Trey Anastasio has a small interview in Time Out: New York about his Sept. 12 show coming up with the New York Philharmonic, in which lucky fans will get to see orchestral representations of many Phish and Trey Anastasio Band songs that we all know and love by now. I recently heard his orchestral version of “First Tube” from the Baltimore show in May and it literally sent chills down my spine, so I consider that to be a hot ticket for a Saturday night in NYC.
Not long after the interviewer poses the question of “what album will you playing at Festival 8 for the Halloween set,” and Trey answers with a typical “it’s an album I really love” answer, we get this as the answer:
Can you tell me which album you’ll be covering in full at Festival 8?
The only clue I can give you is that it’s an album I truly love. That’s kind of a boring clue. My wife gives me a hard time all the time because I like everything. Saying it’s an album that I like doesn’t really narrow it down.Do you listen to a lot of pop music?
I really liked MGMT when that record came out. I like Band of Horses, you know, [Singing] “I could sleep, I could sleeeeeep.” That song really got inside me for a while. I was listening to Panda Bear. I would be cooking in the kitchen and listening to “Comfy in Nautica.
Would he really be that daft to suggest MGMT when the rumors were already swirling that it’s an album that could see the light of day? The Lillywhite connection is totally there. But I would literally die a happy man if I heard the band try to recreate something completely inventive like the Panda Bear Person Pitch album. In fact, I’d probably ask my neighbor to just end my life right then and there; it would be impossible for a musical moment to have more meaning to me than at that moment. It would be like seeing Jesus. It’s easily the record I’ve listened to most over the last three years of my life, and I often find myself continually convinced that it’s one of the best albums ever created.
So maybe he’s not suggesting it, per se, especially considering the question comes after the pop music thing is referenced, but I like the dream of it all to keep me going until Halloween weekend down in Indio.
