As Phish summer tour kicks off, we share this essay whichevolved from Benjy Eisen’s presentation at the Phish Studies academic conference, which took place at OregonState University in Corvallis, Oregon, last month
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If you understand Phish’s lyrics — form, function, intent — thenyou understand that Phish’s most effective, most quoted, and most popularlyrics tend to take common themes and express them in uncommon ways — they takethe ordinary and transform them into something extraordinary. That’s if you understand them — reallyunderstand them. But Phish’s lyrics havealways been misunderstood, often by the band’s biggest fans and certainly byany passerby who overhears this sometimes goofy band singing about meat,meatsticks, lizards, and ghosts.
In Trey Anastasio’s 1988 senior thesis for Godard College, heanalyzes his process for composing the song “Tela,” which was — essentially —Phish’s first love song. Anastasiowrites, “I wanted to be able to express some of my more serious emotionsthrough music, not just my jovial, carefree self.”
Anastasio explains that the song’s narrative is ultimately aboutunrequited love — Col. Forbin, the fool; Tela, the love interest — but hisprimary intent was to write a song that conveyed the universal emotions we allcircle through when experiencing a new love for the first time.
“And my soul is made of marble
But in her gaze,
I crumble into dust
And drift away on the wind
The wind from beyond the mountain.”
The lyrical approach is remarkably different from: “ I want todance with somebody, I want to feel the heat with somebody, I want to dancewith somebody, with somebody who loves me” — Whitney Houston’s top ten hit fromthe same year that Anastasio wrote “Tela.”
“When writing the lyric,” Anastasio says in his thesis, “Ifocused on the use of language, thinking of the song as poetry. This may or maynot have been the greatest idea because sometimes simple language is the bestthing for a song, in that people have to understand what you are saying.” Hold onto that thought.
Anastasio’s work with Phish would, more or less, take a muchdifferent turn for the next quarter century before circling back around to thisdesire to connect by being direct. Immediate examples include songs with names such as “You Enjoy Myself,”“Tweezer,” even “Stash” — all three of which employ lyrics for something akinto phonetic amplification, letting the voice act as a lead melodic instrumentinstead of as a narrator. Going back tohis Godard College thesis, Anastasio even admits that the songs “McGrupp” and“Wilson” began as, in his word, “nonsense.” He post-contextualized those examples by writing a fanciful musicalaround them — the rock opera known as The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday. (Or Gamehendge for short.)
Gamehendge closes with the song “Possum” and, outside ofits use in that saga, I’m not sure that many fans derive any kind of deepmeaning from that song. It can be fun, at least the first dozen or so times yousee it live, and the lyrics are silly but memorable: “Oh possum, your end isthe road.”
Of course, this is likely one of those examples that non-fanspoint to when stating that the lyrics are a roadblock to their appreciation forPhish because, after all, “Oh possum, your end is the road” seems more like an“Ashes ashes we all fall down” cautionary tale for school kids than somethingan older, college-educated music fan would consider near and dear. Those that hold it as such are likely to doso because of the way the entire composition — the music, the melody, the tensionand release — makes them feel emotionally. It’s a music trick.
And yet, in his thesis, Anastasio states, “‘Your end is the road’is supposed to mean that something that seems important at the moment is allpart of a greater flow of things and that to be happy one must just realize theinevitability of things.”
That’s an early example of Phish taking the ordinary and makingit extraordinary; the common into the uncommon.
Fishman can “suck to blow” that Electrolux all he wants but thetruth is that Phish wasn’t born in a vacuum. There’s a strong and complex linear heritage that led to Phish,musically and lyrically, which we don’t have time for in today’spresentation. But as I went down thoserabbit holes, I found some things that I didn’t expect.
I’ve written about Phish for more than two decades, from onlinechat rooms to Rolling Stone, and one of my motivations for doing so wasthat I was annoyed by all the lazy, stigmatic descriptions of the band as amelting pot of folk, jazz, blues, funk, metal, rock, pop, prog, and barbershopquartet — but the truth is that their lyrics absolutely borrow from all ofthose genres.
Anastasio notes in his thesis that the Random House dictionarydefines composition as “The act of combining parts or elements to form awhole.” He then states that it was from that angle that he approached both thelyrics and the music for Gamehendge, and — we can demonstrate — much ofPhish’s entire songbook. Combining disparate parts and unrelated elements toform a unified whole. The wooks had it right all along: It’s a patchwork.
Phish has always been a creative creature on the move; anyserious analysis of their lyrics or their music will fail to accurately capturethem beyond a certain finite period in their larger history. This is furthercomplicated by the fact that the four of them have four very distinctsongwriting voices and that they utilize additional songwriting partners,lyricists and contributors as well — most notably, Tom Marshall, who brings adistinct, poetic voice to the lyrics.
Glossing over the data, let me just state that there is plenty ofanecdotal evidence to support a theory that Phish’s most popular songs — songsthat have been life-changing for a number of fans, songs whose lyrics appear onbumper stickers, high school yearbooks, and backs of eyelids — tend to be thesongs whose concrete, literal meaning is opaque, unless and until you hear adirect explanation straight from the multi-beast’s mouth. If and when therespective lyricist reveals what they actually meant by certain lyrics, youmight wish that your tattoo had been temporary and, oh my god, did you reallyname the cat after a song about a morally bankrupt spy?
In the last few years, Anastasio’s own songwriting has becomesignificantly more direct. We can all speculate the reasons for this and myguess is that the majority of all of our guesses are probably somewhat onpoint. Anastasio is getting older, he’s now clean, sober and a family man. He’seven shaved off a lot of the youthful playfulness in his onstage banter. In thecurrent era, when he addresses the audience, it’s most often to expressreflective, nostalgic, or emotional thoughts in a fairly straightforwardmanner; a sharp contrast from his “Forbin’s” or “Icculus” narrations of anearlier time. Many, though not all, of his recent lyrics mirror this.
The most striking example is Ghosts of the Forest. Itcontains some of Anastasio’s most direct and serious songwriting to date. In amodern first, he made it a point to lay bare the subject matter before we evenhad a chance to hear the tunes. It’s a song cycle about watching one of hisclosest friends die and the emotions that he went through before, during, andafter. Most reviews were favorable and the fan reaction was overwhelminglypositive, although some young friends of mine were less than pleased about whatthey perceived as a lack of lyrical complexity, even accepting and appreciatingthe context of concept. (I would argue that, in classic Anastasio mode, evenhere, not everything is what it seems, including the title track, and thatscattered amongst the more forthright lines are plenty of examples of “lyricalcomplexity”).
Regardless, those few hold-out fans might point to an earlyclassic, “Fluffhead,” which most perceive to be one of Phish’s sillysongs. It’s actually about watching aloved one slowly die of disease. “Wipe those fluff balls off your head" —spoken in frustration and horror at watching a loved one’s hair fall out due tochemotherapy treatment.
But Anastasio was arguably right all those years ago when hestated that a very straightforward, direct approach can be the most effective —perhaps even the only effective — method, if you want people to immediatelyunderstand exactly what you mean. Ifyou’re trying to tell them something specific. If you’re trying to express, to connect, to relate.
Nobody needs to go listen to a podcast or read a magazineinterview to understand lyrics like: “It’s so hard to find a real friend,” or“Don’t give up hope — keep dreaming.”
They’re almost reminiscent of Bob Marley lyrics: “Don’t worry about a thing,” “No woman, nocry,” “Let’s get together and feel alright” — songs that are universally loved,popular to the extreme, songs we all know by heart… We all immediately knewwhat these songs were about, even if we didn’t know their origininspiration.
It’s hard to quote those Marley tunes without also being remindedof a batch of newer Phish songs: “Everything’s Right,” “Rise Up/Come Together,”“More” and so on. I find these songs to be a welcome addition to the largercatalog, especially when viewed as companions, not replacements. But they undeniably represent a creativedeparture from what we can call, without judgement, “Classic Phish” or“Characteristic Phish.”
As we discuss this next point, keep in mind that Ghosts of theForest was not a Phish album. The songs were a thematic collection ofAnastasio compositions, introduced to us via a side-project. Now cut to Halloween of last year: KasvotVaxt. Instead of Phish’s usual Halloweentradition of covering a complete album by another band, they pulled a prank andinvented a fake band from Scandinavia. They claimed they were reviving an obscure album from a bygone time but,as we know, it was actually a complete set of new Phish songs.
During a solo acoustic performance in Boulder last winter,Anastasio revealed that he first started thinking about the songs that becameKasvot Vaxt while he was — notably — still wrapping up work on Ghosts of theForest, down in Nashville. The Kasvot lyrics, “Everything is overlapping,to the future to the passing” certainly is applicable here, with “to thefuture, to the passing” having a particularly haunting undertone in light ofthe events that inspired the Ghosts of the Forest album. “To the future…to the passing.”
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I would like to put forth the just-for-fun theory that Kasvot Vaxt is actually the Phishification of Ghosts of the Forest. It’s Ghosts of the Forest cloaked in costume for the Halloween party. Lyrically, the two albums are companion pieces, two sides of the same coin. “Everything is overlapping.”
As already stated, Ghosts of the Forest was mostly direct. Oftenliteral. Plain. Naked. Raw. Which is whyit had such an immediate impact. “Why dowe have to wait until it’s gone to know what love is?” “What was I so worried about? What a waste oftime!”
These lyrics are a beautiful parallel to Parsifal asking theFisher King, “Dearest Uncle, what ails you?” in Wolfram von Eschenbach’stimeless medieval tale “Parsifal.” (Note that “Parsifal” was interpreted byJoseph Campbell to mean, “Pierce down the middle” — as in, asking the mostdirect question, in the simplest most direct way, is how we can be healed bylanguage. It connects.)
Dearest Uncle, what ails you? That was Ghosts of the Forest. “If you want to fly, let go.” “So this it, it’s over.”
Kasvot Vaxt, meanwhile, was meta Phish — it was all in costume,incognito, a deliberate farce. In true Phish fashion, there might more tounpack than just the surface prank. After the show and upon hearing these songs for the first time with therest of us, Anastasio’s frequent songwriting partner, Tom Marshall, remarkedthat he was impressed with how the lyrics sounded almost exactly like what hewould imagine Anastasio’s own original lyrics would sound like if they werewritten in a foreign tongue and then coarsely translated. Hold onto that thought, too.
There was a general consensus among fans that Kasvot Vaxt was areturn to form for Phish lyrics. Phraseslike “This is what space smells like” and “I’m the glue in your magnet” didn’tappear to have much of a deeper meaning. If anything, they sounded like awkward translations, as Marshallobserved. But above all, they were catchyand playful and just plain fun. Theywere fun to hear and fun to sing along with. Not unlike “We’re all in this together, and we love to take a bath” or“Your hands and feet are mangos but you’re gonna be a genius anyway.”
Fans instantly adapted Kasvot Vaxt lyrics into vernacular memes,fan art, and all the other things that we, as Phish fans, tend to do. They felt like the Phishiest songs Phishrolled out in a hot minute.
Much, if not all, of the Kasvot catalog might belong in the“Fluffhead” box in that - maybe - the song meanings are in near opposition tothe emotion of the music; a playful way of cloaking something a bit moreserious, a way of expressing common sentiments in uncommon ways. Of taking the ordinary and making itextraordinary.
In this light, the album title, Faceplant into Rock (or íRökk in the native tongue) becomes a humorous metaphor, a way of sayingsomeone bit the dust, went belly up, kicked the can, bent over and buffalobilled. Potentially. (There are other interpretations that arealso viable and the very fact that it’s so easily adaptable to multipleappropriations indicates that it hits the high mark on the Phishiness Meter).
“Everything is overlapping.”
Now consider this: we often respond to a period of profoundsadness with a period of pronounced joy, release, a renewed thirst forlife. That welcome return gives oursouls a certain amount of comic relief. Perhaps Kasvot Vaxt served as Anastasio’s comic relief after Ghosts ofthe Forest.
If you wanted to make jokes at a funeral and English wasn’t yourfirst language, you might end up saying something like, “Frozen in place, castinto space, transported too fast, you know it don’t last — death don’t hurtvery long.”
They told us in the Phishbill that all the Kasvot songs wereoriginally written in a foreign tongue. That’s fake news. But it was a key part of the narrative forthe Halloween prank. Translations canhave bumpy transitions across languages. As an experiment, I took a line from a Ghost of the Forest song and hadGoogle Translate change it to several languages before converting it back intoEnglish. If nothing else, what I got wasinteresting to entertain:
“If you want to fly, go vacation” came from “If you want to fly,let go.”
“I am clear, the ghost came to visit” came from “I’m wide awakeand the ghosts are out to greet me.”
And to double back on Kasvot’s own counterfeit translation, “Thisis what space smells like,” I had Google Translate change it into Finnish andthen back. This resulted in “This is astate of smell.” Sounds like it couldeasily come from a Phish song, right?
Now, this was just an exercise and doesn’t mean anything — but itis interesting, especially in relation to this exploration.
The Phishbill that I mentioned earlier, distributed to fansentering the arena on Halloween, contained a background essay that was in on the joke. It opened with, “It’s as if Kasvot Vaxt neverexisted. But Halloween is about ghosts…”
Now let’s compare specific lyrics from Ghosts of the Forest withspecific lyrics from Kasvot Vaxt, tit for tat, without listing which line isfrom which. Look closely and think aboutthem for a moment:
“Bright white light shining right between my eyes” vs.
“There’s a light that’s guiding me”
“Look around at the light, the shapes, the colors all around you”vs.
“Take a look around, the shapes are hanging over you”
“…the lost and the loved ones, they’re moving all around us” vs.
“Take a look around, the shapes are hanging over me”
“Regrets, maybe it’s not too late, I’m about to run” vs.
“Down below my feet, last forever, dark and scary, I ran away”
“Stumble into flight, you can taste the water” vs.
“This is what space smells like”
“When I die, I’ll turn into a giant ball of energy” vs.
“We are come to outlive our brains”
“Descended from apes, you’re just changing shapes, death don’thurt very long” vs.
“Forms change so fast, time is moving past…. gonna get wider whenI die.”
“Sonic sea vibrations passing over you, let go forever” vs.
“If you want to fly, let go”
“We are only passing through, we’re vapor…” vs.
“We’re moving at vapor speed”
“Crystal memories shimmer in my mind, of laughing all together, Iwill always cherish till the end of my time” vs.
“You will always remember where you were”
“It’s such a beautiful world, and such a brief time” vs.
“Take a look around, stop trying to rush nature”
“We’re vapor, light, and liquid blue” vs.
“Vapor splits into yellow light…and it’s blue all around”
“Sweet longing freezes time” vs.
“Time slows down, waves roll…”
“We are momentarily frozen” vs.
“My thoughts are frozen”
“The rules of gravity no longer apply as I drift off into a mintsiren dream night sky” vs.
“This is what space smells like”
“We are only passing through, we’re vapor, light and liquid blue”vs.
“Going home, the swells of blue connect you to the ocean and thesky”
“We are breaking waves, crashing, high above gravity…we areletting go” vs.
“Sonic sea vibrations passing over you, let go forever”
It certainly looks like a match. There’s a thematic thread that weaves the two sets of lyrics togetherand a surprising number of instances in which even the key words are the sameor expressed via synonyms and corresponding concepts. It’s as if you can recycle the final hurrah…with an inventive and creative result.
The band reportedly worked on the Kasvot Vaxt songs shortly afterCurveball, their 2018 summer festival, was unexpectedly cancelled, which likelycomes into play in verses like: “Friends are dancing on the hill side / for thefirst time in a long time / I want to live another day.” So the two albumsoverlap but aren’t always mirror images. Companions, not twins.
And it’s important to keep in mind that Kasvot was acollaborative effort (whereas Ghosts of the Forest was not), just as it’sequally important to remember that, in the past, the band has shown a willingnessto traverse subject matter (and styles, time signatures, even tempos) within asingle song.
In the end, regardless of whether or not the two projects wereintended to interlock, there’s a thematic continuity or overlap that iscertain. One was expressed in a way thatwe all knew the intent was a eulogy and celebration of life (Ghosts of theForest) while the other was expressed as a costume within a costume since theintent was a dance party for Halloween. Both worked.
And regardless of whether or not Kasvot Vaxt was actually thePhishification of Ghosts of the Forest, or if it was merely the Phishificationof an imaginary underground Scandinavian rock act, it remains the latest proofpositive that Phish is still at their Phishiest — lyrically — when they takecommon sentiments and express them in uncommon ways; when they take ordinaryconcepts and make them extraordinary.
Everything is overlapping.
