HT Interview: Catching Up With Mike Gordon – Part 2

Brian Bavosa: In discussing songwriting, you’ve mentioned that sometimes the process or preparing a song to hit the stage with Phish or your solo band takes years. Can you give a specific example of one such song?

Mike Gordon: There are a lot of examples. Sometimes there are songs like Susskind Hotel. Ok, just to trace the history of a song and it’s hardly a song, it feels more like a jam with a vision attached to it, and the vision originally came from a dream. So that’s juncture one.

The dream was a lucid dream, so I was aware that I was dreaming. And there’s a huge mountain with a hotel from the 13th Century that the Phish guys were staying at, and it was along the curve, way up on the side of a cliff in the mountains. I remember that Trey and his wife were down in the valley at the bottom and somehow I decided that I would hike down and meet them or I bumped into them and I realized I was dreaming, it was a very simple dream, and I’ve had some with elaborate plots and this one was just simple and I was just kind of talking to them about the hotel that was a castle, up in the mountain, along the curved road.

Anyway, but the vision stuck with me. And then I wrote the song, and when I wrote the song, I was going to the Woolworth Building when I lived in New York, everyday for an hour. One song a day was my rule then. And it was especially material I was coming up with to use with Leo Kottke, because there were the two albums and tours that I did with him. So I had a whole bunch of stuff that I brought to Leo, maybe 40 songs, fragments for us to pick and use some. And that was one that wasn’t used at the time. So then, maybe the next time was when Trey and I played with the Duo.

Brian Bavosa: Is that when you brought it to Trey, Marco and Joe?

Mike Gordon: Actually, when we were recording in the studio in Brooklyn, we were recording some of Trey’s songs with the Duo that ended up going on Bar 17 and I think Trey had to leave, but we ended up recording two or three of my songs just because we were there and had extra time and that was one of them. Then, when we did the [2006 GRAB] tour we ended up playing that song, and it’s basically a big jam, but has a little bit of a song structure, which for me represents that vision that I had, actually almost more of a feeling than a vision. And now, that I’ve got my main band [laughs], we decided to bust it out and it started to become a vehicle for us to get really crazy and just sound different than we normally sound and it just felt like a good release of energy.

Then I started to see signs for it on Phish tour, and actually there were a couple of times that Phish practiced it and then never played it, and then finally we did play it this summer. Well, that’s the trajectory of a song ending up in some different groupings. It didn’t change its form too much, although the extra drum fills were Trey’s idea, so I have to thank him for that. It was a little bit more simplistic without those drum fills.

[Photo by Hal Hansen]

Brian Bavosa: While that doesn’t exactly answer the question that I ask, but I think it was a pleasant surprise to many of us that were at Super Ball and a lot of fans that do appreciate and would welcome more of your solo stuff in the repertoire. It’s interesting to hear how Susskind came into a Phish setlist.

Mike Gordon: So, the short answer is, right now, in my studio, that I am working on something that people are going to love in 2016! [laughs]. This year they may hear something great from 2006 that no one’s ever heard of [laughs], but it’s not that it’s old, but it’ll be that in 2006 it was only a germ that was growing which finally came to fruition.

Mike Gordon Tour Dates:

12/9 – The Met Cafe – Pawtucket, RI

12/10 – Calvin Theatre – Northampton, MA

12/11 – The Egg – Albany, NY

Phish Tour Dates:

12/28 – 12/31 – Madison Square Garden – NYC, NY