Phish.net

Mike Gordon is fascinated with dreams. His hotline frequently mentions his methods to create lucid dreams and deal with them, as do several of his songs, especially Party Time's "Only a Dream." While "Idea" doesn't outwardly address sleeping or dreams, the song seems to still be influenced by nocturnal visions.

"Idea" presents a surreal landscape of owl tycoons – is that someone who got rich off of selling owls to zoos, or an actual avian millionaire (complete with top hat and monocle) that used its wisdom to predict fluctuations in the stock market? – and ancient crumbling oceanfront cities. The protagonist scales walls, gets into confusing arguments and is captured by a pair of knights. The underlying message below the metaphors is to not stack things up higher and higher until they collapse. It falls somewhere between a metaphor for the correct way to live and a good Jenga strategy.

Watch Idea on YouTube Mike Gordon Band, “Idea” – 11/6/2010, Los Angeles, CA

When Moss was released in 2010, a variant of “Idea” (“Idea (Another Idea)”) was a bonus track on both iTunes and Amazon’s MP3 store.  The music is similar (identical in the choruses) with different lyrics.  What makes it so interesting is that it opens up a new perspective on the original song.  Buried below the layers of surrealism in “Idea” is the fact that the protagonist is fighting with the person he’s singing to.  “Idea (Another Idea)” makes that fight crucial; moreover what they are fighting over seems to be his inability to stay in the real world.  The song starts out grounded in the real world – it even references the fact that Mike is a bass player – but as the music gets closer and closer to “Idea”’s (the song is a bit of a musical asymptote), the lyrics get weirder, until finally the chorus stops being an apology and starts becoming almost identical to the original (only replacing “stacking it up” with “hacking it up”).  The character is hanging out to his “one last strand of grace,” but eventually falls back down the slippery slope of living in his imagination.  

Lyrical theories aside, what caught the ear of many of those in attendance at its nTelos Pavilion debut on 6/15/10 was the outro jam after the final verse. There is potential for this section to become a massive Page and Mike funk fest. If that starts to happen then maybe it wouldn't be such a bad “Idea” to keep stacking these up. In the meantime, “Idea” has taken root and become a staple in the Mike Gordon Band repertoire.

Watch Idea on Vimeo Mike Gordon Band, “Idea” – 11/17/10, Madison, WI, 105.5 Triple M In Studio

(Gordon)
© Who Is She? Music, BMI

Sliding down that final stretch of highway
I pass beside you and my mind comes alive
Got to find a way to the person inside
Skip my turn and follow you to a city
I scale the walls of a highrise to the sky
And I see you yelling and I don't know why

I'm hiding in that empty room
Behind a pile of impending doom
It must have been a bad idea; gotta stop stackin' it up
I don't know why I got so lost; and how long; I've been gone

You're meeting with an owl tycoon at a conference table
Another sketch of a higher tower is drawn
And your voice is becoming my favorite song
As the knights of reason stand in the way clanging
I step out and plead until they take me away
But another idea begins to inflate

On chairs stacked up to your room
I serenade you with a thought balloon that says
It must have been a bad idea to start stacking it up
I don't know why it got so lost; and how long; I've been gone

You built an ancient town from rocks and bones
On sand they find your glossy tower sheens
Waves crash up and the spires beam
From the top of the world you scope out what you know
But standing way up there makes you feel all alone
With the odds stacked against me I walk up slow

Piece by piece you break your wall down
And as it tumbles to the ground you say
It must have been a bad idea to keep stackin' it up
I don't know why I got so lost; and how long; I've been gone