Music of Phish - Songwriting

Songwriting

Bassist Mike Gordon wrote a number of compositions for the Phish catalog, beginning perhaps with "Minkin" from The White Tape. His compositions are marked by humorous lyric content and a straightforward musical style. The title track of Round Room is a Gordon-penned piece with a more rhythmically and harmonically complex style.

Lead vocalist Trey Anastasio's boyhood friend and schoolmate Tom Marshall was the primary lyricist for Phish. Marshall, a biologist, has written lyrics ranging from arbitrarily assembled nonsequitur ("Stash") to the expressive ("Lifeboy"). The lyrical style was a distinctive part of Phish's music. Often Anastasio would pull lyrics for compositions from large notebooks of prose and poetry kept by Marshall, although the two have also directly collaborated on a number of songs. Anastasio is the next most prolific contributor of Phish lyrics, notably in the Gamehendge cycle. Both lyricists focused heavily on wordplay and musical language, with content taking a subordinate role to the sounds of the words and phrases.

On many album credits, multiple members or all the members of Phish are listed as composers. This has been the cause of some confusion. While not exclusively true, it is generally the case that Anastasio was the composer of most of these numbers, with other band members thereafter making contributions to the music to varying degrees of significance. These changes were sometimes subtle and sometimes major, and ranged from more or less immediate revisions to alterations that were years in the making.