Deep Album Cuts Vol. 382: Phish
Phish is one of 2025's nominees for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside Bad Company, the Black Crowes, Mariah Carey, Chubby Checker, Joe Cocker, Billy Idol, Joy Division/New Order, Cyndi Lauper, Mana, Oasis, Outkast, Soundgarden, and the White Stripes. I believe we're finally finding out who's gonna get inducted in a week or two.
Phish deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):
1. First Tube
2. Waste
3. Axilla (Pt. II)
4. The Squirming Coil
5. Insects
6. You Enjoy Myself
7. Ghost
8. Crowd Control
9. Llama
10. If I Could
11. All Things Reconsidered
12. Theme From The Bottom
13. Farmhouse
14. Guelah Papyrus
15. Dinner And A Movie
16. Horn
17. Thunderhead
Tracks 6 and 15 from Junta (1989)
Track 4 from Lawn Boy (1990)
Tracks 9 and 14 from A Picture of Nectar (1992)
Tracks 11 and 16 from Rift (1993)
Tracks 3 and 10 from Hoist (1994)
Tracks 2 and 12 from Billy Breathes (1996)
Track 7 from The Story of the Ghost (1998)
Track 5 from The Siket Disc (1999)
Tracks 1 and 13 from Farmhouse (2000)
Track 17 from Round Room (2002)
Track 8 from Undermind (2004)
Phish isn't a band that really has casual fans. There are a whole lot of people whose musical world revolves around Phish, and almost everyone else has either never heard Phish or does not care for what they have heard. Hit singles were never really their thing, although I did enjoy "Down with Disease" and "Free" when they were briefly on the radio in the '90s. So I've always kind of kept an open mind to the idea that I might enjoy Phish, especially after hearing that they covered albums like Little Feat's Waiting For Columbus and Talking Heads' Remain In Light in concert.
Often, if a band is beloved for their concerts and has a canon of live favorites that weren't singles, I really try to build my deep cuts playlist around those songs and maybe include selections from their official live albums. But I decided to go in the opposite direction here and just stick to Phish's studio albums, and pick the songs that appeal to me the most without paying much attention to which songs the band plays live the most, and hopefully come up with something that other Phish neophytes would enjoy. Maybe I'll see a show or hear a bootleg that blows my mind one of these days, but for the time being, I want to engage with their studio catalog, even if any fan could probably easily tell me what night they played a version that's far better than the one here.
Some of these songs are live staples, though -- "You Enjoy Myself" is the most played song in the band's catalog, and "The Squirming Coil" and "Llama" are also way up there. Farmhouse's title track has more than twice as many streams as any other Phish song, and "Waste" and "If I Could" are also in their Spotify top 10, despite none of those being in the band's top 100 most performed songs, which is interesting, the fanbase seemingly is embracing some of the studio stuff independently from the live repertoire.
Like my Jay-Z playlist, I decided to just focus on the albums up through the mid-2000s hiatus, since it doesn't seem like a lot of really essential career-defining stuff is from the later post-comeback years. That being said, they really took a few albums to get a good sound in the studio, I kind of understand why their live show became the focal point from very early on, but by Billy Breathes and Farmhouse they definitely started to figure things out in the studio more. These guys are undeniably talented musicians, though. My favorite Page McConnell piano moments are on "Theme From The Bottom," my favorite drumming from Jon Fishman is on "Crowd Control," some of my favorite guitar by Trey Anastasio is on "First Tube," and Mike Gordon's melodic basslines hold a lot of songs together, particularly "Farmhouse."
For a band that cares about lyrics enough that Trey Anastasio regularly collaborates with a lyricist who's not in the band, Tom Marshall, some of their lyrics are just incredibly awful, and a lot of the time here the challenge was finding songs that had great musical elements but no lyrics that made me cringe or reminded me of Barenaked Ladies. So I wasn't shy about including some instrumentals like "First Tube" (the only piece of music by Phish that's ever been nominated for a Grammy), "All Things Reconsidered," or "Insects" from the nearly-all-instrumental The Siket Disc. That album is comprised of outtakes from sessions for The Story of the Ghost, which was engineered by John Siket. Very little Phish music sounds remotely like indie rock, but it makes sense that I like the sound of their albums more once they started working with Siket, who'd done a lot of work with Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo, and Farmhouse co-producer Bryce Goggin, who'd worked on seminal Pavement and Sebadoh albums.
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