While I was prepping for this, I happened upon the LIGHTSCAPES project that you did with Charlie. I’m very curious about that. How did that come about?

Mike Natiello was creative director of LIGHTSCAPES, which took place at Croton-on-Hudson. Mike’s been a longtime fan of the band and is also a dear friend of mine. One thing led to another, and next thing you know, Charlie and I are doing the music for Lightscapes, which was so much fun. It was so gratifying and it really was an amazing project. After a few years, the funding ran out, so we’re not doing that anymore. But Mike also runs the Blaze, which is very famous, so Charlie and I did some music for the Blaze this year.

What is that exactly?

It’s during Halloween season. Mike and his team have thousands of pumpkins, and they make all these amazing sculptures—dinosaurs,bridges, you name it. Everything under the sun is made out of thousands of pumpkins—it’s absolutely exquisite. Charlie and I worked on music for the Legend of Sleepy Hollow; it was really phenomenal.

Is this instrumental music?

We made a loop, it’s a minute or a minute and a half. As people are walking through, they hear the loop.

When you’re writing something like that, how do you approach it differently from writing a full song?

It’s a completely different animal because the people who run the exhibit are asking for specific things within that minute and a half. So you provide it, but in a creative way.

What are some of the things that they’re looking for?

For this Legend of Sleepy Hollow piece, they wanted horse sounds. We had to place them in the mix properly and get an eerie gallop going. It took some time, but it came out nicely.

You mentioned Jerry Garcia earlier and you are obviously a longtime Grateful Dead fan. To my knowledge, you’re one of the reasons that Trey was exposed to Grateful Dead music. I’m curious how you see the Grateful Dead scene today. It seems like there’s a Grateful Dead renaissance of sorts in popular culture, where they’re being appreciated not only for their music, but for their philosophy and their iconography. What’s your take on that resurgence, as someone who has seen it in many iterations?

The Grateful Dead created a massive body of work of incredible songs. What I find is when a group has songs of that calibre, those songs can live on. The perfect example of that is, you have an amazing band like Joe Russo’s Almost Dead selling out Red Rocks, which holds about 9,000 people, doing mostly Grateful Dead songs. That’s a testament to the phenomenal songs but also to the phenomenal musicianship of JRAD. They’ve taken those songs to a different place. It’s incredibly exciting to see that. And I love Jerry Garcia as much as anyone. In my mind, Jerry Garcia was probably as important of an inventor as Albert Einstein. Many of his inventions don’t even have names yet, but the methods he used to open up lines of communication and connections and consciousness is flabbergasting. One day I think people will realize all of the amazing things that he created. It’s amazing that he died in 1995 and so much of this music is still living on in such a huge way.

What people are doing with the Grateful Dead’s original music now sort of reminds me of what the Grateful Dead themselves did with The Great American Songbook or Bob Dylan’s music. They themselves are becoming the thing they used to build the Dead’s catalogue. People are injecting their catalogues with the Grateful Dead.

There are a lot of young people coming in who are hearing this music for the first time. It’s opening the gateways for them as well. In my mind, it’s very exciting to see all these different variations of all these different Grateful Dead bands and jambands carrying on the tradition.

I think it’s very cool to even see bands that are not known as jambands embrace the whole vibe of the Dead. Recently Relix had Vampire Weekend on the cover, a band you would never associate with the Dead, but much of the article was about how that band has looked to the Dead for inspiration in the way they approach live shows and approach recording.

The Dead broke a lot of ground; they broke down a lot of walls.

Very true. To pivot back to your own work, what’s next for you in terms of your own projects?

Over the next year or so, I’m really looking forward to going into the studio and recording 12-15 songs to make a new album. I hesitate to say “album” because, “What’s an album?” [Laughs] Maybe, “body of work” because you can’t even say “CD” anymore.

Will those songs be recorded with the people you’re playing with in your band currently, or Fluid Druid people, or are you not sure yet?

I would like to record with all of the above.

Maybe even some people from Phish will get in there, like you had in the past.

Your mouth to God’s ears.

I’m trying to will it. We’ll both be hoping. Speaking of Phish, I basically ask anybody who is a Phish fan this question. When you attended the New Year’s Eve show in New York, as a personal friend of Trey, what was going through your mind when the whole platform debacle was occuring? As you mentioned earlier, you’re not always in on it, but did you know he was stuck?

I was very concerned because I saw the look on his face, and I saw the looks on other band members’ faces, and that’s a really frightening thing. When Trey was playing at the Capitol, I was backstage with him and he was telling me that when he was on the platform, he didn’t even have a harness. The reason being that they told him, “You don’t need a harness because this is the Titanic of platforms.” In other words, because it was so well built, you don’t even need a harness. All he had was this wire attached around his waist, attached to the platform so he couldn’t walk off the edge. Trey was saying that if he would have fallen off, the pain would have been excruciating because he was being held by his waist. He was describing to me the fear he experienced when the platform—at times when they were trying to work on it, it would shift and suddenly tilt. He thought that at one point he was going to have to throw his guitar in the audience. More importantly, he was scared for his life.

I think everybody in that room was worried, other than those who were like, “This must be part of the gag,” which considering Phish’s prankster history was not a totally crazy thought. But someone like yourself could see that was not the case. I certainly thought I could see the distress of the band that was going on, and the uncertainty of Page and Mike looking up at him with concern.

The most amazing part of it is that Trey was able to play all the solos and do all the parts even though he didn’t have a harness. The fact that he was able to do that and do it with so much grace so that people thought it was a gag, is a testament to what a professional he is. A lot of people would be crying like a baby up there.

Yeah, or just stopped the show immediately, which I wouldn’t blame anyone for doing. Like you said, not only was his own life at stake, but there was a lot of very priceless and one-of-a-kind gear up there. I certainly wouldn’t have thought twice if he was like, “Guys, I’m stuck up here. We’re going to have to take a break or potentially stop the show.” But Trey is a true pro and knows that the show must go on. I was with a person who had never seen Phish before that night, and she was blown away by his professionalism that night more than anything else. That’s all she was talking about after, like, “I can’t believe he was willing to keep going.”

At the end of the day, there’s now an unofficial new Phish symbol, which shows a green square suspended above red, blue and yellow ones. That’s the beauty of being a big rock band: You go through a troubling time like that, but you come out with new iconography.

Any final thoughts?

I just want to elaborate on the band I’m with now: Doug Schneider [drums], Adam Dell [guitar], Charlie de Saint Phalle [bass] and Parker Reilly [keyboards]. It’s a wonderful chemistry we have together and I’m really excited about the music we’re making. There’s a lot of soul in there and we’re having fun; I’m really excited to see where this leads.

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