Q&A: How Mike Gordon Got His Groove Back

Bassist Mike Gordon's solo album The Green Sparrow might not have come to fruition if it wasn't for some advice from Sting, Twyla Tharp's self-help book or Phish's 2004 split. With a possible Phish reunion and a tour with his new band on the horizon, Gordon spoke to Rolling Stone about breaking rules, his relationship with his old bandmates and why fans are so addicted to calling him on the phone.

What made you decide to do another solo album?
I was playing with all these different bands and people, collaborating, and wanting to have my own material. If they're gonna hire me, then I might as well just write my own stuff and hire myself as bass player. I'm so sought after that I want me too.

So you recorded most of The Green Sparrow in your own home studio?
The first thing I did was spend two years building the studio in Vermont. It's the same guy that had built my old studio, and Trey's barn. Trey and I used to talk about Stevie Wonder's work triangle, where you can spin around in your chair and have everything you need within reach. I worked alone for nine months, completely alone. I had read [choreographer] Twyla Tharp's creativity book. She was saying you should face your solitude, and I had never really worked alone much, at all. And then I read Julia Cameron's The Artists Way, which Trey recommended 10 years ago.

What does that book recommend?
It's 10 hours a week and there's exercises. There's two weekly rituals which I still do. People talk about the Morning Pages, that's one of them, where you write three pages every morning. There's all these unexpected reasons why it frees up your brain. You could be writing, "God damn it! The dog pissed on the floor again!" But you're venting that stuff and you're teaching your hand to keep writing despite the fact that your inner censor that you've developed since childhood is gonna say what you're writing is shit. It's been kind of life-changing.

Were you suffering from writer's block?
Sometimes I was. I mean I've been writing songs for 20 years, but never all day, every day, all week, for a year. And what it was unearthing, in terms of my fears and what I didn't know how to get in the flow of, was astounding. But the result was I came up with 50 songs, and by the end of September, I had recorded just six of them. In October, I changed it up, and [engineer] Jared Slomoff and I were writing the rules. I live my life by all these rules. You can't have the fun of breaking rules until you make rules.

What are some of the rules?
The rule for the year was no gigs allowed. But for October, the two main rules were one song a day, it had to be finished from beginning to end, demoed. And the other rule was, I had archived 20 years of jam sessions and little scratch pad ideas, so everything had to stem from something that had been archived.