Phish C/D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iszu0K5o9AU

y’all this is fucking outrageous

whoa mama. listened to that at work today and loved it! but then, but then, this baby came on:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF2j2UPLlA8

holy hell

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZdKyGRluCY

i watched between me and my mind yesterday, and it's the best phish documentary, and also the only music documentary to ever make me cry ten minutes in. the conversations between trey and his family are so raw and intimate, and when he's just hanging out with fishman talking about music and they're making each other lose their shit laughing you can feel how long they've been friends, how rich their connection is. so i had to hear a ghosts in the forest show immediately, and this entire one is on youtube, and it is fantastic. this is the best stuff trey's ever written

I still need to watch that.

I was finally able to couch tour a show live this summer, for Dick's night 2... which, yeah, not the brightest show of the tour but I had fun watching it on my buddy's outdoor projector. That "Fuego" ripcord into "Farmhouse" really sucked, but the "Bowie", "Everything's Right" jam and "YEM" were all fun.

this is the best stuff trey's ever written

Now that's a challops! Hard to compete musically for me with the compositions his brain was pumping out in the era of YEM, Reba, Divided Sky, the Gamehendge stuff, The Curtain, etc. But I do appreciate and see how much he is working on his songwriting craft.

I will watch that Ghosts of the Forest webcast sometime soon. I listened to the studio version when it first came out and wasn't really able to take it at face value because the name and marketing had gotten my hopes up that it was going to be something more experimental and gnarly. Trey's earnest songwriting of the last 15 years or so walks the razor's edge for me - it often falls off the precipice of feeling embarrassingly cheesy and populated by platitudes. But I think it is working more and more as he spends more time in this mode.

I saw Between Me and My Mind in the theater and, as I often do with Trey, found it both affecting and awkward. He just always puts it all out there, for better or worse, but getting to see that that's true 100% of the time helps to contextualize times when he's being excessively goofy. It has been edifying in that regard listening to the "Alive Again" podcast that covers the history of his solo projects, it is a constant stream of enthusiasm and gratitude for making music, every single one of his collaborators, the fact that he gets to do this for a living. He's like the living embodiment of the opposite of jaded, which is pretty amazing given how long he's been doing this and how easily he could coast given how dedicated his fanbase is.

hey did y'all watch that Simple jam I posted above? Please do so.

you're absolutely right that trey's lyrics for ghosts in the forest can slide into cheese and platitudes, one of the revealing things about between me and my mind is that he's composing and recording that album at the same time he's taking "soul planet" around to the different members of phish, "soul planet" being the worst or near-worst offender in terms of trey's tendencies towards platitudinal hippie shit

but idk, it works on the album for me, the production is so good and the songs are both really organic and well-structured; "drift while you're sleeping" has the hyper-composed qualities of early phish but it's coming out of an actual song, which i find so refreshing

i like sigma oasis slightly more tho, and it's likely because the lyrics are mostly handled by tom marshall and not trey anastasio

musically "beneath a sea of stars" contains like several of trey's best melodic ideas, i find that song totally overwhelming

i have no idea why i keep calling ghosts of the forest "ghosts in the forest"

Yeah I mean there is a whole contingent of Phish fans that hate his current lyric writing approach, most often slagged off as "dad rock". Which isn't necessarily a complaint without merit but also, come on, let's not pretend that every era has been littered with absolutely terrible lyrics.

I'll be honest, I've actually avoided the phish appearances of the Ghosts of the Forest songs because I still have the bias that they're bad. But I do have a recollection that "Beneath a Sea of Stars" is very pretty and am excited to dive back in.

One way to avoid getting the name wrong and simultaneously level up your Phish fandom is to use acronyms for everything. Just call it GOTF (or gtfo!)

Part of why I like that "Soul Planet" Shoreline jam so much is that it's the newish Trey song people bitch about the most, "oh you hate 'Soul Planet' do you? here you go...".

my god that is not where i expected them to take "simple." 4.0!!!

i should also say my ghosts of the forest fandom is also rooted in the fact that my favorite phish songs are "walls of the cave" and "waves" and trey writing more songs about how awesome the ocean is (even when that ocean is a metaphor... for LOVE) is only a plus in my book

Yeah that "Simple" is great.

I also think the 8/31 "Stash" deserves some major attention, though it's understandably overshadowed by the "Soul Planet".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZlmRRPUv80

xps

There are certainly terrible lyrics in all the eras, but I think a lot of fans feel like they're in on the joke of the earlier terrible lyrics

"The tires are the things on your car that make contact with the road" - wink wink

"The ocean is love" - embarrassing sideways glances

Of course there are good ones in all eras as well. Unaccountably, one of my favorite Phish lyrics is

Rabid victim martyr stranded
Level headed boy, ya better bend
Soon your luscious honey sugar
Mellifluous life is gonna end

oh yeah, Waves rocks. Brad have you heard this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYUNK0V4EwA

If not get excited.

Another great underwater ocean song is "Theme from the Bottom", has great lyrics too

lol the "fluffhead" lyrics, bane of my existence

Of course there are good ones in all eras as well. Unaccountably, one of my favorite Phish lyrics is

Oh absolutely, gems in every era too. I dunno, to me if part of the current, happy, settled and productive Trey means getting a higher ratio of cringe lyrics in songs, I'm willing to accept the bargain.

Still never dreamed of the day a Phish thread would be bumped so often around here, <3 to see the enthusiasm here.

haha, i am a longtime phish fan, it has been my secret shame as an ilxor and i have felt very validated by y'all

Rumors flying that the upcoming Fall Tour is going to be shifted to outdoor only venues. Which makes sense but does not bode well for the rumored winter tour that was going to include three nights in Chicago. Sad that I'll have to go yet another full year without seeing the guys. Going to love the future when tours for half the year are restricted solely to the warmer states.

On the plus side in a few years they'll all be warmer states so no worries

Yeah then we'll just have to worry about fire, floods and intense weather cancelling half the shows.

what a time to be alive

catching up on some shows that were recommended to me during the project. 7/29/03 was great, love an unsettling first set full of bust-outs and a second set "crosseyed" that has the most rocket piercing the firmament of space at one billion miles per hour vibe. i think the only knock against it is "harpua" is not my favorite phish experience, even though this one is fun. the cosmic donut-themed "harpua" from the baker's dozen was so entertaining it may have ruined the rest of them for me

i just started 7/30/03, which has a reputation as a majorly dark, jammed-out show, and it is kind of the show of my dreams so far, this "scents and subtle sounds" is incredible

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkBXEcnhjtg

this may be the eeriest phish show i've ever heard. five stars

revisiting my atlantic city phish show, can everyone here please confirm that i witnessed the greatest "split open and melt" of all time https://relisten.net/phish/2021/08/14/split-open-and-melt?source=317834

that was the phish i came to see and they fucking delivered

Apparently they played "And So To Bed" from the White Tape for the first time ever last night. God bless this band

sort of a capper for my phish project https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/learning-to-love-phish/

oh awesome! very excited to read that having accompanied you on the journey! and major lol at the picture they chose to accompany it. just on the off chance any readers might not have an entrenched sense of them as the dorkiest band on earth

Awesome Brad, can't wait to dive in! As Lavator says, even more excited having been able to see bits of your journey along the way.

Also, yeah that photo is lol, "quick, find the dorkiest picture of these dorks you can find". Feel like this was the runner-up:

https://phishsonian.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/1723253_10151854724266290_996336485_n.jpg

Just finished the piece, I love it. I appreciate the honesty and the skepticism that framed part of the journey, pretty common starting point for a lot of people I know into Phish.

A far fairer piece on the band than I'd ever expect to see on Pitchfork, tbh. Brad - I would love to see you do a Sunday review for one of their albums, studio or live! Hampton Comes Alive could be a fun one, or Slip Stitch and Pass.

i would honestly love to write a full piece about the story of the ghost

Even better!

Will check it out!

was gonna say, i'm not in the biz but one of the trio of Billy Breathes/Story of the Ghost/Farmhouse seems most likely to get greenlit for a Sunday Review

I only jumped on with you for a week or two during your Phish trip, but as usual, Brad, love your enthusiasm and writing.

Yeah this was a great read, and at this point I should probably mention that it was this thread that moved me to register an account after reading ILX off/on for circa eighteen years.

Even if at this point I probably won't get around to writing the "reckoning with Phish" megapost I'd originally intended to put together, I wanted to take a moment to say "thanks" to Brad -- hearing all of this stuff through your ears was a wild ride and brought me a great deal of wholly unexpected joy!

Also, loved the detail about the lyrics of "Farmhouse" bc during my own Phish odyssey I got extremely hung up on that song for about a week during which my take progressed from "this particular band kicking off a record with a song that's like 'welcome to our place, sorry about all the flies' is maybe a little too on the nose" to "gosh, this is unbearably gorgeous" to suddenly considering the second verse and becoming v unsettled by the implication that the farmhouse may not be what it seems and the whole scenario may be dystopian (protagonist embarks on some sort of wwoofing journey/commune visit/etc in the aftermath of a bad breakup, initially innocuous situation is not what it seems, winds up doing forced labor and meditating bitterly on the nature of betrayal, never even gets to see the northern lights) to forcefully telling myself "cmon now, the 'stinging lash' is just the flies, right?" Like a much hairier version of what happens when Alannah Myles' "Black Velvet" catches you off guard in a grocery store and you find yourself unable to stop wondering exactly what the deal is with "a new religion that'll bring you to your knees."

The head pic chosen for that article was golden

Home run, Brad. (And you have me wanting to explore the band, too. The live material I’ve heard was always more exciting than the handful of studio records I’ve sampled.)

Bonkers "countdown" set last night, even if it led to exactly the predictable encore choice. Still, great start for the run. Seeing a lot of speculation that this means a numbers related Halloween cover, with 5150, 2112 and Pearl Jam's Ten being among the more popular guesses:

set 1: 2001, 1999 > 555 > 46 Days, Strawberry Letter 23 > Twenty Years Later
set 2: Seven Below > If 6 was 9 > Five Years > Two Versions of Me > NO2, Army of One, My Sweet One, First Tube > Character Zero

encore: Backwards Down the Number Line, Grind

lmao that's amazing

You are truly converted if you find a gimmick that high concept to be amazing and not inducive of eye rolls. I’m with you though! I have been at a few shows that had setlist mayhem, and a couple high concept ones where the first letters of all the songs spelled something out. They don’t always translate for posterity but it is pretty electric to be at a concert where that is happening.

Brad, I read and loved your piece on Pitchfork. Subsequently not one but two old Phish show buddies alerted me to its presence and gave us their own rave reviews. You struck the perfect balance between naming and articulating what makes Phish such persona non grata for so many, and what the fans see and experience that makes that first perspective hard to relate to.

PHISH, SATURDAY 10/30/2021
MGM GRAND
Las Vegas, NV
SET 1: The Dogs > Ocelot, Turtle in the Clouds, Run Like an Antelope, Camel Walk, Wombat > Guyute, Big Black Furry Creature from Mars, Shaggy Dog, Dog Faced Boy, The Sloth, Llama, I Am the Walrus

SET 2: Dogs Stole Things, Your Pet Cat > Runaway Jim[1] > Piper -> Birds of a Feather, Harpua > Bug > The Lizards, Farmhouse

ENCORE: Vultures, Sleeping Monkey > Possum

[1] Unfinished.

Also +1 great work on the Pitchfork article, Brad!

they did it! the all animals set!!!

also thank you all for your kind comments on the piece, thrilled it has been well-received by the phish community, who i relentlessly owned in said piece