times when I've been backstage warming up by myself and I turn off the lights and it's almost a mini-jam session with myself, whisper-quest, just the bass, maybe a metronome. And I thought, this is where some of the best stuff comes up—by myself so there's no pressure, lights are off so no one can look at me, and there's a stream of consciousness that happens. So probably in '07, I started creating these exercises where I forced myself to let go of my mind and see what happens.

And Scott and I have done some of those together and actually, I'm having a little bit of enlightenment here because "Ether" is the perfect song to make that point. Because when we were writing that song, we came up with the lick and the groove and we were going through and cycling—not the beat or anything, just the main lick—and we taped 20 minutes of it and we took two microphones, and we just went back and forth, back and forth making stuff up, around the concept of floating in the ether for 20 minutes.

Most of it was completely unusable and plenty laughable but some was usable, and the way the song is…it's pretty unusual, it's pretty whacked. But that's the point, this guy's getting more and more unhinged. But that was kind of happening in the songwriting because that's what we were doing. We said, 'we're gonna throw out the lists of ideas at this point,' and we were gonna force ourselves—when you have a microphone and the tape is rolling and you're supposed to come up with something fresh every couple of bars, there's no time to think. It's just whatever comes out comes out.



(Courtesy Phish)

And on "Long Black Line," there's that lyric, "I'm trying to kick these spinning thoughts I've known." Do you meditate, or is there something else that inspired lyrics like that? There's probably a long string of inspirations for that one line that aren't necessarily recent. I've done meditation on and off over the years, and I haven't been doing it lately, but I've been very inclined to get back into it lately. I used to be, in my hardest part of life, a very obsessive person, so the spinning thoughts of life is a feeling I know, as does anyone who knows the feeling of not being able to stop thoughts.

And actually, at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center in Cambridge, Mass. there's this beginners session on Tuesdays that's always packed. I've gone a couple times and what she says—she guides you through and explains the reasons for meditation, and she says that they don't want you to stop thinking, because thoughts are tools that you use. You don't want your thoughts to get a grasp, to strangle you. You should be able to see them as clouds passing over in the sky. You can latch on to some if you want, and take them, but they're not getting the best of you. "Long Black Line," which originally started with an entirely different theme, got more personal in that way, in that maybe it's someone just contemplating their life and maybe having regrets.

Were there any regrets in particular you were thinking about? That's interesting because I don't think it's autobiographical, except it is in many, many little ways. Every song that feels worth pursuing has personal resonances. I do feel like the person in the song, overall, has some regrets, and this person, Mike, overall does not. I've been extremely thankful, I've been in Vermont getting ready for the album release and the tour, feeling so excited, and spending tons of time with my 5-year-old daughter skiing and playing chess, and spending time with my wife, and I've just been feeling so happy!

So, the "Long Black Line" person somehow screwed up, and they're so far away. The Long Black Line is a place in Columbia. It's this triangle of mountain ridges by the ocean, so this person walking is really far away from civilization, so whatever life that they're imagining that they didn't follow through with is really long gone. It's important to explore some dark themes whether you're having a dark phase or not, and it's probably the other way around, too. It's probably good to explore some bright things when you're in a dark phase; life is more balanced when you have both.



(Courtesy Mike Gordon)

It could be in a sense. A portion of my personality is imagining being alone and distant from the other portions. It's an archetype, a Jungian archetype. But Scott was involved too; in fact, that song might have started from Scott. There was this guy Pat Pattison, who was Gillain Welch's teacher at Berklee, and he recommends this exercise called Object Writing; it's a stream-of-consciousness thing. Really, it's just one piece of the puzzle where you bring your ideas, musical ideas, lyrical ideas, whatever they are, and Object Writing has been really helpful to me to connect things I'm doing now to things in the past; it's really pretty cool. I suggested it for Phish, and they've been doing it too.

When you were in preparation for the new Phish album? A little bit, yeah. It's kind of a way of going deep inside. It's stream-of-consciousness with a method; with a few rules that help you to get at stuff that resonates. It's interesting too, thinking about "Long Black Line" or "Ether" because who knows why they're floating; it seems like probably drugs. And I mean, I'm not doing too many drugs these days, I'll get a cocktail when I have a date night with my wife and I'll have three sips, that's my drug. And yet, I really am into the idea of people playing with their consciousness, whether it's meditation or safely using drugs or dreams or jam sessions or whatever it is, just trying to explore what's in there. So in "Ether," the idea of someone floating and floating and floating, I feel like that's not me either, but I love the song and feel like I relate to it so much. Maybe that's what it is: we have our archetypes and we write songs to allow the dormant parts to play themselves out.

"Peel" is the song that really stood out for me; the vocals reminded me of Radiohead a bit, like you could hear Thom Yorke covering this in a different dimension. I love that one. It all came from Scott, originally, and the bridge came from me, but the inclinations, both musical and lyrical originally started from Scott. Although, there are early demos of me singing it and I loved singing it, so it was a little bit hard to let go of singing lead on it, but then I just so much love Scott's voice and how tragic-sounding it is. And the idea of using no reverb on it; it's how it was on the demo but it's intentional, and even more so when it gets to the chorus; it's just basked in reverb and it feels like the microphone was on the other side of the room, and suddenly the chorus ends and we're back to the verse. I see it as like a movie scene almost, and I keep picturing this vast warehouse and we're all in the middle singing together. It's completely dark, and it's 10,000 feet of warehouse and it's empty…you know, there are two such warehouses that actually come to mind.

One, I don't know if anyone's seen Inland Empire, the David Lynch movie. I've seen some weird movies, but that's probably the single weirdest movie I've ever seen. I actually saw it twice in the theater, and I was with Jared Slomoff, and we share so much in common, but he walked out. And then I saw it a second time with Jon Fishman, and he loved it. But anyway, when Laura Dern is sitting in the studio and they're just looking at the script and time has warped in on itself, and Harry Dean Stanton panhandling in the background with nothing going on... Actually, we were doing overdubs for the album in Hopkinton, Mass. in a barn, and I realized that my dad had this building that he owned with a lot of different investors, along with myself and my brother. It was this huge warehouse 45 minutes away from where we were recording and I remember thinking 'shoot, should we just go there?' We didn't actually end up going and we didn't need to, because that was the vibe. "The vastness is around you, but it's so distant with echoes and then I'm so close; unable to climb into the world."

Scott and I, often when we were having these Skype sessions, we would turn it into a therapy session. It's not that we wanted the song to sound too personal, it's that we wanted the song to resonate for both of us. We were kind of looking for what related to the issues of the song we were working on in a deep way for each of us. And for "Peel," we had a lot of sessions.

It was an interesting code to kind of crack into, because we didn't want to spell it out either. We got very specific with stories from our lives and then wanted to take away being so specific in the end. But, what does it mean to peel layers? All I know is in the demos it sounded so tragic, in a great way. I really loved the yearning quality of the song, and we knew we had to keep that feeling, so we were kind of looking back over our lives, the tragic yearning passages, and relating that back to everything you could peel from an orange to your soul and whatever that means. It was just really interesting trying to philosophize about that together to see what would come out. Anyway.

What's that whooshing sound in the background of the song, is it synthesized? It's hard for me to describe. There are a lot of sound-effects on the demo, and we have no idea how the hell they got there because we have drum machines, pots and pans, whatever, but they were all on the other side of the room. We were recording with three or four instruments at once and then going on to the next track, and so we just decided that we needed to recreate the same kinds of feelings and sounds that wound up on the demo.

And one of them, the one you're referring to—and actually we're working on a behind-the-scenes video of the process of making the album that I think people will enjoy a lot—I used this instrument the microKorg a lot, which is a Korg synth that's more for portability. They make two; one of them is analog and one's digital and the analog one is more like the real deal. I've been using the digital one a lot; it's sample-based and it's not as organic because it's just fake sounds. I had this idea where we were adding all sorts of sound effects, there was a penny whistle, frame drums, and then I just started screaming into the vocoder, but it doesn't come out as a scream. It comes out as whatever note I was playing as I was screaming. And the idea was to aim the vocoder into the speaker and let it feed back. It doesn't feed back like a guitar feeds back because there's not a complete feedback loop, but that's the air sound that you're talking about I think.



On New Year's Eve, Phish celebrated their 30th anniversary by performing one set with their old instruments, on top of a truck that was driven into the center of Madison Square Garden. (Courtesy Phish)

It'll be interesting to hear how this will materialize live. I have to ask you about the New Year's Eve Phish show at the Garden; I just thought it was beautiful how you guys played on the roof of that truck with your old instruments. How did you feel doing that? Were there technical challenges? I had one technical challenge which was really difficult, which was that Trey's guitar amp and my left amp was really loud and there was nothing we could do about it. He didn't realize it because his legs are by his speaker, and I really got hurt in my ear. But otherwise no, it went really smooth. I really liked jamming, and there were two bass amps, the larger of which I didn't even end up using. I used my high school bass amp. It didn't sound bad, and it was more convenient to use the little teeny tiny one, which was only about a foot-and-a-half tall. But I loved the sound up there and having the people so close, and I thought that the jamming was good, and I was playing the Languedoc bass, and it had a nice cutting sound that was maybe a little less full range, but that allowed it to kind of "speak" in the little mix that we had going on stage. Other than blood dripping out of my left ear, it was a really good experience.

Seriously? No, just figuratively.

So there was this rumor going around that the reason why no covers were played during the four night run was because of something Billy Joel said, because he was supposedly upset he couldn't play the Garden on New Year's because Phish keeps booking it. And the rumor was that he said, 'Phish is just a second rate cover band.' The flames of this rumor were fanned by a Tom Marshall tweet. Really? I met Billy Joel once and he was really nice, but I haven't heard anything about that. I know he was playing a lot at the Garden but I didn't know he was looking for those dates.

Was it a conscious decision not to play any covers over the four nights? Yeah, I think so, and not only that but to play stuff that we could really jam out on. When you're in a new or different situation like that, there's a tendency to go for the novelty and just stick with the silly stuff and make it a nostalgic thing, making it like some little things that used to be when we were on stages that small. But rather than doing that, we said we're going to go for the real deal. We're going to do originals that can jam, that can be long, that it's not going to be a second-rate novel experience, it's going to be a moving experience, and so I think the whole thing was pretty cool.

Do you think that your solo work has informed the dynamic of the band? You've got two of your own songs on the new Phish album. Has your solo work made you more assertive? It probably gives me confidence, and gives me more to bring to the table, as a personality, because I'm more used to bringing in my ideas. Although, I've had two songs on a Phish album on occasion. It's not that it's three songs. Actually what's pretty exciting is that we all wrote together so intimately, the Phish guys, so it's not just those two songs that I played a role in.

What I'm especially happy for is how my Phish career informs my other career; having musical experiences that after 30 years run pretty deep and that I can remember as I get on my own stage. I mean, I want to have a different experience from Phish or it's pointless, but at the same time there are so many musical inspirations that I get from Phish, that often I'll just call Scott and I'll share them, these inspirations, and say, "Oh, we did this Phish thing." Because I want to be inspired. For me, all points lead to my stage with my band; the rest of my life just feeds that and my time with my family.

Last question, because I know we're out of time. What was the inspiration for the title of the album, Overstep? I will say that it was going to be called Jet Pack, and we had a lot of other ideas too. When we couldn't decide about Jet Pack, Scott and I got on Skype, and we interviewed each other. I said, "Okay, Scott, it's 12 years from now and you've become a filmmaker, you're at Cannes with your film, and you bump into Martin Scorsese who reflects on how you used to be a musician and you had an album called Jet Pack! Does that feel good?" That wasn't getting anywhere, and he was doing the same thing for me, and we were just talking ourselves in circles. So then, we just stayed on Skype and played the whole album, and basically what happened was the album told us. We didn't have to say anything, we just knew. The album told us that it wanted to be called Overstep. We had several other titles, but ultimately the thing you're making tells you what it wants, I think.