“Summer’s coming and I’d like a revue,” sings Trey Anastasio in the first chorus of the first song of the first solo album of the rest of his life. The request stays airborne above a musical undercurrent propelled by rhythms reminiscent of, say, Bermuda.

Or maybe the Virgin Islands, where the Anastasio family is vacationing while dad rests up before the release of his self-named disc. The singer is also making time for an interview or two, when he’s not “drinking Bushwackers and lying in the sun,” happy to escape mud season in Vermont.

Tranquil setting aside, the length and breadth of the subsequent conversation makes clear just how busy Anastasio’s mind is these days. Trey Anastasio is teeming with an ocean of styles as well, from the opening waves of “Alive Again” to the placid acoustic view of “At The Gazebo” and on to churning, funkier tracks like the 11-minute “Last Tube”.

The guitarist is palpably excited about letting the horns, organ, and percussion of his own Cayman revue wash over audiences this summer. However, while Anastasio’s musical ideas may be running plenty deep, another fact becomes as clear as the cool Caribbean water right now: There’s not a lot of Phish in his sea.

Robert Beverly: Phish’s hiatus has meant anything but a break for you. What’s the longest break you’ve taken from the music business in the past few years?

Trey Anastasio: I would probably say never. I’ve definitely been busier since the last Phish show than I have been in the last three or four years, as far as non-touring stuff. I was able to do an orchestral piece, then Oysterhead (with Primus bassist Les Claypool and Police drummer Stewart Copeland), and now this. It’s more just a break from Phish than anything else. This band that I’m working with now is something I’ve been dreaming about for year.

With this band and record, you’re really trying to explore the coexistence of structured parts and room for improvisation. Can you tell us about that, and whether the idea evolved any as it moved from your initial thoughts into execution with the band?

If you listen to “Last Tube”, that is the closest I’ve come to the music I’ve been hearing in my head for years. I’d seen King Sunny Ade many years ago, and there were 23 people in the band. There were three guitar players, and they all plays with small patterns, interlaced into one really cool guitar part.

To me, it’s music as communal glue. It’s the same concept that makes orchestral music the greatest artistic accomplishment of European music, to get 110 people to play at the same time and create this gorgeous sound on all levels — texturally as well as developmentally and harmonically.

The big band is the best example of popular music coinciding with art, and since then, popular music has been on a downslide.

My dream has been to combine those elements with band music, like a dance band. The big band is the best example of popular music coinciding with art, and since then, popular music has been on a downslide.

Whether it speaks to people in my day and age … I think that’s a stylistic question, not a content question. And I’m also trying to combine that with group improvisation, because that’s where some of the most exciting moments I’ve been involved with have happened.

That Surrender To The Air album involved the same idea, but I didn’t have the time. It sorta worked, and it sorta didn’t. But this time, I’ve been slowly building it toward what I originally conceived; we’re up to nine people now, and I’m hoping summer will be it.

At first, this project reminded me of Paul Simon’s exploration into African music, but you sound like what you’re after here is less Simon and more like Gershwin.

You’re talking about legends of American music, and I’m just talking about … well, in concept, I know what you’re saying. Duke Ellington, Gershwin, they took the popular music of their time and combined it with what had developed in orchestral music and jazz.

The thing Duke Ellington did, whenever somebody joined his band, was to incorporate their personality into the band. That’s something I’ve tried hard to do. When someone joins, the first thing I do is sit down with them in the bam [Anastasio’s recording space] and say, “What’ve you been practicing? What’s your best stuff? What’s the stuff you’ve played since you were 12 years old?” And then incorporate that.

So ideally, the band becomes an atmosphere where people feel completely comfortable. They’re not naked, they’re playing their stuff. And that would be the key, I think, with stepping from the tunes themselves into the world of improvisation, because then they feel comfortable to take risks.

About the horn charts you write — how do you do that, in terms of getting the parts from your head onto paper for the band?

Today I’m writing some stuff down, but a lot of it has involved skipping the paper. For instances, when we did the Giant Country Horns with Phish, it was all meticulously charted. But I was almost overdoing it in that sense, since I had less experience with charts. It wasn’t coming out as well as if I just get the four of them together and we have the opportunity to experiment with voicing and whatnot.

Electric instruments are weird, you know? There are no actual overtones. So it just doesn’t sound the same as when you get four horn players standing next to each other. Overtones are an amazing thing. It’s a huge part of the warmth. That’s why in orchestras, the hall that you’re playing is so incredibly important. It’s like another instrument; it’s the overtones that make it sound musical.

For this record, the chart for “At The Gazebo” was done, and nothing changed when it went to the horn section. But with other stuff, it varies. Sometimes I’ll just sing stuff to them. This way, they can play it for me, and I can make fine-tuning adjustments that I wouldn’t have made doing it all myself.

I think it must be funny for people, because I start playing these tunes out long before they’re done — changing lyrics, putting new parts on. I feel like that’s only legal until the album comes out, otherwise I’ll go on changing stuff forever. But that being said, I very much plan on having a lot of new material in between the album and the tour.

Your fans must be happy to feel like that’re actually a part of, or at least witness to, some of that process of new material evolving.

I can think of two specific times when I went to far with changing something, and got complaints from people. One was with Phish — I think it was “Theme From The Bottom”. We had this climb up; it was very Phish-esque, a 30-second buildup to kick off a jam, and we took it out, thinking maybe it was just too mental.

Some guy wrote a letter, saying “What? That was my favorite part!” He made a good enough argument for why it was cool, so we said, “Oh, OK” and put it back in.

With this band, it happened when I took a lyric out at one point, and everyone hated it the new way, so I put it back again. It happens.

I’m sure part of what you like about this project is the way that playing with new people always leads to new ideas and possibilities. Have you noticed that the way you play, or the way you sing, has changed in this new context?

I think it has. It’s been much easier to change in the last year than in the last six or seven years. That would probably be better answered by a big fan, because I don’t have the outside perspective. But from where I sit, a lot has happened since Phish stopped.

I’ve played with so many musicians since then. To write and play the orchestral music, and then to play with Les and Stewart … I’d have long conversations with Stewart about how the Police wrote songs and I learned a lot. One of the things he said was that Sting would start writing without an instrument.

I’d have long conversations with Stewart about how the Police wrote songs and I learned a lot. One of the things he said was that Sting would start writing without an instrument. That’s why he wrote those songs that were so memorable — first they’d stand by themselves as a melody.

He’d start by singing a line. It wasn’t until the song had started developing that he’d reach for the closest instrument. That’s why he wrote those songs that were so memorable — first they’d stand by themselves as a melody. And that’s so utterly different from the way I do things (laughs). I always think music first.

You’re the father of two children now. I’m guessing your own creativity and your childhood in general were enhanced by your parents’ professions (one worked for Sesame Street, one for the Princeton Review Board). Do you think your daughters’ development is affected by what their father does for a living?

Probably. But there’s always the flip side to that. In terms of the guitar, to my kids, the guitar is the evil intruder. I pick it up, I zone out. So when I pick it up, they come over and slam their hands down on it! But I so much like making things in general, bouncing ideas around. It’s the basis of my friendship with Fish [drummer John Fishman]. So that instinct ends up coming out (around my kids) in enormous sandcastles or weird stories.

I talked with John Mayer last week, and unintentionally, our conversation kept winding back to the benefits and pitfalls of being an artist in the internet age. Does the growth of the internet and lightning-fast distribution of material between fans affect how you approach your work?

I love it. I understand the complaints, but I really disagree with them in a big way.

I feel like it’s the Patti Smith song, “People Have The Power”. If anybody can hear your music, whether via downloading or mp3’s or whatever, it’s a blessing — if you can keep moving forward, and I think people should be doing that anyway. It’s like a kick in the ass — you can’t write one hit song and lean on it for your whole life.

Most of the time, if it’s good, people are going to buy it anyway. For me, it’s been an incredible blessing, because it can be a tool. I love the fact that people are out there trading stuff around and critiquing it.

Last week, I had this idea about how to present new material lin a different way. We’d perform, say, a 60-minute set of new material, but we’d play the set three times a night for two nights. The crowd could tape the sets and then go back and decide the best takes of the new songs by voting for them online.

One person could say, “I really like the guitar solo from the second version on the first night, but I really like the singing on the first version from the second night …”

And everyone would have to have all the arguments that I would’ve had in the studio about what to choose. They’d figure it out completely by themselves and then inform me what the 60 minutes is going to be. That way, they can have the live versions, and I would mix [the selected takes] so it sounds the way I want it to sound.

Last week, I had this idea about how to present new material lin a different way. We’d perform, say, a 60-minute set of new material, but we’d play the set three times a night for two nights. The crowd could tape the sets and then go back and decide the best takes of the new songs by voting for them online.

You could never do that without the internet. It might just end up being a mess, but it’d be a cool experiment.

I’ve also wondered what it would be like if you wrote music for a night like that and played it, and then that was it. It wouldn’t be as much an individual vision, but it’s like what has happened to Charlie Parker and Django Reinhardt over the years. They haven’t been the ones to pick what’s good and what isn’t good — history picked it. Now you always see compilations. Charlie Parker didn’t pick what’s on those. Sometimes I think the musician is the worst person to pick it.

So instead of complaining about the internet and running away from it, why not use it to your advantage? Instead of waiting for history to sort it out, you could essentially let history sort it out in a really short period of time, and then you’d have an album!

You’ve been associated with some very creative song and album titles over the years, so I was surprised to see that your solo disc’s name is about as simple as it gets.

There were a lot of titles tossed around, but here’s my thought process on that. I had two choices. I’m always walking around coming up with crazy names for albums and stuff. So part of me thought, “Boy, this is a missed opportunity to use one of those titles.”

On the other hand, I felt like you only have one chance to do that [name it after yourself], and I plan on doing a lot more albums.

Also, a lot of my heroes did that. Peter Gabriel did four of them. Paul Simon. Elton John. Jerry Garcia. So at the last minute, I was like, “Oh, what the hell.”

Shifting from the cover of your album to cover albums, if you were going to do a disc of another songwriter’s songs, what one writer would you pick?

Phish played a lot of covers, in part because we were living out there, and people wanted to hear something new every night. Three tours before we stopped, we said, “OK, we’ll do a new cover every night,” which we did. We learned whatever we were listening to backstage, or what was on the radio, and we’d just do it. It was fun, but it started to become symbolic of … I’m giving you the long answer …

Basically, I’ve been down that road to such a degree, and I have so much more stuff I wanna do. I feel like there’s this desperate feeling in the air, like nothing new is happening. So if I were gonna answer that question, I would have to say, “I don’t wanna do it right now.”

So essentially, you feel like there’s no time for that kind of thing.

There isn’t, that’s it. That was part of the whole thing with taking a hiatus from Phish. We were always talking about taking risks and going out on a limb, and yet by having such an enormous scene, there was a very strong inertia toward somewhat of a familiarity, you know? No matter how hard you try, the song from eight years ago is still going to carry the day at the show.

I’d still say, with that in mind, that we were mixing it up more than any other band. But in the end, the real risk was not to tour. We kept talking about risk, risk, risk. It became clear that the truth was, “You wanna take a risk? Then throw out the whole songlist, throw out the band, throw out the mythology, and start a new band.” Now, there’s a risk — start with nothing.

Yet by having such an enormous scene, there was a very strong inertia toward somewhat of a familiarity, you know? No matter how hard you try, the song from eight years ago is still going to carry the day at the show.

And now that I’ve done that, it felt so good that the next level of risk is to really look forward, and from this point on, play music that you’ve never heard before. That’s not completely true on this album; some of it is just good old rocking tunes because I like that stuff. But some of it is different.

I’m not claiming to do this, but I’m hoping to do this. You start to feel a responsibility to the world at large not to rehash old stuff. But, you know, them’s fighting words! A million people could read this article and be like, “What the hell?” and I’m aware of that.

But if you’re going to be true to the ambitions behind why you started writing songs in the first place, maybe sometimes that’s the only thing to do.

And still, it’s a balancing act. For this album, there were maybe 25 songs that got honed down, and a lot of the ones that got left off were more unique in a certain way than what landed on the album, but they didn’t mean as much emotionally to me in the end. I’m trying to get this music out simply because I’ve been walking around imagining it for so long, and I haven’t heard anybody do it, and I just so desperately want to hear it.

The goal for this music is that there is some unique stuff going on in there, and yet it still carries on an emotional level just as well as anything else on the album, to my ear.

So that’s the idea: to keep pushing to play music that’s emotional, because that’s what music is supposed to be, but which is also unique enough to be honest — an honest expression of what’s going on inside the artist.

I suppose that’s about as much as someone could ask for, really.

Yeah, you wouldn’t think that you’d even have to talk about it, would you?

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(This interview was first published in the Music Monitor, May 2002, “Solo Swim: Robert Beverly takes a few laps with Phish’s Trey Anastasio.” Many thanks to the Monitor’s then-editor [now Record Store Day empress] Carrie Colliton for her OK to share it here.)