Big Boat, the second Phish album produced by the prolific Bob Ezrin (Alice Cooper, Lou Reed, Pink Floyd) came out in October 2016, just days before the band’s Las Vegas Halloween run, though many of the songs had already been performed live during 2015’s summer tour.
The album begins with a rolling drum lick and fuzzy guitar chords that kick off drummer Jon Fishman’s “Friends.” Its lyrics describe a big boat “Ascending from the depths of our imagination” and ultimately “heading across the great ocean from our shores to outer space.”
Is this the big “boat” on the album’s cover art? The trippy, ethereal image was created by Beijing-based artist Fang Er as part of her 2008 series Don’t Touch Me!
Without a title track on the album, “Friends” may very well be that song. It’s been performed live only twice.
However, of the 13 tracks on the album, a couple of them have become live-show staples. Most notably, “No Men in No Man’s Land” has proved itself a heavy contender within Phish’s jam conduits. Phish.net lists nearly half of all “NMINML” performances in its jam chart, where their writers highlight noteworthy jams, including the song’s debut in Bend, Oregon (July 21, 2015), a year before the release of Big Boat.
“Blaze On,” the album’s fourth track, may read more like fan fiction than a Phish original with lyrics like, “You got your nice shades on, and the worst days are gone / So now the band plays on, you got one life, blaze on.” Also please note the track’s precise runtime of four minutes and twenty seconds. Heh.
The underlying theme to the album seems to be one of reflection, remorse, moving past the dark times, and embracing the good times ahead. Songs like “Home” and “Tide Turns” seem to be speaking specifically to Trey Anastasio’s successful recovery from drug abuse.
And “Miss You” is about Anastasio’s sister, Kristy Anastasio Manning, who passed away in April 2009 after a courageous battle with cancer. Anastasio spoke to Alan Paul at The Wall Street Journal in October 2006 about his song: “I was literally looking at my sister’s picture, and those words just came tumbling out. Some of the lines were an attempt to speak for my parents and their experience. But as direct as it was, I hope that people think about their own lives when they hear the song. I believe that the more specifically a songwriter writes, the more universal the sentiment becomes, and I hope that happens here.”
In his review at NPR, Mike Katzif writes, “What has changed this time out is the directness of Phish’s lyrics. In the past, the band (along with longtime co-lyricist Tom Marshall) often relied on zany, imaginative wordplay—or fashioned fantastical mythologies—that treated words and syllables as rhythms that ping off the tongue, yet favor cryptic absurdity. But for Big Boat, Ezrin reportedly challenged the band members to share more of themselves in their songs, resulting in expressions of sadness, anger, and earnest positivity as well as themes of aging and mortality, internal angst, and desire for social change.”
At the other end of the album’s spectrum is the Page McConnell song “I Always Wanted It This Way,” seemingly a tribute to early ’80s synth and prog.
Though the penultimate song, “More,” certainly has Ezrin’s lyrical influence and has come to fill the first-set closer position at Phish’s live shows quite nicely.
Now, let’s discuss the elephant in the room: Anastasio’s latest opus, the 13-minute “Petrichor.” The word, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, means “a pleasant, distinctive smell frequently accompanying the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather in certain regions.”
Sam Sodomsky writes of “Petrichor” on Pitchfork: “It might not be a track to convince the naysayers (or even, with its 13-minute runtime, to necessarily warrant a second play). But it’s the only moment on the album when Phish shows—and not just tells—that transcendence is possible, and that they’re willing to go there with us.”
The song itself may not stand up well against previous compositions like “YEM” or “Divided Sky,” but it has its own unique emotive peaks and valleys all the same. Is this Phish’s next big one? Perhaps not as much as Anastasio would hope. Is it just maybe a little too playful?
Perhaps more poetic and pedantic than other albums—I’m looking at you, Bob—Big Boat is not all sad, sappy ballads. Just mostly. Tracks like “No Men,” “Breath and Burning,” “I Always Wanted It This Way,” and “Petrichor” keep it worthwhile and relevant.
At the end of the day, no one is looking to Phish for hit singles and folk songs. We want the jams and songs that can deliver those jams. Does anyone even listen to their studio albums anyway?
Big Boat peaked at No. 19 on the Billboard charts.