Q&A: How Mike Gordon Got His Groove Back

What would you say characterizes the 10 songs that made the album?
I wanted songs to be rock and not some of the genres I had been playing with earlier. I wanted the songs to be a little bit more sophisticated — more chord progressions, lyrics that said more stuff than I had done before.

What kind of music are you listening to, and did anything inspire the album?
I listen to a lot of world music, like King Sunny Adé and Toumani Diabaté. I saw the Police at Fenway and I got to meet Sting at this incredible party. And Sting said that one of his tricks to songwriting was not to listen to any music, like in the car, at all. And I had been listening to a lot of stuff, and I realized that it was really good advice. When you empty out your ears you find emptiness, and it can get filled.

So you stopped listening to music while you were writing these songs?
Yep. I have this hotline that fans call and I got addicted to doing the hotline in the car instead of listening to music. My rule is I have to listen to all 30 messages [that fill the inbox] to change the outgoing message. And sometimes it's games. One game we had was to infiltrate Madonna's hotline that she had going for her album Confessions on a Dance Floor. So her hotline was you were supposed to call in and confess. But she didn't listen to it herself, I don't think. Mine, I listen to everything. If I clear out the 30 messages, in an hour or two, it'll be full again. Some people get addicted to it. People have said, "I call you more than my own mother." They get out of bars, and they're going home alone, so they call the hotline.

What kind of Websites do you read every day?
I'll look at YouTube links that people give me because they're funny, if they're cat-oriented or something. Or like tiny little kids playing music better than jazz greats.

You've said your songs are often inspired by dreams.
When I wrote "Andelman's Yard" I had this reoccurring dream about burrowing tunnels in my neighborhood. Dreams are my guide posts in my career and if I'm onstage having an incredible jam, I kind of link to some dream I had the night before or one of these reoccurring dreams.

There's a lot of strange instruments on the album. What's a "clucky?"
Marco Benevento who I played with has this collection of children's toys that have been circuit bent — toys that make sounds, and then they go into the circuitry and screw around so that it doesn't sound normal anymore, so there'll be these little loops and static. Clucky is this little duck quacking thing but it has some pitch bending. I like to collect weird sounds to record with, but I also wanted to make it a rock album where there aren't banjos or pedal steels.