Q&A: How Mike Gordon Got His Groove Back

You're going to be on tour at jam band-oriented shows. Does it feel weird to appeal to that audience again?
I appreciate the Phish audience, it was — is — a great audience, because they wanted us to improvise. They wanted us to find the unknown and to take risks. Usually audiences want to hear what they know, like the hit song or be brought back to a familiar place. I don't know what the jam band movement is and where it's at, where it's going and maybe it's over.

I was going to ask what you think of the scene now.
I love it when I hear a song that makes me cry or something. But, again, if I hear something that came out of nothing and it also makes me cry then I love it even more. So, I'm not gonna give up on the idea that improvised music can exist in a rock & roll setting because I think it's a great combination. There's a lot more to be done with it as far as I'm concerned. But, where it's at, I don't know. I went to New Orleans jazz fest with 12 people and we stayed up 'till the sunrise every night.

That's what I actually miss the most, going to band practice at Trey's barn and sitting around and talking. It's all this backstage stuff and hanging out with the band type stuff, where we just feel like we're all on a mission together. We had our separate dressing rooms in the end, but we really hung out a lot. We didn't go our own ways. We were a band with a capital "B," I think, or tried to be. For that to go away was just devastating. But then, what happened, a year or so later, I started to think, "I'm gonna push myself to do stuff that I wouldn't have pushed myself to do." Because if there's a Phish album or tour, even if we take six months off, if there's another one on the horizon, it's like, "OK, well I'll do my own little thing, but ultimately Phish is gonna ?" But with that gone, suddenly, I think I was taking bigger bites out of my creative potential. And then, eventually to say, "OK. I'm gonna have my own band," and now, it's really magical, because it's new people. So to have that feeling is great, and then to come back to the Phish thing, to know that we can have that also and that there's no replacing the chemistry of 25 years, no matter what we do.

Can you tell me about how it feels to be thinking about a Phish reunion?
We're all healthy, so much healthier than before, and we've grown to this place because of whatever personal stuff we've gone through or we've come to over the last five years, or four years. And that we could potentially do it and that some people will have some excitement about it — that alone is a really inspiring thing. For a rock band, after twenty-five years, to be able to say we could do this again and we're pretty excited about it is awesome.