An Interview with Trey

[This interview is presented for educational purposes only and is reprinted without permission unless otherwise noted. This interview is copyrighted by the original owners and will be removed promptly upon request.] rec.music.phish › Interview with Trey, Olympia, 4/25/92 1 post by 1 author Shelly Culbertson 6/17/92 [Here is the interview with Trey from April. We sat outside on the grass while people played frisbee and talked in the afternoon before the show. TA is, of course, Trey. BW is my friend Beth Whaley, who plays flute and saxophone and (coincidentally) attended a jazz workshop in Massachusetts, "Jazz in July", along with Trey several years ago. SC is me. Feedback is welcome....] Interview with Trey Anastasio, Olympia, Washington 4/25/92 SC: First of all, I wanted to ask you about the new songs. Were most of those written in Ireland? TA: I wrote something like ten songs in Ireland when I went over there. I just brought an acoustic guitar and I brought stacks and stacks of lyrics from Tom, I didn't write any lyrics. On the plane over there I started flipping through them and saw a couple of them that caught my eye right away; actually, the first one was NICU (sometimes called In an Intensive Care Unit). That little melody; as usual, that wasn't the one that jelled very easily. But anyway, the whole time I was there I was writing songs - Maze, Rift,...some of them then required more work sitting at a piano when I got home. I made a cassette tape over there of just acoustic guitar and general ideas for the songs, and then I went over to Tom's house when I got back, and we sat around and wrote new lyrics together and came up with other little ideas and made some four track tapes. SC: How did All Things Reconsidered come about? TA: That I wrote a while ago. Somebody said it sounded like The Asse Festival - in a sense, it does sound like The Asse Festival; it's the same form, but to me it doesn't sound any more like The Asse Festival than saying that everything by Bach sounds the same. It's the same style and it's definitely true that there's similarity in the form, but after The Asse Festival I wanted to do another theme and variation in that style with a different theme, so that was that. I actually didn't know it was the All Things Considered theme until later <laughs>. Somebody said something and I said, "Hey! It is!" SC: So of all the new songs, Mound was written by Mike, and all the rest were -- (*note - I forgot to ask about Weigh at this point, which I would have thought that Mike wrote.) TA: Myself and Tom. Except for Brother - well it depends on what you count as new. SC: I'm thinking of this tour. TA: This tour - the rest were myself. Maze was myself with Tom's lyrics, Rift was myself with Tom's lyrics, NICU, My Friend My Friend - that's kind of two songs in one: the My Friend My Friend intro was a thing that I wrote on acoustic guitar, and then "My friend, my friend, he's got a knife" was another song that I wrote and then we put them together. SC: How about Sleeping Monkey? TA: Sleeping Monkey was myself and Tom....what else is there that's new? SC: Silent in the Morning -- TA: Silent in the Morning. That's going to be really good on the album. [Just then a crowd of dogs came by.] It's the dog pack! Some of these dogs are the ones on the dog tape. Shasta was there. SC: By the way, I wanted to ask about a version of Esther I've heard with completely different lyrics. TA: Oh really? Is it a really early one? Oh yeah, I changed the lyrics. A lot of our stuff - we kind of look at things as ever- evolving...well, not ever-evolving, but starting out as evolving things, so we're always changing things around. Fluffhead went through about eight different evolutions before it became what it is. On the first Fluffhead tape there's just the song Fluffhead without anything else. Then I wrote the first middle thing, and it was that for a while, and then all this other stuff... So, Esther, I wasn't really that happy with the lyrics to Esther. I thought it was almost there but we went into the studio and recorded it with the old lyrics and I didn't like it. Then I went home for Christmas and at Christmas I re-wrote the rest of the lyrics and then I came back and changed the lyrics in the studio. I didn't even remember that we were doing it live before that, but I guess we were. SC: It sort of changes the outcome of the story. TA: Oh yeah - what happens? She ends up back at the thing?... SC: ...and all the souls come up out of the ocean. TA: Oh, that's right. It's too happy. I wanted something a little more evil. It's too cheery; couldn't deal with it. So I eviled it. SC: I'd like to ask you about studying with Ernie Stires. TA: I was at UVM and I was a music major; I wasn't that happy with my situation there. I went looking for a composer to study with. I wanted to study composition; I thought the best way to do it would be to study with a composer. So I just started asking people, found a few names and ended up meeting Ernie, went out there and just hit it off with him right away. A lot of it is a friendship as much as a teaching thing. I listened to his music a lot and learned a lot from his music. He is a big influence on me. I think if you heard his stuff you'd know what I meant. He's incredible; he's great. He's not into rock'n'roll at all. He's into big band jazz, that's his thing that he was raised on and that's his kind of music. He's the one who introduced me to a lot of that stuff. I just learned a lot from hanging around his house -- I'll go to his house and we'll just sit there all day and drink coffee and listen to music. He had me write some two-part things and three-part things and then he taught me about fugues and stuff like that, and then he had me do a jazz arrangement: Flat Fee that we did with the horns I did pretty much under his wing. It was really for a much bigger horn section than that, so it wasn't doing it justice doing it with the horn tour, but that was the closest we've ever had to having horns. That was writing out a full chart, the whole thing, the bass and everything; which was really good, because it got me working on orchestral scores, full score paper, each instrument on a big sheet of paper. And then I started doing that kind of stuff for the band, like Foam was all written out -- except for the solo section in the middle, which is a solo over changes -- it's completely written out. The bass and drum stuff is sort of written out; it's over a latin beat, pretty much. SC: Mike had something interesting to say about how the structure of composed music can be necessary in order to arrive at the moment when improvisation can occur. TA: I think so. It gets you to a certain point. When you go through a thing like David Bowie, which is all this worked-out stuff for three or four straight minutes of playing complicated lines, the release when it gets to an improv section is great for everyone in the band -- you kind of break through to a part where you can play anything you want. Without that lead-up to it I don't think it would be the same. That's something that we do in a lot of our songs and have always kind of done. But I like all different kinds of music - I like classical music and I like improv music, so I like to put it all in. It's just another one of those levels. Split Open and Melt is another one that I did on orchestral score like that. It's fun writing like that. SC: That sounds so good with horns! TA: I had that all [written out] -- the bass line at the bottom, and then you work with a section -- you can look at the music in a vertical sense and a horizontal sense. It's hard to explain to somebody who hasn't done it, sometimes; you can stop the music in time and see what harmonic structure is going on between what's happening in the bass, what's happening in the piano, what's happening in the guitar, what's happening in the horns. Without writing things on paper you can't do that. BW: Did you do that on piano first? TA: On piano. Because piano is right there, the bass is at the bottom - whereas a guitar the notes are all over the place.

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