Photo by Julia MordauntMike Gordon has spent much of 2010 ensconced in his home studio up in the trees behind his Vermont home. For his forthcoming release, expected this fall, he is once again working with longtime collaborator Jared Slomoff (although these days he’s sharing him with Phish keyboardist Page McConnell who has tapped Slomoff to assist with his next studio effort). Much of the music on the as-yet-untitled disc is drawn from a series of live recordings that the bassist created with a variety of drummers, although other musicians have contributed as well, including members of Gordon groups: Phish (McConnell), Ramble Dove (Marie Claire), and his current band (Scott Murawski and Tom Cleary).

Alpha State

The Inside In album was kind of dreamy and the Green Sparrow was supposed to be a very awake experience. This one is sort of in the middle where it’s not quite dreamy but it’s also not pointedly awake. It’s supposed to be maybe more Alpha state – where you’re kind of half-awake and half-asleep, sort of playing with that.

Meteor Jam

A lot of songs on this album began as bass and drum jams. Jared and I catalogued them and then I went back and worked with them using Pro Tools. There were jams with Russell Baptiste, Zach Velmer, Doug Belote, Joe Russo, Bill Kreutzmann and one with Ken Lovelett who is playing some really bizarre percussion instruments. There’s one with me and Fish and this guy Nick Cassarino, who’s a great young guitar player. There’s also one with Page and Fish, the meteor jam [named after celestial fireworks that took place during the session]. This is when Trey was living in Saratoga [Fall 2007] and he was playing with Rock Band drum loops, writing some songs or playing with ideas, so we decided to record some for him. We wanted to show him how we felt about him, so went in one night and recorded 43 loops for his 43rd birthday I’m not sure if he’s used them but I’ve started to.

Swing Theory

My favorite parts are when I get disoriented – when I feel like it’s sort of danceable but I lose where the One is. It’s sort of like – imagine you’re on a swing set and the rhythm is very understandable, where you’re in front, and then you slow down, and then you swing back. Let’s say someone unhinged it from the top and starting whipping it around in the air and suddenly you don’t know where you are – you don’t have a grounding point. I really like that feeling of disorientation.

Peripheral Hearing

A great way to tell whether something feels right if you’ve overdubbed it, let’s say a guitar solo or whatever it is, is to listen back and don’t listen to that thing. So if I want to know whether the guitar solo sounds right and let’s say there’s a bass line going on, I’ll play it back and I’ll only listen to the bass – not to judge the bass, but to see how I like the guitar solo. The reason is that as soon as you focus on something – focus is probably the most important human skill – but as soon as you focus on something like that, it’s almost hard to see it objectively.

Photo by Julia MordauntBalance Training

One of the balancing acts is between syncopation and steadiness, where it’s really nice for music to be steady because life is so uneven that to have some evenness and to get carried away by a song is nice. But at the same time, I like to combine that feeling of getting carried away, not with a jerkiness, but with an unpredictable nature in rhythms. And that’s what this album is doing, definitely more than any of my other albums, where you hear one instrument come in and it seems to make sense, and then the next instrument comes in with a juxtaposed rhythm and it makes sense, but it’s contrary to the first one, and then another instrument comes in and with a third rhythm and all of a sudden they are doing this dance that’s a little bit disorienting in a way that I like. So I keep having this challenge as I add things and subtract things so that I maintain that fine line there.

Lessons from Leo

I guess what happens as people go through different eras and develop different perspectives then look back earlier in their life and apply the new perspective to the earlier experience. So now when I look back at that time with Leo, I see it the way I’m seeing my challenge right now. There’s something about Leo’s playing that’s nice – that’s disorienting. He’s great at not sticking to a pattern long enough for your ear to even figure it out. By the time you’ve heard a bar of guitar repeated, even a couple of times, it’s not going to happen again. The basic groove is turning and repetitive, but within that what’s happening is constantly changing. He explained that to me at one point that he had a way of taking the rhythm and changing it up as soon as someone thinks they understand it. I thought that was pretty cool. And I noticed that when I got to know his playing more.

And then when I added bass, there’s this real danger of defining it and anchoring it. If he’s implying this kind of chord progressions, this calypso groove or something, and I go in there and play all the root notes on the downbeats and make it so you hear the chord progression and the rhythm very clearly when you hadn’t before, that might take the whimsical nature out of what he’s doing. But then, on the other hand, if I play so crazily and randomly, there’s no grounding feeling in the bass, that doesn’t really add something nice either. That’s the big balancing act and that’s what I’ve kept in mind for this recording.

Band Members, Old and New

My new band members play on a few – probably half of the tracks in different combinations. There were three of them that we recorded as a trio with me and Scott [Murawski] and Todd [Isler]. And then there’s sort of a smattering of other people – either where the original tracks came from in some cases, or where some overdubs were done in other cases. So we’ve got some more Doug Belote. I just had such a fruitful smattering of bass and drum jam sessions and one of those was with him. There are a couple Joe Russo ones and Jon Fishman plays on one track. And Marie [Claire] who was the keyboard and singer from my honkytonk band [Ramble Dove] – she was on one track on my last album [ “Radar Blip” ] and now she’s on three on this album, and one in particular is kind of like a duet between us.

Bassing It Up

This album is kind of bass-oriented. Not in that the bass is the lead, but that the rhythms and the patterns are bass centric. The uniqueness is centered on the bass. So the bass is the key instrument. On Inside In, the pedal steel is the key instrument and if you had to say it for Green Sparrow, maybe electric guitar. But this time it’s the bass.