After wrapping up a successful fall tour with Phish that was capped off with an electrifying Halloween run in Vegas, Mike Gordon is poised to head back on the road with his solo band, which has seen a couple tweaks recently. The bassist talked to JamBase in a new interview in which he looks toward the future of his solo work, looks back on the Vegas shows and delves into how Phish try to avoid music that sounds like “Jamband 101.”

On the new lineup with his solo band, which features newcomers John Kimock and Robert Walter, along with longtime collaborators Scott Murawski and Craig Myers, Gordon says the experience has been “beyond expectations” and that the range he was looking for in his band is there in spades with the newcomers, with whom he aims to record new music soon. “There’s a mess of things that I would look for, musical and otherwise, but one thing I look for is how someone takes a really simple pattern—and there are so many simple patterns we would use in a band, any band — and do it in interesting ways,” he says. “That just seems like the hardest and most rewarding thing, rather than go in and go crazy to be innovative, it’s finding the ways to be close to the roots. And so with those guys they do that with flying colors.”

When asked what he means by trying to not sound like a jamband, Gordon says that he has “over the years…found the importance of accepting. A groove or a chord progression can get really old for me, but you know, ‘I’m going to accept this, I’m going let this seep through my body.’ And I can enjoy it.” The bassist goes on to talk about how Phish used to avoid ever sounding like the Grateful Dead and that some chord progressions were “taboo” because of it. He mentions a soundcheck during the band’s fall tour that featured a jam that he says was “overly syncopated,” and Trey Anastasio said it sounded like “Jamband 101.”

“I like bands that jam, but what he meant was that it’s unanchored, with everyone playing between the bars and no one playing simply and grounding it,” Gordon continues. “That’s what I mean in terms of grooves—nothing heavy, and everyone is sort of swimming in syncopation and everyone is filling all of the holes.”

Gordon also touched on Phish’s recent tour-closing Halloween run in Vegas, noting that it was his favorite part of the tour—and apparently the only portion that stood out to him personally.

“As I wrote in the Phish bill, it’s not an album I had grown up with like the other guys had,” Gordon says. “So coming into it as more of an outsider, it was a whole world to discover in there—it was more being influenced like a kid would be now, a different attitude [approaching] what Bowie was bringing. We all practiced for it, and it felt really good.”

Read the full interview here.