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Phish Capture Live Vibe in the Studio

Reunited jam kings on their wild comeback disc

Aug 25, 2009

“I want it loud,” Trey Anastasio shouts over ”˜Twenty Years Later’ ”“ a song on Joy, Phish’s first album of new songs since 2004 ”“ as he cranks up the volume in a New York studio. “You have to get the full effect of Fish’s Black Sabbath drum fill,” referring to drummer Jon Fishman. Sure enough, when the midtempo stomp hits the bridge, a very Sabbath burst of rolling thunder fills the room.

Later, Anastasio plays the heavy stroll ”˜Stealing Time From the Faulty Plan,’ balling his fist in the air when he hears himself sing, “Got a blank space where my mind should be.” “We played it live for the first time last night,” he says, “and you could tell. People relate to that line.”

On Joy, out in July on Phish’s label, JEMP, the faithful will also recognise, for the first time on a studio record, the Phish they’ve known onstage since the Eighties. Three weeks after their reunion shows in Hampton, Virginia, Anastasio, Fishman, bassist Mike Gordon and keyboard player Page McConnell went into New York’s Chung King Studios with producer Steve Lillywhite and cut the 10-song album in three weeks. They recorded all of the basic tracks live in the studio.

“The essence of great rock is pure feeling and energy,” Anastasio says after a playback of virtually the entire album, including the high-speed ”˜Light’ (with Gordon playing hellbent bass runs like the Who’s John Entwistle) and the Lynyrd Skynyrd-flavoured charge of ”˜Kill Devil Falls.’ “The shortest path to intent is what makes rock rock, and there is a lot of that here.” Joy, Anastasio says, “feels more like a live record than a lot of our live records.”

The 13-minute ”˜Time Turns Elastic’ closes Joy. Phish recorded the suite, just issued by Anastasio as an orchestral solo project, after Lillywhite decided something was missing from the new material: “I told Trey, ”˜We don’t have one of your centrepiece prog-rock songs.’ To make the best Phish album ever, we had to cover all the bases.”

Anastasio estimates that it took 278 takes to get the piece right. The group split ”˜Time’ into 15 sections, then recorded each separately. “I wanted every member to play every section perfectly,” Lillywhite says. “If Trey made a mistake, I’d say to all of them, ”˜Do that section again.’ ”

Joy is laced with allusions to Anastasio’s long road back to his band and health, after his 2006 arrest for drug possession and his 14-month sentence of community service. The title song, which starts as a ballad and then revs up to a driving chorus, was written as Anastasio’s sister, Kristy Manning, was fighting cancer (she died in April). “I saw it as a metaphor,” Anastasio says, “something we all go through, living in the darkness.” But the message, he insists, “is affirming with a dose of reality.”

Then he quotes a line from ”˜Kill Devil Falls’: “This time it’s gonna be different/Until I do it again.” He laughs loudly. “How many times have I said that? I love the guy in that song, because it’s me. He’s trying so hard.”

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