I once knew a woman with a weird problem. Apparently her brain chemistry was such that her normal condition was that of someone on LSD. Jokes aside, this was not a fun thing for her at all. Normally she was blissfully unaware of her issues and would just tell her surreal stories and try to do her work as best as possible but every now and then she'd have a moment of clarity. She had goals that would never be realized because she was stuck in this weird internal world and there was nothing that she could do about it. The release of "Idea (Another Idea)" as a Mossbonus track caused me to think about her.

"Idea" by itself just seems to be one of Mike's weird songs. There's surreal imagery and the like but nothing too out of the ordinary, well if you ignore the line, "And I see you yelling and I don't know why." It's easy to miss that with all of the wacky imagery. I wrote the song history and never really noticed it despite pouring over the lyrics to figure out what it's about.

"Idea (Another Idea)" is the flip of "Idea" that takes that line as the core. It's the moment of clarity, admitting that, "Don't care what I leave behind/When I get caught up this way." The first two verses all seem to be about the struggle to cope. "Idea"'s "I've been lost," gets morphed into "I've been wrong," (and the concern is to stop messing it up instead of the weirder stacking it up) as he talks about his desperate attempts to stay off of the slippery slope into his delusions. It's a repeated motif - "I've rejoined the human race," the moment is one last strand of grace - but one that is doomed for failure. By the end of the song, we're back to surrealism.

While I doubt Mike had the thought of someone fighting with their sanity in mind when he wrote these two tracks (without my personal history, I never would have thought of it myself), it works as an interpretation. What was a goofy little song now comes across as rather bleak, but also rather powerful. It's too bad that the track is only an iTunes and Amazon bonus track, as it changes the one song that Phish have played off of the disc. Thankfully, it's available for only the 99 cent charge (as opposed to requiring a purchase of the entire album) and it's streaming on Relix: http://www.relix.com/audio/relix-radio/2010/11/16/mike-gordon-idea-another-idea-version

Moss is definitely a project where the bonus tracks have been interesting.

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