Some of you may have noticed that there are some stories that don’t always get the immediate news treatment here on the site, which I’m working to rectify a bit by building a bit more of a news aggregator on the site that will collect the best and brightest stories that you guys need to be aware of. For now, we’ll just settle for my five-day-old commentary on the news that most of you have already seen through Facebook friends or the PT Boards.
The biggest news we’ve missed is that Phish spoke with Rolling Stone about their new album, Joy, with a tracklist and some details about the recording process thus far.
From Rolling Stone (my emphasis added):
Many of Joy’s songs have already become live staples on Phish’s reunion trek, and they unleashed new gems during both of their headlining Bonnaroo sets. Fans are already connecting to the Lynyrd Skynyrd-flavored “Kill Devil Falls,” “Stealing Time From the Faulty Plan” and the epic 13-minute closer “Time Turns Elastic,” which the band released as a digital download in May. According to Anastasio, “Time” took 278 takes to get the song right, as Lillywhite forced the band to nail down all 15 sections of Anastasio’s prog-rock closer. “I wanted every member to play every section perfectly,” Lillywhite said.
If you run the math on that, this song alone took the band at least 62 hours to record (not counting any overdubs or post-production). Lillywhite = studio nazi.
Here’s the tracklist:
“Twenty Years Later”
“Backwards Down the Number Line”
“Stealing Time From the Faulty Plan”
“Light”
“Joy”
“Sugar Shack”
“Ocelot”
“Kill Devil Falls”
“I’ve Been Around”
“Time Turns Elastic”
Following up that news and the final two shows of the tour at Alpine, I started to get pings from all my Phishy friends about a festival to be announced for Halloween weekend in Indio, CA at the site they host Coachella and Stagecoach every year. I didn’t want to run with the story right away, figuring that it would prove to be true or false pretty quick. And sure enough, Phish.com updated in style to show a map of the U.S. with some haunting loops running in the background saying only “Save the Date: A 3 Day Festival 10/30-11/1” – and the frenzied planning begins!
So far, the map has eliminated the following states: Washington, Idaho, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, North Carolina, West Virginia, and New Hampshire. The latest attack was a swarm of red fire ants (see screenshot below).
And now the speculation begins. What album might Phish cover this year as their first musical costume since 1998’s performance of Velvet Underground’s classic, Loaded? I’ve got money on Thriller, but that would almost be too obvious a choice for them to do. Maybe they’ll do two musical costumes just to blow everybody’s mind. If there’s one thing about this band that everybody should know by now, it’s that you need to continue to expect the unexpected. I can’t wait for Red Rocks.
Also, a footnote, these two news items combined earns our esteemed and soon-to-be-coveted AYFKM tag. I’ll let you decide what that really means if you don’t already — no need to spell it out — and it’s a phrase we’re going to start using whenever something seems just a bit too good to be true.
