State Theatre Cleveland, OH 2/26/01

Maybe you receive that information differently when you’re thirty-six and you’ve done your share of tour than when you’re in your teens or mid-twenties and just gotten started.

Maybe you’re right because I ask people who are thirty-six, Don’t you think if you were hanging out with the same people you were hanging out with in high school, you’d want a little vacation too?’ It’s obvious.

As I’m sure you recognize, some of those younger people feel as if something was taken away from them that they were starting to experience, that the rug has been pulled out from under them.

Well there’s nothing I can do about that, though. You know what I would say? So many people come up to me, “Wow, I wish I had been there the first time you played You Enjoy Myself’ or something.” I hear that a lot, “I wish I had been there.” Wellyou can be there (laughs). Just go out right now, most of these shows aren’t even going to come close to selling out. Come out and see a whole bunch of new music

“On your current tour it seems as though there will be plenty of opportunities for guest musicians to join the band. You don’t have to give us the specifics, if you don’t want, but do you have anything planned?”- Bruce Egan

It all feels so new to us that we don’t know which direction anything is going to go. We’re up there at the barn and it feels like we’re venturing into the unknown a little bit. So that being said I would hesitate to start planning anything about who would be there. People like Nicholas Payton who played on the album, I hope he’s going to come out to some shows and that guy who played on Letterman with us [Alan] Chez, he’s a wicked trumpet player. Then in Vegas we’re playing with four of my favorite bands. I don’t know what will happen but I’ve played with Los Lobos and I’ve played with the Roots and they’re both incredible. Spearhead and Antibalas will also be there so in that sense I can’t wait to get out there. I get to play in Burlington which I’m probably more excited about then just about everything, I get to play at Red Rocks which I love and Radio City and Bonnaroo. I’m really looking forward to it and we’ll see what happens.

Do you consider Oysterhead to be a one off project or something you would like to revisit again?- Jen Bloom, Gregg Michaelson

I consider that at least a two off. We had such a good time.

Do you have any concrete plans?

No, that’s the beauty of Oysterhead. All three of us had one month in the studio and a month on the road and I loved the whole thing. It was a real learning experience for me to be on stage with only ten available songs. That was the hardest part because it was a fairly short period of time after Phish. I think I had done one tour with my band so it was like two completely different worlds.

It was the most purely democratic experience musical experience I’ve ever had by far. That may sound like a funny thing coming from me because Phish is so much about the four personalities, clearly. But with Phish there were still defined roles about who did what, especially in writing, that was pretty clear. Whereas with Oysterhead every aspect of that album was a three way decision from “What mic are you’re going to put on the kick drum?” to lyrics (laughs). We called it the three alpha dogs. There was something very cool about that and a big learning experience for me. And very, very different from the album I just put out which was clearly a solo album.

Can you talk a bit more about the frustration of touring with so few songs? A number of our readers had questions about that.

By the end of the tour, all three of us were saying, “Look if we do this again, we’ll do another album so we’ll have two albums worth of material, maybe write a couple other songs and go out with twenty-four songs. It would be a lot easier. But what could we do, we had a month in the Barn. We felt that it was what it was.

I did learn a lot though because there was one night where I was on stage with Oysterhead after about two weeks being on tour and I really started to feel helpless in a certain way. From standing on stage with Phish for so many years I had this feeling that I wish I could inject some of that unpredictability and chaos into this formula. I was longing for it but I just couldn’t do it. But after I walked off stage at that show I realized that was a ridiculous way to be thinking and from that point on I said, “Okay we’re doing what we’re doing enjoy it. It’s not Phish, you know.” (laughs).

Speaking of Oysterhead songs, what led you to record that version of “Ray Dawn Balloon” on your new disc?- Sam Peters, Jim Heller, Jo Fernandez

The song the album moves back to the intent when I was writing it. When I’m writing, I usually have an idea in my mind about what the orchestration would be like. “Ray Dawn Balloon” I always thought would have a small string quartet and a couple of orchestral instruments, there’s that bassoon line in there. When I was doing Oysterhead, I had the solo guitar version that I was doing a couple of tours ago. Stewart heard it and suggested that I put it on Oysterhead. I think he also suggested that I write lyrics to it (laughs) which was an afterthought. So once that was done I wanted to do the earlier version.

When that first came out it was called “Waves?”

Yeah, it wasn’t going to be called “Radon Balloon” either. All the lyrics to that came out in almost a one-take kind of vibe. With Oysterhead we were up at the Barn, there were a lot of late nights and because the three of us produced it everybody was involved in everybody else’s stuff. The way I remember it Stewart just handed me a mic. He said, “Oh I really like that” and did a really cool percussion thing to it which wasn’t the way I imagined it but I thought, “What the heck.” He handed me a mic and I think in the space of five minutes I sang those lyrics, I didn’t really know what they meantRadon Balloon (laughs)

The song that was originally called “Waves” I wrote when we were on a sailboat. It was a day trip from one Virgin Island to another. I was sitting up on the bow and the thing that was striking me was when you look at waves there are big rollers and medium size waves on top of those bigger rollers and then smaller and smaller ones. You’re on the surface of the ocean and can’t see land in any direction and you look at the waves and then you think about that you’re basically sitting on top of another atmosphere. And the fact that music is all about waves and even human touch is about vibrations and sound and it’s all waves and you can start to go crazy thinking about that (laughs).

That’s what I was thinking about and I have a hard time getting that kind of thing out of my mind. And the thing I liked about it musically was the inner voices. If you listen to that piece there’s these little inner middle voices, they’re the melody (sings) I think the reason I needed to redo it with acoustic instruments and slower is that while the Oysterhead version is really cool and I especially like what Stewart did, I think all the inner voices were getting squashed and to me that was the whole point of the thing. That was the whole beauty of it, there’s a big obvious melody (sings it). Then there are these little running arpeggios that go inside the chorus and I thought that was getting covered up. That was kind of the musical connection my mind was making to the fact that waves on the ocean aren’t as simple as, “Here comes the wave,” they’re going in every direction smashing into each other because of the wind.

Pages:« Previous Page Next Page »