Check out this incredible new interview with Phish frontman Trey Anastasio that just dropped in the New York Times Magazine.
The entire piece starts with a question on whether or not the legacy of jambands may carry on past Phish, which I found this to be an interesting and true answer:
Will there continue to be jam bands? If people look backward, there won’t. If people start writing new music using the language of improvisation, sure. But if you’re just celebrating something that happened in 1970, it’s got to die.
The interview was conducted sometime between the Mexico shows and this summer tour which just launched, which already has been a fantastic tour with tons of highlights.
The last show that we played was in Mexico. In the encore, we played a song called “Martian Monster,” which is from a Halloween album that we did. Then we were playing this other song called “Big Black Furry Creature From Mars,” which is from when we were 18 years old. The two songs connected. That’s nostalgia for me. Nostalgia can be valid and good.
I’m glad to see that the interview takes a turn into discussing what went “wrong” for the band before their hiatus.
Success probably triggered feelings of being a fraud. All through the ’90s, we used to walk offstage with a great sense of pride that we had kicked ass. We put on a show: It was pow, wham – energy. Then somewhere for a while I lost that feeling. I remember walking off stage in 2003 or 2000, something like that, and turning to Jon Fishman and our manager backstage, and I was like: “Was that good? What was that?” That’s when it got a little strange.
Read the whole thing here.
