Phish bassist Mike Gordon was interviewed by Mike Greenhaus for Relix. On preparations for the tour with guitarist Leo Kottke:
Rehearsing for this tour with Leo [Kottke] has been really fun—we’re piecing together some material from all three of our albums, sort of dabbling. And then we are working on some stuff that’s not on any of our albums. What I really like about bands, and maybe even duos, is when they have a certain sound that transcends whatever song they’re playing—a groove and a tonality and a sensibility. I call it the fabric of the band. There’s a certain flow.
So what’s been really cool about rehearsing this week is finding new levels of that. It’s not really that different than what we’ve done before, but I enjoy just being able to bask in the flow of the way we play together. And then, from there, it almost doesn’t matter what song we’re playing as long as we make sure that there’s nothing in there that feels uncomfortable.
As an analogy, it’s like the way Phish handled Halloween. We did a bunch of writing together; I really like the way that we didn’t overwrite it, where we let it do its thing so that each song was unique but not overthought. That’s what Leo and I are finding.
