Phish in The New Yorker

Amanda Petrusich has written an in-depth piece about Phish for The New Yorker. She spoke with all band members and gets to the heart of the matter of the band's modus operandi.

Musically, Phish braids three major elements: formal composition, improvisation, and—despite what you may have heard—pop hooks. (Fervent fans tend to favor the more sprawling songs, but the band’s most streamed tracks—“Farmhouse,” “Sample in a Jar,” “Bouncing Around the Room”—are bona-fide earworms.) These elements might appear to be in opposition to one another, but the band’s capacity to hold them in balance is arguably its defining achievement; all three are crucial, in different ways, to whatever trapdoor occasionally opens up mid-set. Anastasio and I spent dozens of hours parsing the physics of it. “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. It’s hard not to understand the lyrics, which Anastasio wrote with Tom Marshall, as a rejoinder to excess:

I can hold my breath for a minute or so
Five days without food is as long as I’ll go
I didn’t sleep once for four days and three nights
I once didn’t stop for seven red lights

Around five minutes in, you can hear the band members find one another and begin to coalesce. Phish is generally oriented toward euphoria, but there are instances in which it gets dark, brooding, nearly carnal. Fans refer to this as Evil Phish. (The most consistently beloved example of Evil Phish is “Carini,” a creepy, taunting song that has never appeared on an album. It opens with a vicious riff and an ominous lyric: “I saw you with Carini and that naked dude!”) “Twenty Years Later” is a hopeful song, but the jam got heavy. “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.”

The band's Spring tour kicks on April 18 in Seattle.

» phish.com