Trey Anastasio wrote "You Enjoy Myself" in Florence, Italy, in the summer of 1985, while he and Jon Fishman were busking their way across Europe. The title came from an Italian man who wrapped his arms around them near the Uffizi museum and announced, with complete sincerity, "You know, when I am with you, you enjoy myself." That grammatical wreck of a phrase became the song's name, which tells you something important about how Phish thinks. The whole point was never the words. The whole point was the feeling underneath the words, the thing that can't quite be said, only played. Decades on, "You Enjoy Myself," universally shortened to YEM, remains the most frequently performed song in Phish's catalog. That distinction is the argument. No song survives that kind of repetition without being genuinely inexhaustible.
The first live version landed on February 3, 1986, just months after Trey came home from Europe. A stripped-down a cappella sketch appeared that same year on The White Tape, the band's 1986 demo cassette. The full-band studio recording came later, cut at Euphoria Sound Studios in Revere, Massachusetts in 1988, engineered by Gordon Hookailo and mastered by Bob Ludwig at Masterdisk in New York. Phish produced it themselves. That self-released cassette, Junta, came out in May 1989, and YEM sat second in the running order, right after "Fee," which is about as close to a throat-clearing opener as Phish ever wrote. Trey Anastasio on guitar, Mike Gordon on bass, Page McConnell on keys, Jon Fishman on drums: the same four people who would still be playing it three and a half decades later. The studio version clocks in at nine minutes and forty-seven seconds, which sounds like a long time until you realize it's essentially a blueprint, a set of instructions for something much larger.
What the studio version can't capture is the architecture that Phish fans have spent years mapping. The community named the sections themselves: "Pre-Nirvana," "Nirvana," "The Note," "The Second Note," "The Charge." That taxonomy didn't come from the band or a press release. It came from people who listened obsessively enough to notice that the song has internal weather systems, pressure fronts and releases that recur across hundreds of performances but never land in quite the same place twice. The song's lone lyric, a couplet delivered before Trey and Mike Gordon jump on trampolines in tandem, generated its own acronym in the fan community: "WATSIYEM," standing for "What are they saying in 'You Enjoy Myself'?" The words appear to be "Boy. Man. God. Shit," followed by "Wash Uffizi drive me to Firenze," which is either a meditation on transcendence or a fond memory of a Florentine street corner, or both. Phish never clarified. The mystery became part of the ritual.
The version that introduced YEM to the wider world came out on June 27, 1995, when Elektra released A Live One, the double album that served as Phish's first official live document. The YEM on that record, running just under twenty-one minutes, sits at track five on disc one, between "Montana" and "Chalk Dust Torture," and functions as the disc's gravitational center. The album was drawn from the 1994 tour and went on to become the band's first platinum-certified release. Rolling Stone later ranked YEM at No. 85 on its list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time. That is a remarkable thing to say about a song that had already been performed hundreds of times by then and would be performed hundreds more. It suggests the editors understood, even if they couldn't quite articulate it, that YEM is a moving target. The A Live One version was the best available photograph of something that keeps moving.
Trey understood this too, and said so plainly. In the New York Post on January 1, 1999, he called YEM the song that "sums up our first five years." That quote came during a period when the band was already well into their second decade, which means he was looking back at the song as a kind of origin document, the place where Phish figured out who they were. The New Year's Eve 1995 show at Madison Square Garden, later released officially in 2005, was named by Rolling Stone as one of the "Greatest Concerts of the '90s." In September 2009, Trey performed an orchestral arrangement of YEM with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall, handing the song's architecture to an ensemble that had no prior relationship with a "Nirvana" section. That version is worth tracking down if only to hear what the song sounds like when it's stripped of its usual context and rebuilt from scratch.
What YEM actually means to the jam-band world is harder to pin down than its chart position or its play count, because it operates differently than most songs that get called touchstones. It has no chorus to sing along to, no radio-friendly hook, no verse-chorus-verse structure that a casual listener can grab onto. What it has is a commitment to the idea that a song is a container, and that the contents are supposed to change. Every version is a negotiation between the composed architecture and whatever the room, the night, and the four people on stage are willing to risk. That is how Phish works, and YEM is where they proved it first. The count keeps going because the song keeps being worth it.
