Between Me and My Mind

Hey, buddy. Hi.

There it is.

All I do on the piano is compose,

which is very slow when I use the paper and compose.

And that's it, I don't really play the piano, so...

If you're composing, it's great,

'cause you can see how all the chords lay out.

When Phish started,

I didn't know I was gonna be in a rock band.

I thought I was gonna be a composer.

A lot of the first Phish stuff was heavily composed.

This is the tune "Foam" that we do.

This is all written out. It's a big chart. It's all...

And also "You Enjoy Myself" was that...

a lot of the early stuff.

It wasn't like rock music. I don't really know what it was.

It's a weird band, I mean...

It's not really... I don't know what kind of music this is.

- -

You know what I mean? All that shit.

One guy who was in the band pretty much quit

because he was like, "What the hell is this?"

This is the boring reality of what I do every morning now.

It's just that all these lyrics are wrong.

Now I have to write them all down again.

I always have a lot of projects going on: TAB, Solo Acoustic...

but the musical center of my life is Phish.

We've been playing together since 1983.

Yo.

-How you doing? - Good, man.

I'm sitting here, like, working on "Thread" right now.

Yeah. Yeah.

Basically, just refer to the demo for the tempo.

-Yeah. -Yeah, yeah.

-'Cause it's like-- -I hadn't got that far yet.

So funny, I was just sitting here, like, .

I was just thinking of that tune, like, I was singing--

I know, it sticks in my head so much.

-Yeah. -Doesn't it? It's like,

I think we kind of got it up because we were excited.

You know, that was me.

-It was hopping right along. -It was hopping.

That's the only thing I was gonna say.

I really liked "Come Together," "Frost,"

"A Case of Ice and Snow,"

and that "Love's Only A Number" thing. That's just the best.

That one seemed almost the most to me,

with just, you know, with just the little that we put on it.

That's good. That's great.

Then Mike will have a couple of songs,

and Page will have a couple of songs,

and you'll have, you know, whatever.

And then we'll have songs.

Yeah, that's great.

We need songs right now

because we're trying to do this thing

called the baker's dozen,

where we're going to do 13 consecutive nights

at Madison Square Garden, and we're gonna try to do them

without any repeats.

So, that'll be probably about 280 songs.

You know, most bands do a similar show every night.

So my head is kind of exploding with the whole thing.

It's exciting.

I am writing this longform thing that I'm into now.

This Ghosts of the Forest idea.

My oldest friend Chris is now

in this battle with cancer. He's stage four.

He used to hunt elk.

That's, like, where the title idea came from.

Ghosts of the Forest.

They called elk "ghosts of the forest"

because you could be following a trail and they just vanish.

You never know when the trail is going to end.

I was thinking about my only sibling

has passed away.

Chris and both the girls have grown up.

It's all just so fleeting.

A couple of albums ago, a door started opening up for me

in terms of writing about personal things.

I wrote a song about my sister called "Miss You"

after she died.

Once that door opens, it's like a floodgate.

Suddenly you want to start writing about

what you're really feeling in your personal life

in a much more direct way.

Suddenly, I'm writing about Sue, and I'm writing about

my family and friends.

And I want to talk to them and find out

what is my mom's perspective?

You know, what is my dad's perspective?

Even as a parent, I've got my own story

about how I raise my kids and stuff.

You know, and maybe I just wanna learn the truth.

My dad worked in Princeton.

My Mom never really fit in Princeton.

She's a New Yorker through and through.

When I was 18, she said, "Go raise some money."

We painted a couple of houses or something

and I went and became a street musician in Europe.

That's the kinda thing she would always encourage me to do.

Very creative, wrote books.

All kinds of creative people on that side of the family.

I think I've told you this before,

when you were really little,

four, five, six, you went to so many plays all the time.

Peter Pan...

South Pacific, West Side Story.

I mean, Kristy and you, you both knew

the lyrics to every single Broadway song.

Yeah.

A lot of Kristy's friends

come and have lunch with me on this bench.

So it's like, "Let's go to Kristy's bench and have lunch."

And, you know, it's really good.

- I love the bench. -I love the bench.

You know, during that whole time, I mean, you were...

I don't know what we would have done without you.

There's no good thing to say when it sucks.

-I know. -It just sucks.

It sucks.

Anyway, there you go. But back to music.

I remember you guys had big parties.

-We had big parties. -And they went on for two days

-with the speakers on the roof. -We did.

And everybody was listening

-to great music. -We were, like, young.

Early 20s.

But your sense of adventure was magnetic and also paved the way.

Yeah.

Like, when you're like, "I'm going to Barbados

with a backpack." You know, to go live on the beach.

And then when you're like "I'm off to India."

It basically said to me that that's a possibility.

- Yeah. -I know it was important to you

that both Kristy and I knew

-there was a world outside of... - But yes, and--

...that suburban block that we lived on.

Definitely. You try and do the best you can, you know?

I don't know.

Remember in hockey we had

the lead puck and everything, remember?

And the 50 shots before dinner.

And all that stuff, it was great.

I loved playing hockey

because it was fun to be good at something,

and I loved playing hockey because it was with dad.

And I wanted to do stuff with dad.

- Yes. -But no matter how good I got,

like, it wasn't enough.

-It was, like, never enough. - That's true.

In the meantime, I was playing music.

-Yeah. -And--

-Happy. -Oh, man.

Every bit of, like, anger and frustration

and joy was coming out in music.

You never stopped drumming.

You drummed all the time when you were two, three, four.

It was like "du-du-du-du."

And you used to sit behind me in the car and...

It's like...

Like this all day long, for long car trips.

Like, "Trey!"

And then remember in the fifth grade,

you're getting kicked out of class?

-Yes. -That was why.

"Stop drumming, Trey!" And you couldn't.

And I became--

I got kicked out of chorus for drumming.

You must have been born with

just way too many notes in your brain.

And you'll spend a lifetime never getting them all out.

Then I looked at you up there, and I think, wow,

"He is so happy, and how great is that?"

It feels like everything just fell into place.

And the result I can read on other people's faces.

It's not just that I'm having fun.

It's that they are, you know what I mean? Or Page is.

I felt like that with Tom, like, in eighth grade

when we'd, like, write a song.

All of a sudden, we'd be like, "Oh!"

I thought it was great.

-A lot of things-- -It was scary at times.

I didn't like it at times,

because it was scary because it was too big.

I felt like you just were trapped in this madness,

and you couldn't see a way out.