It's Fish's 59th birthday today! How better to celebrate it than to hear him speak (often insightfully) on a host of different topics with a fellow drummer and fan Nick Ruffini in two episodes of the Drummer's Resource podcast. For example, in the first of the two episodes, episode 368 The Art Of Constant Evolution, beginning around minute 69, Fish talks about how the band was really hard on themselves and made fun of each other, and the importance of “embracing silence” in improvising. He also discusses how life-changing the No-Analysis-During-Shows band policy was.

He is very articulate as well when he talks about how, at times, for him, performing in Phish places him in “immediate contact” with whatever or wherever all of us come from, and how he loses his ego when he's as deeply connected with the music as is possible. He even suggests that when this occurs, it must be what it’s like to be dead, as he feels like his conscious brain is outside of him looking down on him saying,"That's great!" “Whatever 'God' is, It exists in music”, Fish says, and his losing his ego while improvising “happens regularly” in Phish’s music. (He doesn’t use the terms “Hose” or "IT" but he's clearly referring to the same Thing Trey and Mike were referring to when they told an interviewer about The Hose in 1994.)

And in the second episode, part 2 of The Art Of Constant Evolution, Fish discusses (among other things) his dissertation at Godard College, which was called “The Self-Teaching Guide To Drumming In Retrospect” but, hilariously, he doesn’t recommend anyone read it. He also mentions that the 12/29/17 Julius had "the greatest shuffle ever," and that since they had played it, he feels like he finally made it to Shangri-La.

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.