Trey Anastasio, guitarist, composer, and songwriter who helped launch the groundbreaking improv rock ensemble Phish in 1983, has ventured down numerous musical routes. These span atonal fugues and intricate arrangements within Phish, daring free jazz explorations on his initial solo outing Surrender to the Air (1996), and partnerships with artists including Tom Marshall, Les Claypool, Philip Glass, Stewart Copeland, and further collaborators. Many of those endeavors unfolded during the 2000s, an era marked by Phish’s repeated extended pauses and separations. Following the 2002 appearance of his glossy, pop-leaning self-titled solo album, Anastasio assembled Oysterhead—a trio that included Claypool and Copeland—and built a sizable solo ensemble that backed him across both recordings and performances. When Phish resumed activity in the 2010s, he sustained his independent musical explorations, among them Lonely Trip and Mercy, two albums he created largely by himself amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Born Ernest Joseph Anastasio III in 1964, Anastasio enrolled at Princeton Day School in Princeton, New Jersey, where he first encountered future lyric partner Tom Marshall. During his teenage years he assisted his mother Dina in composing material for children’s recordings. While attending the University of Vermont he joined bassist Mike Gordon, drummer Jon Fishman, and guitarist Jeff Holdsworth to establish Phish. After a one-semester suspension from the school for an ill-fated prank, Anastasio moved to the experimental Goddard College near Burlington, where he trained rigorously under composer Ernie Stires and developed Phish’s complex early repertoire. Holdsworth soon departed, making way for keyboardist Page McConnell.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Phish served as Anastasio’s chief creative vehicle, with his compositions evolving from extended prog-flavored pieces such as the mid-’80s track “You Enjoy Myself” toward the tighter, though still elaborate, songs on Rift (1993). As the band placed greater weight on collective improvisation, Anastasio’s written charts gradually receded. In 1996 he assembled and produced Surrender to the Air, a large-ensemble free jazz project featuring Sun Ra saxophonist Marshall Allen, organist John Medeski, avant-garde guitarist Marc Ribot, experimental drummer Bob Gullotti, and additional players. Although credited as leader, Anastasio participated on equal footing with the downtown veterans.
The shift in Anastasio’s output from composition-driven to improvisation-driven work reached full expression in 1997 and 1998 via The Story of the Ghost and The Siket Disc, two Phish albums shaped from extended group jams guided by producer John Siket. His continuing work with Tom Marshall yielded an abundance of new songs exceeding what Phish could absorb into their already vast concert catalog. Anastasio presented some of this material with his newly formed side trio yet sensed he was still restraining himself. After Phish delivered a hugely attended New Year’s performance in Big Cypress, Florida, the 2000 release Farmhouse arrived, fully written and produced by Anastasio; nevertheless, amid the band’s increasingly scattered live shows, Phish elected to enter an open-ended hiatus starting in October of that year.
Anastasio immediately turned to scoring an arrangement of the Phish composition “Guyute,” one of his final multi-sectional pieces, for the Vermont Youth Orchestra alongside mentor Ernie Stires. Once that piece premiered he toured with a horn-augmented iteration of his side trio and introduced nearly a dozen fresh songs, many revisiting the intricate constructions of earlier years. He next composed and recorded an album with Oysterhead, the power trio uniting Anastasio, Primus bassist Les Claypool, and former Police drummer Stewart Copeland, thereby opening another phase of his career. The Oysterhead experience proved exploratory rather than lasting. By early 2002 Anastasio prepared his first proper solo album for Elektra; the groovy, sleek self-titled record appeared that April, after which he embarked on an extensive U.S. tour.
The live double album Plasma surfaced in April 2003, documenting more than two hours of material from Anastasio’s 2002 North American summer and fall dates, with seven previously unheard originals and several covers interspersed throughout. The all-instrumental Seis de Mayo followed in April 2004, then Shine in 2005 and Bar 17 in 2006. The interim yet potent The Horseshoe Curve, drawn from sessions spanning 2004 to 2007, emerged in 2007 while Anastasio completed a court-ordered drug rehabilitation program. The cohesive Time Turns Elastic, recorded with Don Hart, appeared in 2009. TAB at the Tab, a concert recording of the traditional quartet expanded to a septet with extra horns, was captured at Atlanta’s Tabernacle Theater and issued in 2010. After nearly two years of Phish touring, Anastasio reentered the studio and delivered Traveler.
Phish stayed active through the 2010s, maintaining regular tours, releasing archival live sets, and unveiling the new studio album Fuego in 2014. In 2015 the Grateful Dead enlisted Anastasio to stand in for Jerry Garcia at their final concerts, titled Fare Thee Well; the Chicago Soldier Field performances appeared as a live album that November. That autumn Anastasio also issued Paper Wheels, a Trey Anastasio Band album steeped in the atmosphere of mid-’70s Grateful Dead. In 2019 a large-scale live collection arrived as TAB at the Fox Theater, drawn from two nights at Oakland’s Fox Theater in November 2017; the release presented both complete shows, totaling more than five hours and surveying every era of Anastasio’s career. After hinting at a new undertaking late that year, he introduced the band Ghosts of the Forest, whose debut album surfaced in April 2019. With touring halted by the pandemic, Anastasio devoted his time to writing and recording a series of unpolished, lo-fi solo pieces released that July as Lonely Trip. He maintained his solo direction on 2022’s Mercy, his first collection composed entirely of acoustic songs.
