Phish’s Keyboardist Steps Out From the Page Side

In Phish’s four-year toggle among hiatuses, reunions, and breakups between 2000 and 2004, when McConnell was leading Vida Blue, he learned to love something new about his main band: He didn’t have to lead it.

“Soon after forming Vida Blue, I realized that, though I could front a band and put it together and do all that, it’s not necessarily the role I’m naturally drawn towards, being a bandleader,” he says. “Right before Phish broke up in 2004, I had even decided I just wanted to focus on Phish and not do anything else.”

As if to prove his point, McConnell reaches again for his cell phone and pulls up a byzantine spread sheet. Every show of Phish’s summer tour was diligently considered well in advance, each possible song they might play every night color-coded to reveal at a glance whether or not the show had the requisite balance—workhorses like “Tweezer” or “Wolfman’s Brother,” so-called “bust-outs” of much rarer material. Before a tour ever starts, Anastasio and Phish’s management discuss what has and hasn’t been played, what fans online might want to hear or what’s grown stale. These night-by-night spreadsheets are only a starting point, and Anastasio wakes up before each show and again considers the evening’s plan.

“He cares so much about it, and he just kills himself during the day trying to get it right,” McConnell says. “As I was starting Vida Blue, putting together songs lists and calling them out and deciding tempos, I felt, ‘OK, I can do this every night.’ But he’s better at it than I am, more invested in doing it. That skill comes more naturally to him.”

But 20 years later, McConnell is trying to apply the lessons of leading Vida Blue to this new band, from how he writes the songs to how he considers its future plans. In the first days of July 2023, he went to see Ziggy Marley play a Burlington theater. He got there early and marveled at the solo dub set by Urian Hackney, a Burlington local and the son of Bobby Hackney, Sr., the Death singer who had moved to Vermont in the late ’70s and started a reggae festival and band, Lambsbread, there. The younger Hackney not only plays in Death these days but tours with Iggy Pop, too.