About to embark on a short solo tour, Phish bassist Mike Gordon talks about going it alone, growing as a bandleader, and planning for Phish's future.

Gordon will be playing the Lebanon Opera House on March 14^th.

“I’m doing a few things at once, actually,” jokes bassist extraordinaire Mike Gordon from his home in Vermont. Fresh off his busiest year in a decade – with the long-awaited return of Phish last March, multiple studio releases, and the birth of his first child – Gordon doesn’t really know the meaning of an off day. With the Phish juggernaut lying dormant (for now), he's set to kick off a run of eight East Coast shows with his own quintet, which features Todd Isler on percussion, Tom Cleary on keyboards, Craig Myers on drums, and longtime collaborator Scott Murawski (Max Creek) on guitar. “One of the reasons I wanted to do a slightly shorter tour was so that I would not as much take away from the time I have before Phish plays again to work on another new album. So I’m kind of juggling a few things.”

With a full year of the rejuvenated Phish under his belt, Gordon is making sure not to neglect his nascent, still-developing group, which first performed together in the summer of 2008. “It was really an important thing for us to have some time for our solo careers – where we’re not only off tour from Phish, but we’re not practicing, either,” Gordon explains. “With Phish, I’m not really the singer/songwriter so much. But I gain a lot of experience and confidence and songs by spending this time doing my own stuff. It makes it so I can bring more to the table with the Phish experience.”

Sure enough, Gordon's “Sugar Shack” made it onto Phish's latest studio album – last September'sJoy. He wrote the shifty, off-kilter track without a specific band in mind. “I didn’t think Phish was getting back together at all when I wrote that song,” he admits.

Gordon first worked on the song with drummer Joe Russo (Benevento/Russo Duo, Furthur) – the two recorded a demo based on minimalist drum-and-bass sessions. “It’s kind of interesting to play the same songs with different groups of people,” Gordon admits. “Obviously, with Phish, there’s this chemistry that’s incredible, because it’s been so long-developed. But the same thing that makes it great in Phish also makes it confined. We’re confined by being the same four people with the same sensibilities. Suddenly, when you’re in a room with four different people or five different people, it can open up a whole bunch of different possibilities.”

“Phish is old and huge and has such strong personalities together, but, fortunately, it’s an interesting group of people in my solo band, too,” Gordon continues. “I feel like, as artists, we have to relearn the same lessons over and over again and then learn new lessons. It’s harder, once you’ve been doing it for twenty or thirty years, to learn the new lessons. And, in some ways, it’s harder to refresh the old ones – letting go and accepting the groove as it’s happening, rather than fighting against it, and allowing the joy in music to come out, no matter how weird or silly the music is.”

Gordon’s solo band draws much of its repertoire from Gordon’s most recent release, The Green Sparrow (2008). The light-hearted, whimsical disc, which Gordon recorded mostly on his own, combines complex polyrhythms with his uniquely melodic approach to bass playing. In concert, the songs are stretched out, with high-intensity jams led by Gordon’s driving bass. Set lists differ radically from night to night.

Earlier this week, Gordon announced the surprise release of remixed soundboard recordings from his group’s October show at Buffalo's Town Ballroom. The two-disc set, available at LivePhish.com, gives a sample of what to expect from the band in the next few weeks – lengthy jams, deep explorations of Gordon’s solo catalogue, a wide range of off-the-wall covers (Talking Heads, The Doobie Brothers, Radiohead), and even the occasional Phish song. Gordon is also working on a new studio album, which he hopes to release in the fall.

The return to smaller clubs affords Gordon the ability to grow independently as a bandleader without the intense microscope of the typical Phish audience. “We tend to mix it up,” he boasts. “For the last tour we learned fifteen new songs. We’ve played songs from the catalogues of all five band members. This time, I’d actually like not to learn quite as many new songs and spend more time dialing in the ones we have. And also try some writing together.”

“It keeps evolving, since it’s a new band,” he explains. “The last tour was a month long, in September, and it really got deep, especially in the second half of that tour. The word that kept coming to mind was ‘deconstruction.’ It sort of felt like Neil Young or something, where there are songs and chord progressions and stuff like that, but we were kind of playing against the structures of the songs and just going for raw, raging energy.”

And as for his other band’s upcoming plans? “It hasn’t been planned, but if I had to guess, I would say that we’ll probably do some stuff in the summer,” Gordon says. “Eventually, I think the idea is not just to keep playing old songs but really for Phish to reinvent ourselves just like we’re trying to reinvent the other aspects of our careers and find the uncharted territory. There’s been talk about trying to find ways to record differently than we have before and write differently, so that’s what excites me – the different possibilities.”