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Greener Pastures: To the Spheres and Back with Mike Gordon

“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.”