Fantastic, thanks for posting.

Hell yeah, love it when people harmonically dissect Phish. There is a whole lot more goin on than meets the ear and much kudos for you for doing the work. Think I'm actually gonna show this to a few of my music professors, a lot of the jazz guys tend to blow off Phish as just a jam band but they fail to realize that they are doing the things that many of the jazz greats were doing, on the fly too!

This is AWESOME. Definitely not TLDR material, especially for people with any knowledge of how music works.

thanks all for the kind words -- i felt a little skeezy self-linking in a forum post, but it wouldn't do to post 4,000 words here, and this is my intended audience. so: tongue bitten, pride swallowed.

Holy cow, this is GREAT. As a musician, I love how you broke it down.

"Short version: Phish’s music is a lot more complex than it used to be, but less complicated."

I think that sentence explains Phish 3.0 in a few simple words. Congrats, sir. As a writer and editor, I say you did a great job.

As a phan, I say you did a PHENOMENAL job.

Although I have done my best to understand music theory, I have to admit it's beyond me. I can *hear* some of the big moves of 20th century music--for example, the response by minimalists such as Steve Reich to the legacy of atonality--but I get lost in trying to follow more specific investigations of musical moves. I'm afraid I still don't really understand the far reaches of bitonality. But I do know writing, and this blog is very well written. And even more compellingly, I know something about aesthetic bliss, and this is a wonderful description:

"In the last few years I’ve grown to love a specific feeling that certain art gives me: something like semiotic overabundance, where a piece of art, or a piece of that piece, signifies or implies or is connected to so many different things, seems to move in so many directions, that I happily surrender the intellectual work of taxonomy and keeping track of what everything means, and experience a blissful dissolution of sense."

Vladimir Nabokov, in describing his goal in "Lolita," described aesthetic bliss as "this sense of being somehow, somewhere connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm."

I love a lot of things about Phish, but especially aesthetic bliss, especially "a blissful dissolution of sense." Great job, @waxbanks!

"Mike is probably home"

I love this, thank you a thousand times.

Makes sense - even to a non-musician like me. Excellent!

Incredible analysis and descriptions!!! You really put into words many of the things i've been thinking and feeling since they came back. Your writing has lots of meat on the bone man, great stuff, thanks!