Interview Thread

[anthrax]

Super long article.  Takes a bit to get going.  I starting copying the good parts (they are bolded below) but about halfway through I just gave up.  There are great nuggets all over this article.  Use the link...

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/21/after-forty-years-phish-isnt-seeking-resolution


On the second night of Mondegreen, the band played a surprise third set. The members set up behind a screen featuring projections by Moment Factory, a design studio known for its immersive, trippy environments. The fifty-minute instrumental improvisation that followed would come to be known as "Mondegreen Ambient Jam." A Phish jam is usually preceded by an enormous amount of preparation. The Mondegreen jam was divided into seven parts, and each was assigned a key, an image ("Organic Architecture," "Shape Shifting Trees"), and an energy level (a number between one and ten). Despite the planning—there were PDFs—it still required what Anastasio called "a willingness to fail right in front of people." He finds parameters generative. "If I know what the image is—flying saucers in blue air, or whatever—and I know what the key is, and I know the level of intensity, and I get handed a guitar, those limits allow me to play with raw emotion, which is what everyone responds to, anyway," he said. "The theory is, art lives by limitation. You develop the theme, you can go backward, forward, stretch it out. But don't keep bringing in more material." At one point, he was playing two guitars (an acoustic set to an open tuning and placed in a stand, and an electric) simultaneously.

Fishman paraphrased Charlie Parker: " 'Study and study and learn everything you can, and then forget that shit and play.' That ambient jam is the safest, most comfortable place I know in life."

"Last night got so deep," he texted me one morning, after Phish had played its second of four shows at Moon Palace, a resort in the Riviera Maya, in Mexico. "Gratitude, emotions, heavy heavy hurt anger explosion, safe space to let feelings go. Fear, confusion. Sometimes the guitar is the only place it's safe to let that out." He pointed me toward a particular jam, during "Twenty Years Later," the track that closes "Joy," the band's twelfth album, from 2009.

"Often there is a moment when it feels like the safety rails fall off," Anastasio wrote to me. "We lose any sense of time passing. Then I feel safe letting people see how I actually feel, which is terrified a lot of the time. Around eight minutes, it starts to feel like my heart is wide open. It feels like pure emotion when the music gets like that. No sense of notes/scales. Just energy." He added, "It's why people come."

"When that portal opens, I don't remember a single thing," Fishman said. "I know which gigs are really good by how little I can remember. I do things on the drums that I never practiced and had no idea I was capable of. I have to go back and learn shit that happened in jams that I don't actually know how to do."

One night, I asked Anastasio to walk me through what it felt like onstage when the band passed through the portal. "I'll pick a jam and try to describe what's going on," he said. "Camden, New Jersey, 1999, 'Chalk Dust Torture.' The song is what it is. It's fast, it's ridiculous, and still, in some weird way, it's my fucking all-time favorite Phish song." About five minutes in, after a spontaneous key change, the band starts communicating musically, changing keys and rhythms. "I throw out a melodic phrase, something we can all jump on. That leads to another spontaneous key change, which can only happen if we're all fully listening. And then the universe opens up, and I feel like I don't exist," he continued. "I'm not locked in my mind anymore. I feel entirely connected to the people way back on the lawn. I can sense the scale, how insignificant the venue looks from above, how minuscule we are in the grand scheme. I don't understand any of it—it feels like being pulled by the music like a water-skier. It's a miracle, this moment. But it's ephemeral—it can't last. And slowly, around twelve or thirteen minutes, it goes back down to earth. But I've gotten to peek behind the curtain for just a moment. The set continues, and when I step off the stage someone walks up and says something like 'The bus is leaving' or 'What time do you want to eat?' And—ugh. Fuck. I'm back in this shit."

"There's a 'Ruby Waves' from 2019, in Alpine Valley, that I'd put up against any jam from the nineties," Anastasio said. "There's no question to me that we're playing better now. So much has happened—we grew up. Modern-day Phish exists in a realm that none of those years can touch."

[mopper_smurf]

Loved it. Highly recommended.

[VDB]

I expect this to land in my mailbox any day now.

[anthrax]

https://liveforlivemusic.com/features/mike-gordon-phish-rock-roll-hall-fame-new-orleans-jazz-fest-band-2025-interview/

Bit of clarity as to why Scott is stepping back from MGB

[sls.stormyrider]

That New Yorker article was a great read. I need to see them again. It's been to long.

[PIE-GUY]

A letter from the editor of the New Yorker - a really cool take on the whole thing:

David Remnick

Editor

Some things you "get" pretty much immediately. Like the Beatles. Or Aretha Franklin. (Or ice cream, for that matter. Who's turning down ice cream?) Then there are a million other things that come your way—and Phish was never a band I developed a taste for. I've resisted the charms of their noodling psychedelia for decades. Yes, they can play. Yes, the concerts seemed (in theory) fun—particularly in an altered state. But, until I had the pleasure of reading Amanda Petrusich's Profile of the band, in our latest issue, I did without; I was Phish-free. I figured that life was short, Spotify long, and who needed what I had always thought of as (stupidly, it turned out) the Grateful Dead Lite? But Petrusich doesn't merely make a convincing and loving case for the band, she revels in their life stories, their trials and ambitions. She's compelled me to listen, and listen better. I'm not a pescatarian yet, but I'm getting there.

In Petrusich's telling, the members of Phish, friends since their undergraduate days, are fascinating in their self-awareness. The singer and guitarist Trey Anastasio admits to Petrusich that the genre of the jam band has always carried with it connotations of endless improvisation and self-indulgence. "The term didn't exist in my formative years," he says. "It's possible its creation had something to do with us." But as Petrusich explores in the piece—with her usual combination of precision, openness to wonder, and ability to listen like few others—there is a peculiar magic in this ensemble. In one great moment, she locates precisely when things tend to take off: "There is sometimes a brief yet transcendent stretch, occurring maybe ten or twelve or even twenty minutes into a jam, in which the band achieves a kind of otherworldly synchronicity, both internally and with its audience," she writes. Eventually, she experiences it herself—"a short but delightful vacation from my corporeal self."

That's a typically personal and vivid Petrusich moment. In profiles from the past few years, of musicians including Maggie Rogers, Brittany Howard, and the National, she finds the vital moments of human searching in an artist's work, to help us better understand not just what something sounds like but why it sounds that way.

So, please: read Amanda Petrusich on Phish. The New Yorker has been fortunate over the years in its music writers—Whitney Balliett, Ellen Willis, Alex Ross, Kelefa Sanneh, and others—and this piece is among the best I've read.

[VDB]

Great to see Phish get the New Yorker treatment. I'm always wary of mainstream media coverage of our favorite band, the way it tends to retread the same territory and betray its relative ignorance, but this profile really delivered for me, informationally and emotionally. Recommend.