You don’t really meet Mike Gordon, per se.

You sort of intercept him.

It’s 1:45 on a breezy Saturday afternoon in Los Angeles. In seven and a half hours, Gordon will step onstage with his band at The Troubadour to officially kick off an 17-date American tour in support of his new album, Moss.

Less than six days earlier, Gordon was onstage 2,500 miles away with another little band from Vermont, delivering a precise reading of Little Feat’s double-live opus Waiting for Columbus (which, incidentally, Phish had just finished learning in between gigs on its own fall tour).

And, so, in the five days between – four days if you don’t count travel from Burlington, Vt. to LA – he somehow had to cram in three full-day band rehearsals and enough daddy time with his two-year-old daughter Tessa to keep his loving cup full for another three weeks.

His stacked calendar and ambitious to-do lists may not define his consciousness, but they do evidence a man with a boundless appetite for new experiences and new perspectives.

Pulling up a chair, I wonder aloud if his ambitious touring schedule is emotionally or physically taxing.

“Usually, it takes at least a week after a tour until I begin to feel human again,” he offers, picking at a salad. “Tour can be very draining. But at the same time, it’s energizing, and I really like this album and want people to hear the songs. So here we are.”

These days, for Mike Gordon, things are really that simple.

Until they aren’t.

If you surveyed Phish fans and allotted them three words to describe Mike Gordon, two of the most popular answers might be “the quiet one” and “the weird one.” To be fair, he can be both of these things (see: his film Outside Out). But like any three word description of him, they both fall far short of the mark.

Conversations with Gordon reveal a person and an artist vibrating with complexity and contradiction. He is guarded and private about the people closest to him, but astonishingly and disarmingly open and verbose about his own thoughts and emotions – the things that bring him joy (his family), the things that bring him pain (Phish’s 2004 breakup) and the things that heal his wounds (creating). He is prone to free-associative, deep-space tangents and yet uncannily capable of reeling it all in with a few choice words of earthbound synthesis.

“My Mom’s astrologer told me my role in this lifetime was to go out into the spheres, then come back and report on what’s out there.”

Gordon’s defining characteristic, perhaps, is deliberate and practiced awareness – being conscious in the moment, experiencing people and events as fully as possible while they transpire and then processing them as thoroughly as he can (hopefully, without sailing right past that next moment)

“Mystics talk about the self that sees the self,” he explains. “Then, there’s another self that sees that self, and so on, the further you progress. I’m intrigued by that idea of stepping outside and observing yourself as another being.”

Of course, moments are fleeting and so Gordon has taken to documenting his own life compulsively. Before he checks out of his hotel (the tour bus will whisk him from the LA gig to play a free show early the following day at the corner of Haight and Ashbury in San Francisco), he makes a hurried pass around his room with a movie camera, capturing the bed, the desk, the mirror, the closet door, the flat screen TV, a “hospitality shelf” stocked with quirky host gifts, an untouched wine bottle and (ever-so-briefly) me.

This 6-second clip will find its way onto Mike’s MacBook Pro – a close companion of silicone and steel whose collective contents comprise a puzzle of its own.

“Here,” he volunteers enthusiastically, “I want to show you my lists.”

He plops down on the white leather sofa, opens his laptop, and produces a file containing precisely 100 lists. Some of these lists are serious ( “Goals” ) and some of these lists are certainly not ( “Bad Band Names” ). Most are somewhere in between. Some of these lists contain his personal axioms – lessons he has learned, and forgotten, and then re-learned, sometimes many times over. How to relax on stage, for example.

“Oh, shit!” he says.

Rifling through directories, Gordon realizes that he has yet not finished categorizing and filing an exhaustive collection of photos and movies from the last month of his life. As he clicks, drags and drops, he offers fleeting glimpses of recent events ranging from the mundane to the sensational: hanging around the house with his family; serving cake and ice cream at his daughter’s birthday party; rehearsing a track from Waiting for Columbus with the horn section made up players from Antibalas and The Dap-Kings. These amuses bouche are sampled in half-second bursts as if to confirm that they actually happened, and are then boxed away.

This is not just one of Gordon’s innate quirks. It’s his discipline, his method. “I need to feel like I’m organized before I can move from one thing to the other,” he explains.

Satisfied for now, he stands, faces the far wall, curls his extended tongue, inhales, and forcefully expels a mighty lungful of air through his mouth.

SSHHWITT!

And again: SSHHWITT!

“Now, I’m going to do some vocal warm-ups I learned from my vocal coach,” he announces, adding parenthetically, “She’s an opera singer.”

Ten minutes into his 20-minute chromatic exercise, something unexpected happens. It starts to sound like music. I become conscious of the acute absurdity of my present reality and laugh out loud.

Gordon doesn’t miss a note. It’s quite possible he doesn’t even hear me.

He’s deep in his process now. He’s in his happy place.

Mike Gordon spend many of his day pursuing the unexpected and the unpredictable. The beaten path holds little appeal for him. He prefers to ski off-piste, in untracked snow. His influences often come from outside the musical world.

“I saw [Banksy’s] movie Exit Through the Gift Shop, about these street artists who are always trying to do something new and different and vital despite the real pressures to do what is expected and tried,” he reveals. “That’s what inspired The Mossery.”

Gordon is referring to a Moss promo event that he staged at Kenny’s Castaways in New York City on a day off from fall Phish tour. He invited fans to drop in and jam with Gordon and a rotating band that included his own guitarist and longtime collaborator Scott Murawski (Max Creek) and drummer Joe Russo (Benevento-Russo Duo, Furthur).

More than 400 fans showed up. Gordon concurs with the overwhelmingly positive online response the morning after.

“It was amazing,” he gushes. “One-hundred and thirty-one people actually got to play, mostly guitarists. At first, it seemed like some of them had never even played before, which would have been fine. But I found if we just gave them the right energy, all of a sudden they would start to play really well, and come out of their shell, musically. There were a lot of blissed-out expressions and it was amazing see people having that experience.”

Gordon often muses about breaking down the barriers between band and audience, about shooting holes in the buffer zone the way he did that night at The Mossery. He is keenly aware that club dates with his own band allow for a kind of intimacy that is harder to achieve in the context of a band as big as Phish.

This translates into crafting meticulous set lists, soundchecking for more than 2-hours and encouraging his audience to participate in jams by playing sounds on his Kaossilator – a palm-sized dynamic phrase synthesizer that’s plugged into the soundboard and very much up in the mix. Collectively, these little mitzvahs serve to draw his audience close and make them feel cared for – which they most certainly are.

Gordon even sets goals for his band.

“I tend to measure the success of a Phish tour,” he reveals, “by how many of the gigs are worth writing about in my journal. It’s different with this band. This tour, I have some things I want us to focus on.” These include:

Simpler music/ less is more/ addition by subtraction

Transcend all of our influences (especially Phish)

Broaden the range of grooves we have access to onstage

As Gordon scrawls tonight’s set list on a hotel postcard, he airs a more immediate and nagging concern. “Last time, when I went out with this band, it took a few gigs for us to really loosen up and feel free up there. I want to make sure we open our first show with something that gives the band permission to step outside a little bit.”

I suggest that maybe they could open with a jam: an invocation of sorts, to stretch out the hands and head.

“That’s not a bad idea,” he says.

(This does not come to pass.)

Like the visionary behind it, Moss defies concise description.

Musically, the new album is accessible, inviting and hypnotic. It bubbles along politely and though it warps back on itself now and again, it never jars. Gordon’s more psychonautic fans will probably find it more appropriate as a “morning after” selection than “night of” selection. Gordon’s bass is very much at the fore, driving the harmonic movement throughout, but not excluding other sounds. The production is contemporary, balanced and confident.

Lyrically, Moss is less penetrable; less plainspoken. As with much of his past work, Gordon tends to shroud his deeper meanings in metaphor, often cramming more than one into a single song, even a single stanza.

But he interweaves the metaphor of moss – a division of plants whose lesser-known characteristics Mike finds enchanting – throughout. Most people associate moss with stillness or even stagnancy ( “a rolling stone gathers no moss” ), and that this makes Gordon’s decision to open the album with “Can’t Stand Still” ironic, if not perplexing.

He pauses a moment to consider this. “I never thought of it that way, really.”

It’s hard to know whether he’s being coy, or whether this intriguing contradiction was genuinely a happy accident that had – until now – escaped his detection.

Further efforts to negotiate Gordon’s lyrical mazes terminate in similar cul-de-sacs. As a rule, he reserves the right to withhold comment on the meaning and value of his own poetry because he doesn’t want to disqualify any listener’s subjective interpretation.

Now and again he’ll break his own rule, as he does when probed about “What Things Seem” – a metaphysical sort of torch song laced with awe and suspicion about magical powers.

“Years ago, I drove past a church sign that read, ‘Things Are Not What They Seem,’ and it stuck in my head,” he recounts. “I wanted to explore that idea. We tend to perceive things a certain way – as good or bad – but we’re only aware of a narrow sliver of reality, even in close relationships. The truth is, at any given time, things might be worse than you assume.”

Pausing, he allows a grin.

“But they also might be better.”

The Troubadour is packed to its trademark rafters.

You wouldn’t know it by the band’s recent tour itineraries, but LA loves Phish and the hardcore local fans have come out in full force. It’s a distinctly familial vibe.

At 9:15 p.m., the band breaks its huddle in the cramped and mildewed loft that passes for “backstage” and descends the rickety stairs to a boisterous welcome.

Gordon and Murawski assume positions side by side at the center of the stage, with versatile Brooklyn drummer Todd Isler tucked in behind and between them.

At stage right, the rangy and boyish Tom Cleary – who teaches jazz piano at the University of Vermont by day – settles in behind a pair of keyboards. At stage left, African-influenced percussionist Craig Myers (Rubblebucket) nests himself amid an array of cymbals, skins and strings.

Halfway through “Dig Further Down,” the second song of the night, I realize I’ve been duped. I have failed, and failed abysmally, to expect the unexpected. Having digested Moss, I had anticipated something way more precious – perhaps a certain world music politeness or studious quality to the band’s sound. Instead, I’m receiving a proper rock and roll rogering.

My wife tugs on my shirt sleeve approvingly, as if to say this band means business!

But Gordon’s demeanor is even more unexpected. Onstage with Phish, he is all economy of motion and often seems to fall almost perfectly still as if entranced. In this band, he is physically kinetic – squaring off alternately with each of the other players to make eye contact, smile, whoop with encouragement and even jump up and down spontaneously when moved by the groove. The end of each song brings eruptions of applause that seem to set him on his heels with gratitude.

In short, Mike’s bandleader shoes fit, well, like a glove.

Not that Gordon hogs the spotlight. On the contrary, he gives all of his bandmates ample opportunity to step out and shine.

Murawski’s frequent but tasteful solos entwine with the bass lines in much the same telepathic fashion as those of Gordon’s “other guitarist,” although, stylistically, there is no mistaking one for the other. Murawski nimbly navigates the furious fretting of “Sugar Shack” with little evident effort.

Cleary and Myers each deliver second set show stoppers. Cleary takes over vocal duties with his side-splittingly funny blues “Miss My Mind,” and Myers astonishes the audience during his instrumental “River Niger” with bliss-inducing tones from his n’goni (a harp-like African instrument that he crafted by hand and strung with high-test fishing line). During “River Niger,” lighting director Jason “Liggy” Liggett (Yonder Mountain String Band, Wilco) splashes thousands of green stars against the backdrop of the stage, suggesting a jungle at twilight. It’s a genuinely lovely moment.

The crowd reserves its most thunderous applause of the night for the band’s brash and greasy reading of Tower of Power’s “Down to the Nightclub.”

Hours before, while writing the set list, Gordon asked me if I knew the tune.

“I don’t,” I responded.
“Good,” he said. “I don’t want to do anything too obvious.”

As the crew breaks down the band’s gear and Gordon signs his last few autographs, I find myself lamenting the day’s end. If I were younger and freer, then I’d jump into a car and follow the band up to San Francisco.

However, I’m not. So I thank Gordon for being so unusually generous with his time and wish him a successful tour. By the time the day’s adrenaline wears off and I succumb to sleep, he’ll be halfway to San Francisco with 16 more gigs, thousands of miles and countless surprises still stretched out before him.

And, no doubt, a few unplanned stops among the spheres.