Trey Anastasio On Music

I remember very clearly, in my heart, knowing that I was going to be a musician when I was in about third grade. I used to write a lot of songs and I still remember some of them. I don’t have much of a memory for anything else but music. If I hear a song or a melody, it sticks. People will often say, “Oh, you’re losing your hearing from all this rock music,” because I can’t hear when people are talking to me, but if there’s something on the radio way in the distance, I can tell you what song it is almost instantly. Someone will be talking to me and I’ll be paying attention to what’s on the stereo. It’s actually kind of an annoying habit but I remember that from a very young age. I remember always being obsessed with music. I had a record player when I was really little and I had a Jackson 5 record—with the song “How Funky Is Your Chicken?” and “Going Back to Indiana”. That was one of the first records I fell in love with.

And then I remember getting a Cream record and that was an eye-opener. It was just always the first love. I don’t think there was any other option for me. I really believe that. It’s easier for me to express myself on a musical level than with the English language. It feels like a pure language. I had a great middle school music teacher, who is no longer living, named Frank Jacobson. I didn’t realize until later in life that not everyone had a music teacher like this. This was in the 6th, 7th and 8th grade, and he encouraged me to do everything. So I did madrigal singers where I learned about harmony singing, I did glee club, I did jazz band, I did orchestra, I built sets for the plays, I was in all the plays. I continued, as the years went by, when Phish started, to have a philosophy that stylistic differences are completely arbitrary in music. Phish would play every style of music. In the beginning, we would do straight-ahead jazz gigs, we studied bluegrass, we would do reggae, we would do show tunes, calypso. I’ve always rebelled against stylistic labels. I also went to Goddard College, which is this very alternative, small school in Vermont. I was there for three years and [Mike] Page and Fish [Jon Fishman] were also there and I think it was thirty-five students or something like that when I was there. The legend is that Cecil Taylor was there in the sixties and a lot of people like David Mamet might have been hanging around there for a while (I don’t know if he actually graduated).

But the philosophy at Goddard is that it’s a process school. There’s no grades and they rebel against results. It’s all about process; so for your work, what you do is you write process papers and that had a big impact on me. I’m a huge proponent of education and I got lucky. I had a great music teacher in middle school and then my second great teacher in college. His name was Ernie Stires and he was a composer, and Samuel Barber was one of his big heroes but he liked swing band music and a little more of kind of a modern classical thing and he turned me onto a very different way of looking at music. I needed a senior project to work on when I was in college, so I decided I’d write a musical. At the time, I was probably thinking that I could be rebellious against popular music. If people wanted a short song, I’d write a long song. If people wanted a song in one key, I’d write a song in five keys. That’s the lens that I was viewing things from at that time. The guys in Phish, we were very lucky to find each other and it’s certainly something that we’re very aware of now. It’s become so deep at this point in time—our friendship—after almost thirty years. We’re very close. Everybody’s got kids and it’s incredible. They are very open-minded: I was writing some weird stuff at the time and they embraced it fully. We always wanted to be a party band. When we started off, we would play bar gigs and what not but we learned to react to what was going on at the event.

I’ll give you a good example. There’s this thing that’s happened around a lot of bands in our group of bands where they threw glow sticks around and they call it the glow stick war, and it was at a Phish concert the first time that ever happened. We were all standing up there, playing along, and we’re watching and some guy, “shtuck”, he threw a glow stick and then another guy “ shtuck ” threw a glow stick and then two and then four and then there were five and then sixteen and then there was this just ocean of glow sticks. They’ve actually since been outlawed because they’re sharp and people were starting to get hurt, which is horrible, but at the time, I just remember watching this thing and it was a little, teeny, meeny metaphor for how it often feels: that we’re playing, we’re listening, we’re watching, and then we’re reacting, and maybe that’s where, as a band, we may be a little bit different. Once that started to happen, we instantly started playing to it, and I can remember that very clearly too. “Here come the glow sticks, and here comes the very fast drumming, dubba dubba dubba dubaa,” and we’re trying to paint a musical picture of what’s happening. But again, like I said before, it’s outside of us. I’m not trying to say that some magical thing happens that we just stand up there and, all of a sudden, music starts happening. The way to get to that point that I’m describing is hundreds of hours of discipline, that’s part of it. When I don’t practice, it doesn’t happen. When I don’t do the work required to prepare for that experience, it doesn’t happen, and I used to practice like an insane person and then I kind of stopped for a while and now I’m doing it again and I can tell you that, like in many disciplines, it takes work to let it go.

Make no mistake about it. I play every day. I do finger exercises pretty much every day. I’ll do a couple hours a day. I just got a bunch of new books and I’m thinking about getting a guitar teacher. I’m taking lots and lots of voice lessons. This is gonna start off sounding like a cliché, but it’s true: a musician is a channel, and there’s no question in my mind about that. The musician’s job is to work in a disciplined way and learn about music as much as possible so that they can get completely out of the way. The best example of this that I can give is that I’ve done some work with orchestras. We played at Carnegie Hall and there’s photos of every one of the great conductors going all the way back to, like, the twenties; it’s very intimidating. Leonard Bernstein’s up there on the wall looking like a young kid next to Eugene Normandy. The room’s the same—the room never changes. The music’s the same; much of it is. I’m lucky enough to play with some great orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, and when I was backstage with these amazing musicians who’ve spent their lives training and training and training, what struck me about the experience was that people go in there and for a brief period of time and they’re stewards of the music for that period of time. You’re never gonna see people who are more humble, and these are people who are top of their class, they got into Juilliard and were top of their class, and then tried out with thousands of the best musicians in the world that are trying to get into that orchestra, and they get up there and they get to rehearsal and they’re quiet, they’re respectful, and they let the music go through but they don’t get themselves in the way of it. For someone that’s that good, you’d expect some kind of ego trip in there, and it’s non-existent.

As a matter of fact, that’s what a lot of the training, I think, is about: the idea that ninety people would be playing together and the idea that it’s important to keep your own stuff to yourself because you only have an hour of rehearsal and you have to be part of a group. So, with Phish—it’s hard to jump from such a lofty example to Phish—but we used to practice a lot of listening exercises where each person would go around in a circle, and Page would be the “leader” for four bars and the rest of us would support him and then I would, and then Mike and then Fish. And the idea was to create a communal sound that was bigger than any of the individuals, and I think that that’s what it feels like at these big outdoor concerts and places like that: inclusive of the people that are there. That my experiences: my kids, my wife, my family, and my little part. I walk from this angle over to the stage and I play and then I go home; but any time that I’ve tried to take ownership of the experience or the music, it’s been a disaster. The results have nothing to do with me: good, bad, I do the best that I can and I try to show up and then I go home.

I can tell you that I genuinely, genuinely hope that everybody has a great experience because it makes me happy, but I can’t attach my happiness to anything beyond showing up and doing the best that I can and being in that moment. It was tricky, when suddenly we were popular, or whatever that means, to not think, “This is me. That yelling and screaming and cheering is about me.” But in reality, the yelling and screaming and cheering is about the very fact that when we’re out of the way, people can experience this music. The musician only has one job and that’s to listen. Listening is the essence of all great musicianship. You can listen to other musicians up on stage. Jazz aficionados will tell you that all the action is in the comping. If you’re really listening to good jazz, you’ll often listen to the people who are supporting—the music is in that area. When I studied with my composition teacher, he used to say, “The music is in the middle voices. Check out the violas. Check out the middle voices of the chords. That’s where the action is.”

As long as I’m thinking about me, the music is never going to blossom. So, my way of getting outside myself would be to listen to Page on the piano or Mike on the bass or Jon on the drums. So, if you stood in my spot onstage, the other three instruments are incredibly loud; much louder than my guitar ’cause I know what I’m playing. I want to do anything that I can to keep my mind focused on whatever somebody else is playing. I’m not saying that that’s always a success but when it is, the reaction you get from the audience is instantaneous.

The other guys are going to be listening to me, ideally; anyone but themselves. You’re riding a wave and the channel is —whatever you want to call it, I don’t know—the divine spirit. It comes from the culture, it comes from the crowd that’s all standing there, it comes from what the wind is sounding like if you’re standing on an outdoor stage. I’ve had literally thousands of experiences with this; my job is to listen and shut up. But not shut up like shut the channel up. One thing that I’ll do very, very frequently is I’ll listen to the back wall and if you’re in an indoor venue, it takes the perspective way off the stage and way out into the back and I can feel it. If we let go and get our hands off it, I can sense that the connection between the music itself and the audience gets bigger.

And I think that you can experience that anywhere: the eighties kind of punk scene, out in that dance floor there’s a group of people and that surging group is bigger than one individual, you can’t push it around. That slam-dancing kind of vibe is a very communal feeling because you’re going where they’re going whether you like it or not, and if you try to fight it too much you’re going to get knocked over. A lot of people use the analogy of surfing; that the wave’s gonna knock you over. That’s what it feels like playing improvisational music. If I get up there and try to start pushing it around the way I want it, to my whims, it’s a disaster and by extrapolation, if we have a good show and something really magical happens, I can’t take ownership of that nor can I really take ownership there’s a bad review of someone else’s experience. I’ve found, over the years, that the only way that I can be happy is to try and be in that moment, listening to the other people, and then go home and that’s it. It was Halloween ’96 and somebody said, “Let’s do The White Album.” You really learn a lot when you do that.

This year we did Exile on Main St., one of my all-time favorite records, one of the great, top rock albums of all time. The definition of “rock album” is Exile on Main St. I got to sit and learn every guitar riff. I mean, I knew them all ’cause I’d heard the record a thousand times but I’d never actually sat down and learned them. And one of the things that happened from playing that record is, Keith Richards uses a very thin tone and I actually found, after doing that record for Halloween, it sort of liberated the thin sound for me. Once I’d gotten my ear inside his sound, I want to go there now. So, you gotta keep learning. You gotta learn new stuff. So we kind of started this new tradition and now we’re stuck with it! So, every year when it comes up, we’re like, “Oh no, we gotta go do that again—learn a whole record.”

One of the things that you find, though, is that there’s not that many good, whole records. Usually, there’s about four good songs. A lot of times, our albums end up feeling a little bit like a journal entry to me. I do like full albums and I do lament, a little bit, the loss of the album as an art form, but I want to be careful to be aware of the fact that every time there’s been a format change in the history of music, something great has happened. When it went from the disc, the cylinder disc or whatever it was, the wax disc, to the LP, and then all of a sudden you had Pink Floyd and FM radio and then now, all of a sudden, you have the computer and you have these singles…it is a bit of a brave new world, so as soon as I start to not embrace it, some great band is gonna come along and use it to their advantage, which I can’t wait to hear. What we’re losing, though, is, as an example, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, which is one of my favourite records of all time and it’s just a hauntingly personal description of a young woman, and you need all the songs in a row to get the picture. Taking one of the songs out is like taking a chapter out of a book. We’re in the era of the popularity of the memoir in literature. Everyone is writing a memoir now and I have yet to read one that gives me as honest a description of the author as Joni Mitchell did on that record. It’s almost too personal; it’s fantastic. That’s what we’re losing a little bit, with the single- driven model—it’s a bit of a disposable world.

The process of the guitar tone has been growing and changing with every progressive tour, probably since about 1990. I had an idea that I had a couple of sounds that I wanted to emulate. One was sort of a Joe Pass jazz thing and the other was a very thin Jimi Hendrix sound. I used to listen to Band of Gypsys a lot and “Machine Gun” from Band of Gypsys was the holy grail of guitar and then mixed with, probably, Django Reinhardt, that kind of thing. And so Paul Languedoc and I designed a hollow-body guitar and it’s got a long scale length so, that’s what a Strat has. Most hollow-body guitars are very short so they also have a warm sound. So we put the long scale length on a hollow body which was something that we hadn’t seen before and it’s got those kind of violin F holes. And then we designed some speaker cabinets and I went through a period where I tried every brand of speaker on the market ‘till I found the one that I liked and still, today, to cut forward, sometimes I’ll listen to tapes and then I’ll make an adjustment for the next tour. A little bit more high-end, maybe a little bit more reverb, I went to a single-coil thing recently.

It’s a fluid process. It’s ongoing, as a matter of fact, right now for the next tour, I made a little shift and there’s gonna be one more that I’m going to make before I go out for the next tour. We’ll move the guitar cabinet a half an inch to the left or angle it in for one tour. Same thing with the other guys. I probably have the best sound onstage than anywhere else in a room. The other guys, maybe we would have a little contest about this, but I’ve got my own drum wedges, I’ve got my own special piano wedges in a circle, I have my little bass amp that I picked and that I dialed in. I want the whole band to sound pristine where I’m standing, and the ultimate reason is to forget it. That’s the main thing is that I don’t change guitars when I’m onstage. I have one guitar, I use it all night ’cause I want to completely forget it. I mean, it’s the strap height, the string gauge, everything, and then it’s gotta be gone. And part of practicing every day is that it has to become like a second limb. I don’t even want to think about it. It’s just gotta work by itself. The pedals are exactly measured to the inch. They’re right where they’re supposed to be. I don’t need the instrument getting in the way. I like collaborating with artists that are technically from other genres. ’Cause it’s a language.

If you think of English as a language, it would be like categorizing different novels based on the language they were using. Turning yourself off to an entire style of music just seems like something that I’m not interested in because there’s great musicians that emerge in all different styles, and the similarities become more evident than the differences at the high levels. Are the great bluegrass players that far from the great rappers? Probably not. Incredibly fluid rhythmically, incredible lyrics, incredible vocal phrasing. One of them’s on the up beat while one of them’s on the down beat. It’s kind of a small difference. They both have that rhythmic flow, they both love words, they both have one foot in tradition, they both know their history, right? We played with Jay-Z. I’ve gotta tell you, it was great. Backstage, he was rapping into my ear from about a foot away. I’ve been really lucky. I’ve had the experience of playing with people who I absolutely admire and are great. I’ve played with Neil Young. And Jay-Z’s got the gift. People say, “How was it?” I say, “The guy’s got it, whatever it is, that music gift.” I mean, it was unbelievable and his tone, his flow, his whole thing, and just to have him standing, just rapping into my ear… I think he could’ve been born in any era. If he had been born in Vienna, he would have been doing the Mozart thing as far as I’m concerned. He’s great. Very, very nice guy. But man, the gift.

I have twelve- and fourteen-year-old girls, and I love hearing music through their ears. It feels like an honour ’cause that’s the age I was when I really was obsessed with music. I still am. So, for instance, both my daughters really like this band Paramore. I went to see them twice with my daughter and all her friends—four twelve-year-old girls—and they were great. I really liked them. They have a really good drummer. I mean, I never would have seen this band. But I can genuinely say that they were fantastic. The concert was really goods– so to me, it’s an honour. They’re not jaded. They like all kinds of music as long as it’s good. If it’s a good song, they’ll listen to it.

(via trappedintime)