The experimental rock group mssv has a sound that defies categorization, but guitarist Mike Baggetta has opted for “post-genre” as a description.

“It kind of started as a little tongue-in-cheek joke because people always go, what kind of music do you play? And I’m not gonna sit there and explain it for 20 minutes while their eyes glaze over and stuff,” Baggetta said in a recent call. “So I came up with it just to tell them that, and then they can go off and think about it, realize that it’s kind of a silly question in 2025 to be maybe asking people what type of music they play. We’ve got a 150-year history of recorded music, and it’d be foolish to limit yourself.”

Baggetta, an adventurous jazz guitarist, teamed with the renowned rhythm team of bassist Mike Watt (Minutemen, Dos, Firehose) and drummer Stephen Hodges, who’s played with Mavis Staples and Tom Waits, to explore and push musical boundaries. The power trio is touring in support of their most recent album, “On And On,” with a stop April 12 at the Funhouse at Mr. Smalls.

The album, according to Baggetta, explores themes of the interconnectedness of everything, unintended influences and the unending, repeating cycles of life.

“I think of songs really like a mirror, like I can make a mirror. I can make a certain shape of frame. I can use a certain type of glass. I can use a certain type of tint,” he said. “But at the end of the day, people are going to look in the mirror and see whatever they want to see.”

In a call Friday from Birmingham, Alabama, Baggetta discussed the band’s dynamics, how they play their new songs on tour before recording albums and much more:

What’s been your overall vision for this band?

Well, the easy answer is to play my music as good as possible, but I guess, more detailed, I have this idea about music in general from playing all sorts of different things and listening to all kinds of different music over the years where the stuff that most excites me is stuff that blurs the line between composition and improvisation, something that can create a lot of drama in music for the listener by manipulating little musical ideas that trick the ear of people into getting them into a state where you’re still living your life but the music is having a bigger influence on it in a way, at least for the time that you’re listening to it at least. I never thought about that.

How different is the band a few years in versus what you imagined at the beginning?

Oh yeah, definitely deepening those ideas I just talked about. I guess we’ve been together more or less for six years now. We kind of reconvene when a record comes out and we have a tour set up. So it’s not like it’s constant, but we’ve been doing this for about six years since 2019 on and off, and these ideas of blurring the line between composition and improvisation have definitely gotten deeper, the way that the guitar and the bass and the drums all interact and the three of us as personalities has grown a lot deeper. It kind of was an experiment at the beginning to start a band with people that I didn’t know, because I’d always had bands with friends. I just always thought all great bands were people that were friends forever. I didn’t know that you could just try to make a band with people you didn’t know and have it be a really intimate-sounding affair. So now I just have ended up with a band with my friends again. All these relationships have grown deeper over the years and a lot more input of everyone’s personality and an understanding of what that can be and challenging ourselves musically for sure, too.

Was it more of an open page at the beginning because you might not know each other’s tendencies?

Yeah, kind of. I was definitely aware of Watt and Hodges and their playing from listening to them over the decades like most everyone else. And then to step into a situation where they’re willing to try to play my music, it’s kind of a big responsibility I took really seriously. So I write the parts for them, hearing their sound in my head, and also trying to think about how I can maybe push them into areas that are a little different for them just because of the fact that I’m writing the music and they’re not writing the music for themselves. So yeah, it was an interesting thing at the beginning to see how it would take, but it clicked pretty immediately into something really interesting that we were all ready to keep investigating for a while.

All the songs on “On And On” were written before your 2023 tour and then you played them every night. How much did they change from what you wrote to what they turned out to be on the album?

That was the same for “Human Reaction,” the one before that. And we have brand new music on this tour we’re gonna record at the end of that. So you can see a pattern developing, I’m sure. They changed quite a bit. I write the music just by myself before I come out and do tracks before the tour with these guys. So in my own head, there’s an idea, but the more we do it, I’m also aware that it’s gonna change over the course of the tour. And that’s what I want. I can think of nothing more disappointing than recording a bunch of music without playing it every night, having the record come out, then playing the music for 50 nights and all the songs change into something greater than I could have ever imagined and then missing the opportunity to record it then.

So this just always seemed like a smart way to do it to me. The music is gonna change drastically in dynamics; the bass and drums’ interaction, that’s gonna change. I’m gonna come up with different guitar parts. We’re gonna find new ways to introduce drama into the music from playing it every night. That’s actually something I’m really interested in with this band, but really any project I’m involved in: how do you get the personality of the players to come out in the music in a way that you can then capture it to share with everybody?

Back in the ‘80s or ‘90s, bands would road-test songs a lot and now it doesn’t sound like a lot of bands do that because of the internet. That doesn’t seem to be a concern for you.

Yeah, there’s all this baggage of modern society that you can easily fall into and feel like you have to let it dictate the way you want the career of your band to go or the way you want to make music to sort of fit the times, but a lot of times I don’t know if it’s always the best way to do it. Some things just make sense. I met Greg Norton when we played in St. Paul last tour and he told me that when Hüsker Dü used to tour, they would do this idea, but they wouldn’t even play any of the old songs. They would have a record come out and they would only play the new songs that they would record at the end of tours. People would come to the shows and they wouldn’t recognize any of this stuff because it hadn’t been recorded yet. But they would get that practice in every night at the show and tighten up the tunes and let them evolve and then record them at the end, and that’s why their record sounds so good, I think.

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How did you get more comfortable as a vocalist on this album?

On the last tour, singing 58 shows in a row, that’ll do it for anybody. (laughs) Part of it was just Watt and Hodges saying, like, ‘Yeah, of course you should sing. Why wouldn’t you sing?’ I’d always been terrified to do so. I had a teacher early on that kind of squashed the idea that I should be singing, (that) I should just focus on guitar, which was fine. I love instrumental music, too. But both Watt and Hodges really helped give me a big confidence boost to try using my voice. I’ve gotten a lot of great tips from Watt, especially as a vocalist, how to use your air and your face and your mouth and all these sort of different things he’s taught me. And then Hodges, he’s accompanied, I would say, most of the great vocalists of 20th century music. So I’m in a very fortunate position to feel like I’m learning as a vocalist with these two guys every night, especially by doing it so much.

Was it important for this album to have more “traditional songs” like “On And On” and “OK To Change” — was that something you thought about?

No, it wasn’t important or that I thought about. It’s just, these are things that just come out of me. I love “traditional” songs (and) songwriting. I also love free improvisation. I love messing with the form of people’s expectations of what a song could be. But I also love traditional song form. So all these things come out when you listen to a lot of music and you’re not limiting yourself if you keep an open mind and an open set of ears.

The thread that runs through everything has to do with the person that’s writing it, not so much trying to fit it into a style. Things happen and I’m not worried about trying to put them in a box so much. You get what you get sometimes.

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