Set Your Soul Free

I am a sick man… I am an angry man. I am a Phish fan.

I’ve now listened to ten live Phish albums several times over, in just over a month. These aren’t short, boppy 35-minute pop albums you can run thru in one commute to work. Most of them run two+ hours and some over three and that’s not even long for Phish (I’ve been to a five+ hour Phish show myself but more on that later). My point is, this time last year, any one of these listens would have been lethal poison in my system. Music you could torture me with to get any information out of me, like … Now I see a 15 minute track on a three and a half hour album and think, oh that’s not that bad.

Yes, I am a fan though to real real Phish fans, like Brother John, a 99th percentile Phish phan I’m sure, I’m probably more of a novice or hobbyist. Just too green, not enough live shows under my belt (only 1, which I’m embarrassed to say at this point, not embarrassment from choosing to go to a Phish show as in they’re an embarrassing act to see which would have been true for me just last year, but because, to a real Phish fan, how can you claim fandom with any lifetime number in the single digits? 1 is like cool you’ve been introduced to Phish you might know the first names of trey and mike and mike is an easy one bc he has a song named after him or you recognize the donut pattern on the dress the drummer always wears but you’ve not grown hair on your chest, been quizzed or even quizzed others about eras, shows, bootlegs, haven’t spent hours on phish.net memorizing setlists and trivia and inconsequential anecdotes in other words a casual spotify baby – embarrassed because I’m claiming fandom of an act that requires a kind of obsession that I can’t prove) yet. Yes, yet. Merriweather and MSG summer ‘26 already circled on the calendar but again, John’s Phish instincts way more ingrained than mine, he’s going to both Merriweather nights without even second guessing whereas I wouldn’t think to do something so (what I perceive to be, at this point in time) unnecessary.

He’s always been pushing them, playing jams in the car for me and Luke, hoping to infect us too but it never stuck before. Trey’s guitar work, while always admittedly skilled, felt kind of meandering and polite and not punk enough. Not punk in the Keith Richards/Mick Taylor, hendrix, joey santiago joe strummer aggressive cool no smiling sense at least. Same for Trey and Mike (who I was unaware of until a month ago)’s vocals; too nice and untroubled, no gravel no boomer/gen x attitude. I don’t exclusively listen to aggressive music, I’ll fold mowtown, nick drake, metheny, ween, dilla, beach boys, etc into the rotation. But those artists are all rooted in things I’m more familiar with like classic rock/blues/country and/or exude rawer more visceral spirit. The weight of a metheny midi zenith or nick drake open-chord nadir gives you chills in the right setting. And ween is silly but they do get deeper on their later stuff and have a great old country style album. Phish, to my ears, in the past, felt more surface-level and not born from stuff I knew. Of course, I had only ever caught bits and pieces of them, usually midway thru a long jam that I had no reference point to grab onto.

I’ve tagged along to a couple of Trey solo shows with John in the past tho, which I did think were decent. Especially the George Mason show in 2022, when Billy Strings surprised and jammed for a bunch of encore songs. But even then I wasn’t hitting spotify or youtube the next day for a fix. Solo trey peppered in some shorter, non-jammy songs into the setlist, the kind of stuff that makes up a lot of what I normally listen to. But if anything, I think that just reinforced that punk bopper sound to me. I just had a better reference point with beck and frank black and the clash, had already put in the legwork to get familiar w deepcuts, read their wikis 10x over etc. And, conversely, there were some truly long jams that I was not prepared for like at the Trey DC show in 2022, where I turned to john and asked if he thought trey would come out for an encore during what I thought was the end of the show but was actually only intermission and hours away from my question touching any relevance. He just kind of chuckled and let me realize in slo-mo over the next two hours that no I did not catch a blue moon and just see a tight 2 and a half hour set, I instead have to be a sardine for another 2 hours shoulder to shoulder w thousands of gen x babies who looked shell-shocked as I hit a joint that was being passed around despite me knowing that weed is an instant panic attack ever since it’s been “medicinalized” and juiced up 200% and that crowds of people freak me out anyways. That I think made it more of a decently-enjoyable-experience-with-my-brother kind of concert rather than any sort of awakening.

And then NYE 2022. I was starting my tech bro digital nomad gentrifier stint in Puerto Rico and was sick with something and stayed in and facetimed luke and john. On the other end, John was half participating half watching a Phish MSG live stream so me and Luke tuned in to see too, not as fans but pulled more so by a perverse childhood team-up reflex mixed in with a little boredom sorry John, such is life as the youngest. They had played some yo gabba gabba / wiggles song that I’ve yet to landmine on in my nascent fandom, early in the set, which Luke and I were already using to antagonise (or interrogate – inside joke teehee) John with. It worked too he was becoming irritable and defensive and started covering parts of his face with his hands. He was trying to explain to us that every NYE show, Phish performed some surprise bit, usually with props and special effects, to coincide with the midnight countdown. Not my aesthetic… and to be completely honest I can’t recall much from the bit because me and Luke were in tears, probably the hardest we’ve ever laughed. It was just so unironically goofy. And of course the more we laughed the more pissed off John got, which made us laugh even harder. I just remember a lot of ballerinas and dancers while Phish performed a very mid Bohemian Rhapsody cover and John completely burying his face in his hands.

Since then I’ve thought very little of phish, kept my distance. They were a band that was not for me and probably never would be. Instead, I continued diving headfirst into pools of ironic 90s slacker genx fluid, sort of the antithesis of a sincere jam band, for the next few years. But of course, all things run their course. An out of body experience in late 2025, where I watched myself on my sofa, horizontal, consuming phone, laptop, tv at once for who knows how long probably an hour at the least, pulled me down from plastic hiranyaloka. Saw my dimmed eyes clawing for little hits of dopamine as a los angeles rat would along shadows, bathing in blue light/changing shapes near excavation from the sockets maybe out of disgust but more likely from the added weight of saturation they could no longer support. A siren pull, slick over easy waves sugar over easy horizon. The LA rat fat now, slop on his big teeth his hands, tail. NYC rat fat too. He trips on the subway track almost didnt get out of the way A C E long wait times o! but the rattle hear the rattle still, why is that? This is not a threshold, virgil did not read abandon all hope ye who enter here (at least aloud) at the turnstile when I came in and I do not see old greeks puttering nor believers bent at the hip searching the ground well that may be the closest to the shrew the earliest human, scavenging as prior to settlement. instead, I sit in a lacoste polo w an a/c in the window to my right, to my left a gamut of satiation what I’m saying is I made some new years resolutions where I would stop rotting so much. This included only consuming one thing at a time (phone OR laptop OR tv) and consuming only new music for at least the first few months of ‘26. No more Teenager of the Year album on repeat, even though it is a perfect 10 (Luke needs to relisten to that one!).

And for New Years Eve ‘25, John insisted on staying with me and seeing Phish at MSG and even though the prospect of sitting thru yet another jam band show and this time with some corny bit sounded rough, it sounded better than joining my friends for a ridiculously tame night out at an overpriced bar in the west village, so I said yes. The show was long, longer than I expected, like 5 ½ hours total, but it was decent. ‘Stash’ stuck with me, with the triple claps and their “milk bit” was kinda cool and considering my no rot resolutions, I mentioned I’d be interested in checking out the 90s stuff that john was always talking up.

First thing I listened to was their famous ‘A Live One’ live album from ‘95 (even I recognized the album cover). Immediately, I felt something different. Not a tectonic plate shift or anything like that but I could place some of the songs I saw at MSG and their sound was starting to click. I liked it enough to give another one a shot. Next I put on Slip Stitch and Pass from ‘97 and it’s really been all phish from that point forward. The Talking Heads ‘Cities’ cover intro was tight and funky and not really like anything I’d heard from them before. Trey sounded awake and intense and ‘Wolfman’s Brother’, even more so. Later, on ‘Mike’s Song’, they folded some ‘The End’ by the Doors into the end of the jam. By the end, I was so bought in I even liked their goofy acapella ‘Hello My Baby’ rendition (especially the shushing Germans in the crowd trying to quiet down the others to hear better). It was really fun and endearing!

“Slip” was the show that really blew it open for me I think because it did tie Phish to more familiar territory. I could hear the 90s in the chord progressions and piano/synth and guitar tonal choices, and trey played some surprisingly non white boy sounding blues and funk. And the album was pared down to a tight hour fifteen, a one sitting listen.

Well now I’ve progressed to the year 2000 and have Fukuoka and Alpine Valley on repeat. They seem to be a little more spaced out on substances this year, which is probably accurate considering their incoming 2 hiatuses and trey’s infamous new york DUI in ‘06. I’m not there yet but I can say in 2000 the jams are even looser and more experimental with different synths and guitar effects. Even some spacey ambient stuff. I think had I not started with ‘A Live One’ or ‘Slip’, these 1999/2000 shows would have turned me off but you end up liking the less accessible stuff the more you get into an artist. Yes ‘Slip’ was the listen that got me here plus the added familiarity of the MSG experience plus the wake up that resulted in me eschewing looping the same stuff over and over. I’ll have to be careful to not let phish be my new loop.

-Matt