Life Around Me Was a Solemn Dream

(Art by David Welker)

When I was dating a woman back in the mid-90s who was a dedicated Phishhead, she tried to get me into the band. Not with an intense regimen of forced listening to their oeuvre on a daily basis a la the Ludovico Treatment but with more gentle therapy. She'd play their music occasionally and we went to see them together in '94. I abetted her efforts by listening to their stuff of my own volition on the odd occasion.

While I didn't become a huge fan, I did come to the conclusion that Hoist is pretty good little album. But that's as far as I got.

I made getting into Phish a little side project that I returned to now and again even after our relationship ended. Things changed in the fall of 1996 when the band released Billy Breathes.

I still have my copy of the album that I bought back in late '96 or early '97 and I honestly cannot recall what inspired the purchase. Perhaps I'd heard "Free" on the radio or some other tune at a party and was suitably impressed. Whatever the case, I had finally found some Phish that I genuinely loved.

The album is a refinement of Hoist in some ways. Trey Anastasio's guitar retains the fuzziness and more muscular sound from that album, for instance. Billy Breathes opens much like its predecessor too. Each album opens with a couple solid rock tunes before throwing in a slower, more introspective song. ("Waste" even has "if I could" in its lyrics)

There's no thrashgrass here and the mix enhances the emotional resonance of the songs which have largely stepped away from the goofy jamming aesthetic that largely defines their pre-Hoist stuff for me. The second half of the album has a fair amount of acoustic guitar and a beautiful, almost solemn feel.

"Prince Caspian" ends the album on a gorgeous note. The song has always felt a bit somber to me but perhaps that was just how I was feeling when I first heard it. Anastasio's brittle guitar sounds like it's struggling to find its way at the beginning as Mike Gordon's bass wanders melodically between the piano and drums.

The melody is carried along by a mid-tempo rhythm from Jon Fishman as the refrain of "Oh, to be Prince Caspian, afloat upon the waves" is sung with a great sense of yearning and that really hit me back in the late 90s. I really like how the song is layered with Page McConnell's piano bolstering the guitar plus all of those vocal harmonies. And there's that vaguely woodwind sounding synth here that seems to be absent from live versions which is a sprightly contrast to the otherwise gentle flow of the song.

After a raspy chorus of "Oh!" fades, the song slowly disassembles until one final piano note ushers in the band again with the guitar in the lead. All that had come before was just beautiful and this more muscular passage adds a little emotional ambiguity. Was something resolved? Is the narrator confidently moving forward? Or perhaps the tenderness of the preceding few minutes is being washed away...