Phish’s Trey Anastasio keeps creativity going after 40 years (2024)

LAS VEGAS — Phish has been performing for decades, but never has the band played the same show twice.

Over the 40 years since the band was formed at a Vermont college, Phish has amassed a reputation for its dedicated legion of fans and the dazzling light shows that accompany the improvisational jams. It follows, then, that the next stop for Phish is the new temple of immersive performances: the Sphere in Las Vegas.

Inaugurated with U2’s 40-show residency, the $2.3 billion arena will offer Phish fans something they’ve definitely never seen — or felt — before.

Mind-blowing visuals run up, down and across the floor-to-ceiling screen, designed to be manipulated in real time during the band’s long jams. A sound system features more than 1,600 speakers, allowing for a Trey Anastasio guitar line in one spot and a line from Page McConnell’s keys in another. Seats make you feel like you’re inside every drum kick from Jon Fishman or bass bomb from Mike Gordon.

On Thursday, Phish began a fun of four shows, with new visuals each night — and no repeated songs. Anastasio, the band’s frontman, says fans will be able to discern a theme across the shows — and find lots of Easter eggs. The shows will be the first to be livestreamed from the Sphere as well on LivePhish.com.

“I love getting up in the morning and creatively thinking of another cool thing to blow people’s minds,” Anastasio says.

Anastasio talked to The Associated Press about the teamwork that goes into these shows and how the band’s “giant rolling family” of fans keeps Phish going. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

AP: How much different is the Sphere, from both a sound and visual perspective?

ANASTASIO: It’s extremely unique to any venue that we’ve played before. One of the things that we’ve tried to do is sculpt our show so that we can be the band that we always are and play to our strengths while simultaneously using the technology to kind of expand the elements of the show — like the adventure and the breaking free of boundaries.

AP: What has the planning process been like for these shows, and were there things you decided not to use along the way?

ANASTASIO: Constantly. Daily. Yesterday. We dropped some things yesterday. It’s a constant process of waking up in the morning and looking for areas that we can improve. Everyone on the team is incredible, but the level of communication and proactive teamwork is hard to describe. And that’s what it takes to get something like this mounted. But yeah, there were ideas on the thematic narrative that was going to run through the four nights that went on for a month. Then we landed on one. Then it was what songs we’re going to play, what the (visual) content was going to be, how literal we wanted to make it. The answer to that is not very literal. Our fans are really smart and really involved, and we wanted to take a night or so for people to figure out what we were doing, plant a lot of Easter eggs and things like that. But it’s a never-ending daily improvement.

AP: U2 played 40 shows here that were mostly the same set list and visuals. Why was it important for you that the four shows be unique?

ANASTASIO: We’re a very different band. We’ve never repeated a set, and we didn’t want to start now. So we created four unique Sphere shows, top to bottom. There was a moment where we were discussing adding shows, because the tickets blew out pretty hard. And we decided as a team that they would be good, but not necessarily astounding — which is the level that we wanted to operate at — unless we just repeated the exact same show over again. The other thing is that Phish is such a wacky community that it kind of set up this scenario where a lot of people would probably want to come back. It’s just the way our fans are. It’s kind of like a big, giant rolling family or community.

AP: Have you always felt the same need to be creative and do new things, or has that changed as the band has kept going for four decades?

ANASTASIO: Always. Always. I just love the feeling of being part of a group, working on something creative, especially when it’s firing on all cylinders and people communicate well. It’s been one of the great joys of my life. That’s what a band is. A good band is a family. It’s a team. It’s communication and listening, and it’s hard to describe what a joy it is when you spend almost a year working on — like what we did last year (with a New Year’s Eve performance of the band’s epic set of “Gamehendge” songs, complete with stage actors and puppets). It’s like you feel like you’re alive. And the Sphere has been like that, too.

AP: What role do the fans play in what you’re doing?

ANASTASIO: Huge. It’s everything. The fans and the community are everything. We have intelligent, focused fans, and we have to honor that. You know, they’re not casual fans, and that’s really cool. It’s an honor, and it’s a massive responsibility. I feel like the longer this goes, the more we owe. The fans have supported us for 40 years — it’s our responsibility to keep raising the bar.