Interview: Trey Anastasio, the brains behind Phish, plays from the heart on Billy Breathes - December 1996

Last Updated: Wednesday, 30-Oct-2002 01:36:16 EST

These interviews are presented for educational purposes only and are reprinted without permission unless otherwise noted. They are copyrighted by the original owners and will be removed promptly upon request.
We link to the original site of the interview when possible.

Trey Anastasio Interview
Guitar World Online
December 1996

Trey Anastasio, the brains behind Phish, plays from the heart on Billy Breathes.
By Alan Paul

Over the last several years, Phish has emerged as rock's most surprising success story, building a massive grass-roots following and becoming one of the nation's top-grossing touring bands; the two-day "Phish Phest" (officially titled the Clifford Ball) held last August in Plattsburgh, New York, yielded $3.3 million all by itself. The band's growth has been almost completely self-managed, with Phish firmly in control of everything from album cover art to merchandising, from ticket sales to Web site design s. And they've done it all without the benefit of a hit single, a popular video or even a gold album. "Our success has been totally about live performance," says Anastasio. "Our live shows have driven everything."

All that changes with Billy Breathes. The new release is, even in the band's view, light years better than any of their previous studio efforts, which too often sounded claustrophobic, mechanical and overly cerebral. An extended song suite, Billy Breathes marks the first time Phish has captured in the studio the spontaneous fun of their concerts. The bands moves effortlessly from the Cream-style single "Free" to the prog-rocking "Theme From the Bottom" to the epic, "Layla"-esque title track, and climaxes with the oceanic "Prince Caspian." Echoes of the Beatles, Allman Brothers, Grateful Dead, Derek and the Dominos, Rush, Genesis, Frank Zappa and much more can be heard throughout the album, all of it synthesized into an organic, thoroughly original brew.

With a great album under their belt, there's no telling how big Phish may become. But Anastasio insists that he doesn't really care, one way or the other.

"All we've ever tried to do," he says, "is make good, honest music that speaks to people. The rest tends to take care of itself."

GUITAR WORLD: Billy Breathes is the first album to successfully recreate the type of peaks and valleys which characterize your live shows. Ironically, it seems that you accomplished this by giving up on trying to actually mimic the concerts. Does that make any sense to you?

TREY ANASTASIO: It makes perfect sense. [laughs] In fact, that's exactly what I would say-that we succeeded by not trying. We kind of gave up trying to capture the live thing after doing the live album [A Live One, Elektra, 1995]. It really felt like we had hit a wall, and that we were starting all over again with this album. Like the slate had been wiped clean.

We were exhausted at the end of the last big U.S. tour we did, which ended last December in Lake Placid, New York-not just from that tour, which was really long and grueling, but from 12 years of pushing really hard. We had a general sense that things were e rolling somewhat out of control and we had to get back to square one. Things had grown so fast for the band and the organization, and we were getting spread really thin. It reached the point that the four of us-the core of what the whole thing is about- were getting lost in the shuffle.

So we went into this recording process knowing that we had to recapture that essence. And we went to a really beautiful, serene place to do it-The Barn at Bearsville Studios in upstate New York. It's completely self-contained, and we were staying right next door in this little old farmhouse with a stream going by. It really felt like an escape for the four of us.

GW: Yet the results are downright epic. There are a lot of short instrumental passages bridging songs, and the other tunes fade in and out, so the music never really stops, creating a Dark Side of the Moon, suite-of-music quality.

ANASTASIO: I'm so glad to hear you say that. The weird thing is that's what we wanted Rift [Elektra, 1993] to be, but we tried so hard that we just killed it. I always like back at Rift with a lot of dismay because it was a really fertile time for us-the music was just pouring out-but I think we were so excited about this conceptual thing that we kind of beat it into the ground. It could have been great, but we tried to cram every idea we had into it. As a result, it's largely unlistenable. I still think that there are segments of great, groundbreaking music on that album, but it's just too much to digest.

GW: The band grew steadily for 10 years, then just exploded in the past two. Do you worry about losing touch with each other and whatever got you to this point?

ANASTASIO: I'm not worried about it now, because things are feeling so good. I was a little bit worried about it last winter, which I think is why we went in the direction we did with this album. We actually down-sized our organization a bit, trying to reel it in. And I feel a lot better now. I went away from the Clifford Ball feeling incredibly connected to the audience. Despite there being 70,000 people, it felt really intimate. Up until this point in our careers, we've been growing and therefore working within the existing frameworks of the business. Now, if there's anything that this popularity affords us, it's the opportunity to completely rewrite the book on how to put on a concert.

GW: Phish's music exhibits an extremely wide range of influences.

ANASTASIO: I listen to a lot of music. I am always trying to find something new. Music is like a porthole into this other world, which is the world of truth. The more you realize that, the more you realize that by listening to different types of music you get a glimpse into the way the world is really lined up, so you become obsessed with finding out what that truth is, and you want more and more and more. You go through your whole life and you keep listening and listening and realize that certain musicians at certain times are closer to the truth. Like Bob Marley-he was onto something. [laughs] And so was Jimi Hendrix and Duke Ellington and Duane Allman and Bach and Brahms and Kurt Cobain and Bill Monroe. It's endless.

GW: And then there's the Grateful Dead, to whom Phish is often compared, largely because of your fan base and your dedication to improvisation. I think you guys actually owe more to the fusion/progressive rock school of improv. What do you think?

ANASTASIO: It's both. Progressive rock definitely had a big impact on me, and also on my songwriting partner, Tom Marshall. I never really got heavily into fusion, though I know that sounds like a lie. [laughs] The thing that I really liked about the Dead is when they were jamming well, it didn't sound like anyone was soloing, which reminded me of an African way of jamming. For instance, I've always really liked [the Nigerian musician] King Sunny Adè. He's got 22 people in his band and every body's playing one little repetitive pattern that creates a bed of sound. We do that type of jamming a lot, and we probably picked that up in a big way from the Dead. Jerry was the lead voice, but when they were good, he sunk back in and everybody suddenly seemed to have an equal role.

I hear a similar type of group improvisation in the Allman Brothers Band. Their rhythm section doesn't just vamp while the guitarists solo. They continue to play things that change the shape of the song and the soloist plays off of them, not off a set of static chord changes. Which is why a lot of what they do reminds me of jazz, though it's not harmonically jazz-oriented-they're not using the language of jazz. That aspect of the jazz tradition is something we've tried to achieve.

GW: What attracts you to a guitar player?

ANASTASIO: Well, purity of intent and playing in a way that is beyond the ego. I never even feel like I'm performing. I feel like I'm there to be an intermediary between music that's in the universe and the audience. It sounds silly, but I believe it more than I believe anything in my life. When I'm onstage I feel this incredible togetherness and intense energy that is like fuel for goodness. It's something that I've felt so strongly that in the last few years I started researching it, reading interviews with musicians to see if others have felt this way-and they have. I've read interviews with Brahms, Bach, Jimi Hendrix, Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, [jazz trumpeter] Art Farmer and many others and found similar themes running through them. All of them essentially say, "There are vibrations there, a natural order to the universe, and I'm not really making music. I'm just hearing it and channeling it so that other people can hear it." Everyone calls it something different-Brahms said it was coming from God and Sun Ra said it was coming from Saturn-but it's always a very similar experience.

The problem is when you try to verbalize it, it sounds weird, but only in a world that's completely lost touch with its spirituality. I think the world has become a commercial, surface place where every aspect of ritual and spirituality has been systematically turned into a way to make money for somebody.

GW: A lot of your fans seem to feel the same way when you guys made a video for "Down With Disease" [Hoist]: they flipped out. How did that impact you and are you considering doing a video for this album?

ANASTASIO: We're not considering doing one right now. We learned our lesson a little bit. I can understand why they were upset. Sometimes I think that people's being upset about things we do is a little nuts. But during the time of Hoist we got a lot of nasty letters that in my heart I had to agree with. The combination of all the things that happened around that album signal to me that we had caved in to the pressures of commercialism. I can't look myself in the mirror and deny that.

GW: Does having such passionate fans keep you honest?

ANASTASIO: Definitely. We can't get away with anything. Sometimes it can be a little exhausting. When you're on tour you can't say the same joke twice, because so many people have been to a bunch of the shows, or at least heard the tapes. You've got to be in the moment and constantly moving forward. We can't play the same song two nights in a row, and it's gotten to the point where we'll hear about it if we play the same tune three or four times in a tour. It can get exhausting, but it's for the best.

GW: You guys become self-sufficient without the help of a record company. Obviously, there's no blueprint for doing this, but what are some concrete steps you'd recommend for a young band?

ANASTASIO: The main thing would be maintaining a focus of why you're in it in the first place, which is because you love it and you want to practice a lot, and get better. Our goals were always very small. I never thought I'd be playing in front of 70,000 people. All we ever wanted to do was to quit our day jobs. From that point on, it was always, "How can we make the show better?" If we were going to be making a little more money on a tour, we'd think, "Can we afford a new mike? Can we get a new p.a. or a better truck?"

Ever since I was in high school, playing in my first bands, Falling Rock and Space Antelope, all I've wanted was to set up and jam, because it was just such a good feeling. And the feeling doesn't change. I was just as excited playing in my friend Peter's basement with his mom flicking the lights at the top of the stairs as at the Clifford Ball. If you believe in that and really want to spend your life chasing that feeling, then have that as your goal, and get better for the sake of getting better.

Music is a spiritual expression of what's in your heart. Music as a way of getting rich is a pretty new thing, and I often wonder if the mega-bucks glitzy atmosphere is making the quality of music suffer. You have to work really hard to get around that and remember why you're in it in the first place: because you have to be. It's like an addiction. You can't go a day without picking up your guitar. To me, the only commercial goals that are really valid are, "Boy, I wish I didn't have to go to work. I wish I could do this all the time."

GW: Is there any specific advice you would give to a young guitarist?

ANASTASIO: Having taught guitar and spoken with so many players for years, I've narrowed it down to one piece of advice: Forget about learning scales and theory, but try to play the melody to everything you hear: every song on the radio, every commercial, every nursery rhyme, the theme song to your favorite TV show. And don't just play guitar lines: try to play horn lines, vocal melodies, piano parts. Develop your ear. Guitar players are the most notoriously scale-oriented instrumentalists. I'm amazed how many guitar players I've met who can't play a C major scale up the neck-from C to C, not as part of a pattern. That's the first thing that you learn on any other instrument, but guitar players learn the blues scale as a pattern, so they end up playing stuff with their fingers instead of their ears.

This story C 1996 by Harris Publications, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan American Copyright Conventions. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher is strictly forbidden.

Return to the Phish.Net interviews page.

News Tour Online FAQ Newbie Archives HPB Reviews Search

The Phish.Net web site is the work of Phish fans and has no official affiliation with the band or the official Phish web site at http://www.phish.com/. Please direct comments, suggestions and questions to webmaster@phish.net.