New Trey Interview in The Believer Mag

Friday 07/01/2011 by pzerbo

NEW TREY INTERVIEW IN THE BELIEVER MAG

An outstanding, insightful new interview with Trey is now available in the July/August 2011 edition of The Believer magazine. An exceprt:

"Yeah, since Phish came back, I’ll just walk around backstage and ask everybody, “What do you want to play?” and people will say, “Oh, I want to sing this or that, ” until I have thirty or forty songs on a piece of paper. It’s like the writing. The set lists are all over the place. A mess. Then we go out onstage and just forget about it. We give a set list to Chris every night and he just laughs and rips it up. We never even play the first song."

If you liked this blog post, one way you could "like" it is to make a donation to The Mockingbird Foundation, the sponsor of Phish.net. Support music education for children, and you just might change the world.

7 comments - Link: http://phi.sh/b/4e0e0fd5

Comments

2011-07-01 5:15 pm, comment by Sherlock19

What an excellent article.

Score: 0

2011-07-01 10:47 pm, comment by Dressed_In_Gray

Best interview Trey has ever given. Amazing what a lack of smack can do for ya.

Score: 0

2011-07-02 3:36 am, comment by terms_of_the_dance

Horrible. Pandering. Fuck the Believer. And Dave Eggers.

Score: -1

2011-07-02 12:17 pm, comment by zappafrank1

Yes Trey! Get back to the composition!

Score: 0

2011-07-02 7:08 pm, comment by User_11821_

The points Trey made were great. My friends have collectively relayed each of his main ideas in this article. To hear it from Trey is an awesome validation!

Score: 0

2011-07-03 12:38 am, comment by TheDeerman

Very well done. The intro was a little overblown and stretched some facts out to the uneducated, but the content was incredible. Makes me want to write some songs.

Score: 0

2011-07-06 1:52 pm, comment by curleyfrei

I love this part. I just read about it in Parke Puterbaugh's Phish: The Biography:

BLVR: In what ways do you work with Phish on improvisation? Like, improvising as a full band, rather than as four individual soloists.

TA: We had this series of exercises that we developed, called “Including Your Own Hey.” It sounds weird, but we did them a lot. They start off with a pulse. [Snaps in time] The first level is, I play a four-note phrase [sings “do-do-do-do”]; Page [McConnell] is on my right, and he imitates it on the piano; Fish [Jon Fishman] does his best to play it on the drums; then Mike [Gordon] does it on the bass. Now everyone goes around the room in a circle and everyone starts one.

BLVR: It’s a copycat listening exercise.

TA: Yeah, and then there were more levels. The next level is, I start a pattern and then Page harmonizes with it. We make a jigsaw-puzzle pattern. Then Mike finds his place in the pattern, and Fish finds his place in it. And we’re all listening to each other. Now, only when you hear that all the other musicians have stopped searching, once you hear they’ve locked in with what you’re playing, you say, “Hey!” So, since we’re still listening so intently to each other, we should all say “Hey” at the same time, but if we don’t—if someone says “Hey” when you’re still searching, they’ve basically just told you, “I’m not listening to you.” So we found, very quickly, that it meant you had to always be listening to three people other than yourself. And the music, we found, improved immensely by not navel-gazing. So now the idea is, I’m not paying any attention to myself at all. I’m just responding to what they’re playing.

Then there were other levels, where you’d leave a hole in a musical phrase, and the other person could only play in that hole. That was called “Including Your Own Hey Hole.” [Laughs] So the bass lands, then the cymbal, then the guitar. [Sings, “Ba-bo-da-bing, ba-bo-da-bing.”]

I hope the interviewer realizes just how lucky he was to have gotten this interview. I could listen to that man talk about music all damn day.