From: shell@smeagol.Berkeley.EDU (Shelly Culbertson)
Newsgroups: rec.music.phish
Subject: Interview with Trey Anastasio, 11/24/92
Date: 23 Jan 1993 01:13:27 GMT
Organization: Dept. of Statistics, U. C. Berkeley
NNTP-Posting-Host: smeagol.berkeley.edu

Sorry for the delay in posting these...I hope they help to clear
up some of the questions regarding Rift, and regarding songs being
"dropped" from the repertoire.  Feedback, as always, is welcome!


Interview with Trey Anastasio, Pennsylvania - New Jersey  11/24/92
(this was done in the car on the way to his father's home before
Thanksgiving)

How would you compare the new album, Rift, to A Picture of Nectar?

     In the spirit of moving in a different direction, and
conquering things we hadn't conquered before, we looked at the
albums we had done.  There was something we were looking for which
is somewhat epitomized in Fast Enough for You.  
     On Rift, we wanted to be able to tie everything together.  For
us, Nectar was going in a lot of different directions at once. 
Maybe that was what was good about it, but we didn't want to do
that again; we wanted to do the opposite, we wanted to try to have
a cohesive album that was a certain mood, that you might put on at
a certain time.  So this concept came along.  The album is called
Rift, and it's basically about this rift between two people.  The
narrator or the main character is this unnamed male person who is
on the cover.  We worked with this oil painter who did a big
painting and brought to life all these ideas we had; and the whole
thing takes place in one night of his restless sleep.  
     He's thinking about this rift between him and his lover,
sometimes in a conscious way and sometimes in a dream-like way,
which would be Maze, where he's dreaming he's trapped in a Maze, or
It's Ice, where he's dreaming that he's battling with his mirror
image, or having a battle with himself.  
     The other thing about this concept that's interesting is that
we wanted it to be something that held it together for us, to give
a cohesiveness.  It's not the kind of thing that everybody's even
going to notice.  

Well, it's better if the concept is more subtle...so that someone
who's already heard the album 50 or 60 times might hear it again
and come to a new realization about how something fits into the
concept --

     Right; that's definitely the way we wanted it, whereas (on the
other hand) with Gamehendge, having narration, it's real obvious.
     Some of the things that we felt like we hadn't really done, at
least not often, maybe on a few rare occasions -- we've always
wanted to be able to play slow and with emotion.

Like Horn?

     Well, like Horn, but mostly Fast Enough for You.  That's the
song that we feel like: we did it, with that song.  I feel like it
epitomizes something that we haven't really done before, and I
think that at least in terms of people who aren't intimately
involved with the band, when they get it, radio D.J.s, etc., when
they hear it they're going to be like, this is Phish?  It doesn't
necessarily sound like -- but that's kind of the point, in a way. 
Not to be different, but I wanted to be able to try writing some
songs with a different kind of emotional weight than what we had
been doing in the past.  So that's what we did.

Whereas so many styles were represented on A Picture of Nectar --
rock, country, jazz, etc. -- do you see the songs on Rift as more
of an effort to define your own style?

     Yes, definitely.  That was kind of the main thought right
there.  Without putting any kind of judgement on A Picture of
Nectar, we finished it and we said, OK, now we've got to do
something really different.  
     It wasn't necessarily a conscious decision as much as I'm
making it sound like one; but in the back of my mind, I heard
Picture of Nectar, and I thought, this is all over the place --
this style, that style -- the next album I want to be Phish songs
that aren't any particular style.  Another strange thing is that it
was sort of a coincidence that Picture of Nectar came out the way
it did.  It was just what we ended up going in and recording.  We
had a lot of other songs.  It wasn't until after the album was done
that we sat down and listened to it and said, oh my gosh, this is
every other style, one after the other.  That was a coincidence as
much as anything.  
     This is a lot more cohesive on all different kinds of levels:
stylistically, lyrically -- we planned the album out by making the
lyrics fit together.  The whole album was based around the lyrics
and the songs first, and the music is supposed to be a description
of the lyrical content on this album, as it always has been. 
That's something that I've always been interested in doing on all
the other albums, for example Guelah Papyrus it's supposed to sound
like you're aboard a craft bereft of oar, or whatever.  It's
supposed to be more supportive of the songs, and the sequence of
the album and the lyrical content is all based around the lyrical
content and that's how we chose which songs went on the album. 
That was it, pure and simple; the whole thing was based on that --
the way we mixed it, the way we sequenced it, the songs we picked
to be on it, it was all for this.  In a certain sense, artistically
it was the thing we had to do; we didn't end up putting anything
very "radio" on the album.

How long is Fast Enough For You?

     It's the right length for the radio; it's just a very, very
mellow song; and again, it's my favorite thing on the album.  I
really like it.  I just don't know if D.J.s are going to play it,
but I don't care.  They can play it if they want to.

What if, for example, you played on Saturday Night Live?

     Oh, no way.  I would never do that song on TV.  <laughs>  It's
the vocals -- I mean, I love doing it live.  But Fast Enough For
You is slow, and there's barely any music going on, it's just a
pretty ballad.  It's just that if I was Whitney Huston, or Aaron
Neville, I'd go on and do Fast Enough; but I'm not.  I wouldn't do
it.

Is there anything interesting to tell about writing the songs on
the new album?

     There is one interesting thing -- first of all, Tom [Marshall]
wrote all the lyrics except Weigh and Mound, which Mike wrote; and
also Lengthwise, which Fish wrote, which is pretty much the glue
that ties the whole thing together.  It's definitely an important
song on the album.  Tom and I wrote all the other songs pretty much
together; we've got a great thing going now, we're working together
really well.  
     So this one song which we've been doing, called The Wedge, was
written after; we finished recording the album and I went home and
did it on a four-track.  Everybody heard it and thought it was
really good and it fit in with the concept of the album.  So we
recorded it for the album -- we did it very fast; we went in and
did it in a couple days and we were mixing in the other room
simultaneously.  That was in Tennessee, in Nashville, at this place
called The Castle, which you'll see a picture of it on the album
cover; it's a really neat place that we were recording.  
     It [The Wedge] didn't go through the process that most of our
songs go through in the sense of getting together with the band and
having every one of the four members of the band really analyze the
song and try to get the best arrangement, 'cause it happened so
fast -- I basically wrote it and went in and said, "play this" --
so I guess there's something good about the album version in that
it's fresh, but we've never played it live and we've already begun
to radically change the whole arrangement of it.  By the time we
play it live it's going to be a different song and people are going
to hear the album...but, there you go.

So how would you compare the experience of recording songs that
you've been playing live for a long time with recording brand new
songs?

     That's interesting.  That's a whole new debate that's going on
about whether we shouldn't try, as an experiment, going into the
studio and taking six weeks off before the studio and just writing
the whole thing, the whole album, and going into the studio and
recording it the way a lot of other bands might work.  
     Fast Enough For You I wrote about four or five months before
we went into the studio and I knew who we were going to be working
with as a producer and I purposely held onto it; and it was great,
it was better, because the song took form in the studio, and that
version, the excitement of it being born as it came to tape is
there, and that's a really neat thing.  But there's good points to
both sides; playing live, you end up fine-tuning the arrangement in
a way that's a slow process.  For example, Rift took a long time to
write.

I've heard completely different incarnations over several years --

     Right, that's what I mean.  And now the arrangement we've
arrived at I really like.  I think it's definitely as good as it's
going to get.  And we might not have gotten that any other way.
     So the two songs that we wrote in the studio [Fast Enough For
You and The Wedge], there you have two different examples, one of
which I love the way it came out, and the other one which is still
evolving.  So, who's to say...now we're trying to decide whether we
should do a live album, or whether we should do the Gamehendge
thing, or whether we should do another studio album and whether we
should, in doing another studio album, have a big writing session
before going into the studio.

Speaking of new songs, what about Axilla?

     It's not on the album; it doesn't have anything to do with the
concept.  It would have gotten radio play <laughs>.  The Wedge and
Fast Enough For You both lyrically fit into the mood of the album,
so we put them on.  

It seemed that over the summer Mound wasn't being played very much;
was that a conscious decision, perhaps to keep it fresh for the
album?

     It's conscious and unconscious.  Even right now, I know
there's people that feel differently than I do, but from my vantage
point on stage, the feeling of the flow of the show is the same as
the feeling of the flow of one particular song or one particular
jam, like Stash, and a lot of times there are new songs that are
easy to slide right into the song list and keep the flow going for
me; and then there are new songs that, until they reach a certain
arrangement, sometimes feel disruptive in a certain way, and are
very difficult for us to get into the song list.  Mound, for a long
time, wasn't necessarily happening for us; now, with the new
arrangement, since we've finished the album we've been playing it
more.  And it's better.
     The other thing that seems to happen, when the album comes out
-- people didn't like Glide until the album came out.  Now they
love Glide.  People didn't like Squirming Coil before the album
came out.  It was weird.  I had this incredible confidence in
Squirming Coil from the beginning, right from first writing it, I
said this is going to be a good song.  We tried to play it live,
and we'd get to the quiet part in the beginning, no-one was
familiar with it, it was an awkward moment or something...I don't
know.  But I just knew, just be patient, when the album comes out
-- same thing with Reba; when we started playing Reba, before the
album came out -- as soon as the album comes out people develop
this relationship with the song, especially a song like Reba where
there's all those complicated sections.  It's easier to listen to
if you've already developed somewhat of a relationship with it.  So
these new songs get written and I like playing them but sometimes
I know that once the album comes out we'll be playing them more. 
It's kind of a combination of not wanting to wear them out and
knowing that they'll be better when the album comes out; until then
we end up just not playing them as often.  
     But really, more than anything, when you're thinking of what
you'll play next, you're playing a song, your kind of on a roll and
what's the next song going to be?  It's not that you say, oh, I'm
not ready to play that song yet; you just kind of find yourself
picking some other song; and then a week later you realize, boy, I
guess we haven't been playing such&such a song that much.  You play
the songs because they're the songs that you want to play.  The
crowd is involved; the whole room is the thing or the feeling
that's going on, and sometimes....did I stray from the point there? 
<laughs>

Not completely, no --

     What was the question?

Why some songs weren't being played live much until after they were
recorded...

     NICU, for instance, is an interesting example.  People keep
asking, how come you're not playing NICU?  It's a weird thing -- I
really like NICU, I really do; of that whole batch of songs that
were written that included Maze and everything -- I wrote something
like nine songs when I was in Ireland [last year] -- and that was
the one that I had the biggest hopes for; I really liked the melody
and the chords, it was a simple song that I liked a lot.  It just
didn't gel with the band; we never really knew what the beat was. 
It's an intangible thing that I can't really explain, but between
the four band members there was something that was awkward about it
and we ended up not wanting to play it as much.  That has happened
to many songs before that will end up -- I mean, Poor Heart used to
be like that, when Mike first wrote it.

Really?  

     Yup.

Because that seems so straightforward!

     But it wasn't like that at first.  It changed.  It wasn't just
a straight country song, there was something different about it. 
It first came to the band, and we tried to play it, and it was just
weird.  People might have liked it; there are always people who get
attached to any song that we debut.  There are very few songs that
somebody doesn't get attached to, and I feel bad that sometimes
some of them go by the wayside.  But we have so many songs....

...like Punch You In The Eye?

     Well, Punch You In The Eye is the one that everybody seems to
want; I'm not saying that we're not going to play Punch You In The
Eye anymore, because we might.  Anyway, it's supposed to be called
Punch Me In The Eye, originally.  
     See, there are so many things -- it's a weird thing the way
that people get attached to certain songs; they don't really know
the history of what's going on sometimes.  Some people do and some
people don't.  But I've been reading in the net this thing about
Sanity, about "why didn't they put the old version of Sanity on
[Junta]" -- look at the date of that Sanity.  That Sanity is 1988! 
The only time we ever did a fast version of Sanity was like 1990,
maybe in 1989, I don't know.  But that's the way Sanity was
written.  As a matter of fact, that version on Junta is probably
right around when Sanity was written.  That's when Sanity was a new
song that we were doing a lot, you know?  Later on, because for
some reason, maybe we were getting bored of the way we were doing
it, we started picking up the beat for a few gigs; and then we just
dropped it altogether, for years, until we started playing it again
the way it was originally written, just because we felt like
playing it again.
     Punch You In The Eye was originally called Punch Me In The
Eye, and I don't know if anyone has tapes of this, but we used to
do that at Nectar's and it was a completely different song, before
it became Punch Me In The Eye the second version, which is the
Gamehendge version.  It was really out there <laughs>.  It had a
50s doo-wop section in it, where we were singing about punch me in
the eye...there's a couple people who were really into it.  So
there's always a lot going on in these songs....

It's clear that you make an intentional effort to keep channels of
communication open with your audience.  In doing that, what is your
goal?  How would you describe your philosophy toward audience
participation in general?

     I remember reading a Frank Zappa interview once where he said,
"When I'm in the studio, I'm the boss.  I don't want people second-
guessing my decisions on how I'm going to do a mix; it just slows
down the process.  They might have a great idea, but I'm the boss. 
I write the songs, I hire the musicians, I tell them what to play. 
I'm the manager, I manage the recording studio, I tell the
engineers what to do; they work for me.  The record company works
for me.
     "The audience is my boss.  They're the only people that I work
for.  When I do a concert, it's my responsibility to do a great
show."
     In a sense, I feel the same way that he does, in a way; except
that I feel more of a family orientation to the audience and a
responsibility in the same way that I would feel for my sister or
something, you know?  I mean, I don't feel like I'm putting on a
show; I feel like I'm with the audience.  I love playing live. 
Sometimes I forget, when I'm in the studio, how much I love playing
live, until that first gig comes and I think, this is great. 
There's such an interaction with the audience going on.  For
instance, last night I wrote out a setlist, this happens all the
time, and got up on stage and changed it.  You get out into the
room and there's just something that you sense among that
particular group of people that night that is different than what
you had thought it was going to be; so you get out there and you
play something different, you get in the spur of the moment, that
particular vibe from that crowd.