Phish Reel in "Victor Disc"

Phish have already recorded an album's worth of material that may follow their 2002 comeback Round Room. While in New York last December for an appearance on Late Show With David Letterman, the band taped ninety minutes of improvised music and is calling the result the Victor Disc, after the session's engineer.

Phish frontman Trey Anastasio and keyboardist Page McConnell dropped by the downtown studio where the set was recorded after midnight the night before their Letterman taping. When they decided to play, they had to call the hotel to get drummer Jon Fishman and bassist Mike Gordon to join them.

"I called Mike -- he was in bed," Anastasio says. "But he came down and we recorded another album. He's always up for anything that is bizarre or weird or left of center. We were still playing at six in the morning, and I'm thinking, 'Boy, I should go to sleep. I gotta do Letterman tomorrow.' But we were cranking it out."

No release has been set for the recordings. Anastasio says the band might edit the jams into song-type structures as it did with the 1997 sessions that became the 2000 release, The Siket Disc. "It's not an album at this point," he says. "My guess is that it could be one of a couple of different things. There are germs of ideas that could turn into songs. But we're going to get together and listen to it again and see what it can be."

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Song Stories

“1999”

Prince | 1982

“I don’t consider myself a great poet,” Prince told Rolling Stone. “I just know I’m here to say what’s on my mind.” In the case of the apocalyptic party anthem “1999,” he was worried about then-president Ronald Reagan’s foreign policies. The song’s melody is based on a riff borrowed from the Mamas and Papas’ “Monday, Monday,” and Prince originally envisioned the first verse with three-part harmony but later split the vocals between himself and members of the Revolution. Because Warner Bros., with whom Prince was locked in a contractual battle, owned the original’s masters, Prince rerecorded the song and appropriately released that version in 1999.

More Song Stories entries »

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