Photo by Kevin YatarolaMike Gordon and Page McConnell are currently in their respective Vermont studios working on new studio albums. Jared Slomoff, Gordon’s longtime collaborator, who also has toured with McConnell’s band on guitar, is helping both of the Phish bandmates. Gordon’s album is expected to hit in the early fall, while the potential release date for McConnell’s recording remains unknown.

Gordon offers some insight into his follow-up to The Green Sparrow in the forthcoming issue of Relix. Here he shares his thoughts on how his work with Leo Kottke has impacted on the project: "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.”

To read a bit more on the project, head on over to Jambands.com.