Parke: This is literally the first project you recorded up there, right?
Trey: Well...yeah. I mean, I did a solo, sound-effecty album called One Man's Trash. That was the first thing I did up there. The studio's been operative since then, in the sense that I did that on DA-88's and a Mackie board. On the day the Barn was available, I ran up there and started recording.

Parke: But as far as a full-band project and major-label release, Farmhouse is the first thing you did at the Barn?
Trey: There's actually one other album recorded there after One Man's Trash. I had Jamie Masefield and his Jazz Mandolin Project come up. Paul Languedoc, Pete Carini and I recorded them onto DA-88's, and that album, entitled Xenoblast has just been released on Blue Note. So there is another major-label album recorded at the Barn. The Barn is just spewing out records of all types!
Bryce: It's a musical factory.
Trey: Everything from the avant-garde to jazz standards to rock history, all being made at the Barn.

Parke: Okay, so Farmhouse is actually the third album made there?
Trey: It's the third released album cut at the Barn.

Parke: Bryce, you've worked at studios all over the country. What was your impression of the Barn as a recording environment?
Bryce: This particular room had positive energy for everybody in the band. It was a very, very comfortable place. They had played there before and really like the sound. Though I've worked in major studios all around the world, I'm comfortable just recording where everybody feels comfortable, and this seemed like the location best for that. It's comparable to the Bearsville barn, at least in my philosophy of usage of that barn, which is that everybody's in the same room and everybody can communicate - not just the band members but everybody involved in the production, so we're all sort of feeding off of the energy being generated.

Parke: In your experience of these things, which kind of studio locales work better - urban or rural?
Bryce: Rural, because it seems a lot less distracting to be out in the countryside. I've done a lot of records where I go on location, sort of escaping central activity. This record was more of an escape for me and less of an escape for the band, I think, because we did have a lot of people come down and hang out, but it was pretty much an environment that Phish was in control of.

Parke: I think in most situations it would be preferable to record in your backyard as opposed to having to travel to get an album done. Trey, what was that experience like, being right here in your hometown as opposed to Bearsville or Los Angeles or wherever?
Trey: It was something I've been wanting to do since the actual first Phish album - The White Tape, you know, which was all done in the basement. I think ever since then it's kind of been a dream. It was incredible. It's honestly what I've always dreamed of doing, and it just felt perfect. I really don't know how else to put it. At the Barn, it didn't seem like we were really in a recording studio at all. As a matter of fact, it didn't even seem like we were recording a lot of the time. It did seem like we were partying! [laughs] But, you know, you don't have to worry because you're not paying anybody, you're not looking at the clock.

Parke: I drove up there yesterday, and I thought it was a fairly challenging drive even on a spring afternoon. You made this in the winter, which had me wondering if there were ever problems getting to or leaving the Barn during recording.
Bryce: I slept there a couple nights because of the weather. There were more problems leaving.
Trey: There were a few nights we got snowed in.
Bryce: There were a couple nights we had to get extra kerosene heaters to heat things up because it just didn't seem like the Barn was ever going to get warm enough. But that's all sort of like a siege, which is part of making a record anyway, you know, fighting against the elements. Sometimes those external elements can keep your mind off the internal elements that you're always fighting anyway. There were definitely real distractions, but they were very endearing and an awful lot of fun to contend with.
Trey: Interestingly enough, technically, it was pretty darn successful. The studio that was set up in there, from the basic conception of it - which you and [John] Siket did - really worked. From my experience, it seemed like the whole planning and execution of this thing - despite the fact that we were up there and there were days we couldn't come down, and there was no food and stuff like that [laughs] - the gear always worked and it sounded good. I thought it was a pretty beautifully conceived studio.
Bryce: You have to remember that John Siket owns two studios in the New York area and I've also been involved in the building of a couple of studios, so between the two of us we could strip it down to the bare essentials of what was needed to record. Also, the Dionysian Productions support staff was there for us and provided us with almost unlimited resources. It was certainly a fantastic experience. We were really well supported all the way through. It seemed like whenever anything went technically wrong in the Barn, we could always say, "Hey, we're in a barn," so it was a lot less of a calamity than if we were in a professional recording studio where the expectation is that everything is supposed to work all the time and be 100% bulletproof. Which is basically a fallacy anyway. There were glitches here and there, but it was all sort of like, "Hey, we're just rolling with it." It was very much a team effort. The band was in an environment they were really comfortable with, and they were also in an environment where they didn't expect to be recording and having things sound as wonderful as they did. So they didn't get too disturbed when things slowed down for a minute.

Parke: I love the sound of the record. It's real natural, wooden...you can almost feel the room when you hear it.
Bryce: Kudos to the recordist, John Siket.

Parke: You hadn't worked with Phish until Farmhouse. What was your impression of them before this project?
Bryce: Well, that they were a really wonderful bunch of musicians and a nice bunch of guys. I had hung out with them in Bearsville during Billy Breathes, and after seeing them play live I became excited with the concept of making a record that represented more of the spirit that I was feeling when I saw them play live than I had ever heard on an album. There were just a number of things that attracted me to the band, I have to say, not the least of which were getting to work with them up in that space and getting to create a studio environment for them to work in. It just seemed like a really stimulating challenge.

Parke: From your side, Trey, why did you approach Bryce?
Trey: I think for a number of reasons....where did we meet?
Bryce: Car Button Cloth, West Hurley, New York, 1996.
Trey: That's right, we met when you were working with Evan [Dando, of the Lemonheads]. I think that has a lot to do with it, for me. That kind of thing happens a lot. You just meet somebody and in the back of your mind, you're thinking, "Hmmm...I'd really like to call him." So it had just been a germ in my mind, and also I really liked the Pavement albums that Bryce had worked on and Car Button Cloth. I mentioned to Page really early on in the process that I had this idea of wanting to work in the Barn with Bryce. The whole thing was a little bit different than all the other Phish, albums because normally that issue would be a really big discussion with conference calls and resumes being faxed around to all the band members. This time, right from the beginning I had a bit more of a role. They kind of made room, maybe because it was the first one we made in the Barn and maybe just because they were willing to let me to see some kind of vision through, and that started right from the beginning.

Parke: I'll put you on the spot. Would you like to work with Bryce again?
Trey: Oh, yeah. We'll see what happens, but we're ready to go back. The whole team.
Bryce: It was a match made in heaven, really.
Trey: It really was unbelievable.
Bryce: I think you're going to hear a couple of Phish records or at least a couple of Trey Anastasio/Bryce Goggin coproductions.
Trey: I hope so. I'm ready to do other bands - the Red Hot Chili Peppers or something! [laughs] It was just so cool. It was hard to believe what a cool experience it was. It was an event. I don't think I've ever felt quite like that with an album before. I've felt like that with shows, you know, like with the last New Year's show, which was an event that was deep and exciting and cool. Normally, albums feel a little bit less like an event and more like work to me. Whereas when I think about making the new album, I don't think about the album itself as much as I think about all these great nights in the Barn. By the end, we had this rolling thing going on. For a long time, me and Bryce were trying to keep up with Siket in the all-nighter department. By the end, we couldn't do it anymore. There's just no keeping up with him. So we would leave at like eleven and go home and go to bed, and Siket would stay up all night.

Parke: Doing what?
Trey: Doing a mix. Hanging out. People would be stopping by, and he would do a mix. We would come back in and the morning and he would still be up, sitting there with a piece of burlap over the window to block the sun from his eyes. And he'd have done some really incredible thing, and probably like the last few hours he may have started to lose perspective and thrown some kind of flanger on there or something. You could tell by the mix what his night had been like. It's like, "Oh, is that what it sounds like in your head?" We'd go in and change a few things around to move it back to reality. But it was a great system. The last four days were unbelievable. Amazingly, I remember the album was done, but nobody wanted to leave. There was snow and everybody was parked up there, and Siket kept saying, "I want to do one more remix." We hadn't slept in four days. And lo and behold, it was the first half of "First Tube." There's two mixes in there: one is the first half and the other is the second half. The second half, the outro, was the first mix of the album. Isn't that weird? The very first mix was the last half of "First Tube," and the very last mix was the first half of "First Tube."

Parke: Wasn't "First Tube" also the first thing you tracked for the album?
Trey: I think it might have been one of the first tracks.
Bryce: Yeah, it was definitely during the first night.
Trey: We were playing just to get warmed up - covers and stuff.
Bryce: We would get together and blow through a lot of music, and just try and capture it all, and then go back and collate later. That way, the band could get hot and not think about what was going down.

Parke: Wasn't that part of the idea: you were coming off the road and felt that you were warmed up and ready?
Trey: Oh yeah. That was definitely the idea.
Bryce: It was a great idea, actually.
Trey: It worked. We played in Albany on October 10th, and we played in the Barn on October 13th. We just set up like another gig. There were a lot of friends hanging around. That was a great way to record. The other interesting thing that happened is that right in the middle we did the New Year's show, which had a really big effect on all four of us. It was just such a high moment. I don't think we've ever had such a high moment in the live thing. Then we came back a week later and re-sang a bunch of vocals and stuff.
Bryce: Yeah, we took a six-week break, and there was about a total of two weeks of touring that went on. That probably provided more perspective than sitting around a recording studio or even in a barn and listening over and over to that stuff. Basically, what they did was get closer to the music. Since it was while they were doing something they really loved to do, it didn't seem like hard work. But there's a hell of a lot of effort that went into the album that actually occurred during touring. An awful lot of the work on the album went on during touring. I mean, these guys went and arranged their songs for the most part during soundchecks and would perform all these tunes. It must've gone on for at least a year. I mean, some of those songs you were performing for about a year, right?
Trey: Yeah, like "Farmhouse." And some of them not. For instance, "Heavy Things." "Gotta Jibboo," we'd been playing but we just got it together before we went into the studio. It was never good until a couple of shows before we went into the studio. Actually, I remember where it was good for the first time.
Bryce: So it was sort of like integrating pre-production into a tour. It made for very painless recording.

Parke: Were you attending any of these shows to hear what they were doing, watching the songs develop?
Bryce: No, I was actually a fortunate recipient of a very fine-tuned band. I was at a couple of shows during the tour that occurred before the album just to get familiar with the material and get excited and also gain the sort of knowledge that you need to get Phish down on tape.

Parke: [Phish manager] John Paluska mentioned that it was an unconventional arrangement in that when you came up to Vermont to work on the album you didn't know if you'd be there for two weeks or twelve weeks, because they didn't know exactly where they were going with it.
Bryce: Well, there was a degree of skepticism about whether or not technically we could pull everything together, whether or not things could actually work in the barn.
Trey: I think that maybe what Paluska was saying is true. There was enough of a different attitude, at least from our end. The whole time, there was this attitude that everything is up in the air: "Well, are we going to finish this thing in three weeks, or is it going to take two months?" "I don't know, we'll just go for it." I definitely felt that from you, Bryce, in the best sort of way, because that's what's been missing from recording studios. Everything is so planned out in such an inhuman way, like, "We are going to do basic tracks for two weeks, and then we're going to...." You kind of have to do that, because you have to move gear in and move gear out. And with this album, I never quite knew what was going on. After we finished what we could call rough mixes, for a long time on the bus we thought we were done. We liked the rough mixes so much that we called up Bryce and said, "We're not going to remix it." And this is important, because this is the thing I've never gotten from people working on an album - producers, engineers. When I called, you said, "This is your album. If that's what you guys want, fine." Even though you probably thought in the back of your mind, "Well, that's ridiculous. We're definitely going to remix." Do you know what I mean? It was so important that everybody working on the album - like Siket, on the nights he wanted to do a mix and we were looking at each other like, "Go ahead, but we know you're wasting your time" - knew they had the leeway to follow whatever road. To me it felt like a very open-ended process in the healthiest sort of way. So Paluska was saying, "We don't know how long it will take or what is going to go down," letting the whole thing unfold in an organic way.

Parke: Had you ever been involved in an album that was made quite like that?
Bryce: No! I'd have to say the making of this record opened up my eyes to an awful lot of reality as far as how well you can do when you allow things to happen. There were an awful lot of moments where I wasn't sure whether what we were doing was exactly the right way of pursuing it, but just by sitting back and seeing how everybody was responding to what was going on, I could see that things were becoming more and more musical and exciting. There were times we were recording and there were 30 people in the Barn who were all talking and drinking and carrying on. We would be working on very difficult pieces of music that were not in the same mind frame of everybody else at the party, but I could see the band digging in and concentrating even more because there was that distraction around. It just forced them to focus, and they also would get a response from the people at the party to what they were doing. I think that was an essential part of the recording, and that's something I probably would never try in a conventional recording studio because you've got all this expensive equipment around and you've allotted all this time to do X, so why are you doing Y? It's obvious that doing Y yielded this result, but it was definitely an unexpected surprise and byproduct, and it opened my eyes up to the realities of musicianship and the ways musicians involve themselves with their environment.
Trey: That's a better description of what I was trying to say when I said it felt more like an event, something that actually happened, when in recording studios you're trying to block out all real human interaction from this cold, sterile room. You work really hard to make sure there's nothing buzzing and clanking before you do a take, and while we still had to do that - obviously, there was a lot of that kind of work going on in the Barn - when I got ready to go over every night, it felt like I was going to a party. Even if there weren't 30 people there, there were at least 8 people and a fire blazing and not just out in the lobby, you know, right on top of the soundboard.
Bryce: There was no lobby! It's just a huge, open space.
Trey: But it really had such a big effect. It started to feel like we were making a document of the scene that really exists in our lives, much more than trying to make some pristine--
Bryce: --trying to create some larger-than-life artificial representation of music, which is what can happen.
Trey: Amazingly, you don't really hear that stuff in the end.
Bryce: Except at the end of "Twist."
Trey: Oh, yeah, you can hear us there. But there were times like when Sue [Trey's wife] was going up and down in the elevator during takes while we were doing acoustic guitars.
Bryce: Chaos exists in everybody's mind all the time, and to have it out on the floor where everybody can see it and laugh at it, as opposed to pen it up....
Trey: You know, as you were saying, anywhere you go in life, if you hear somebody playing music on the street or listen to a stereo, there's sounds all around you all the time. If you're in a car, which is a lot of people's favorite place to listen to music, your brain is used to hearing life going on. So it seems kind of odd you would work so hard to eliminate that. I started thinking about that, interestingly enough, when I was doing the trio tour with Russ Lawton and Tony Markellis shortly before this album. That's when I started getting all those boomerangs I was using. My idea was that I wanted to create layers of looping sounds that had nothing to do rhythmically with what the band was playing. In the back of my mind I was thinking "cityscape vibe." If you're walking down the street and there's [makes rhythmic street noise], there's something comforting about that. And the country, of course, has crickets and streams. In any environment, if you listen closely enough, there's always twenty or thirty rhythmic sounds going. So that maybe ties in with how we did Farmhouse: letting people talk while we were recording.

Parke: Did letting the party go on make the studio atmosphere less clinical?
Bryce: Oh, much.
Trey: It wasn't only just the party, too. There were times, there was this one moment when I had an epiphany. I was sitting in the Barn doing some kind of overdub. We had taken down the dividers. Sofi [Page's wife] was on the couch nursing Delia. Three or four people were drinking wine and talking. Siket was on the phone saying it was a low-fi evening to his girlfriend. Bryce was at the board. The fire was going. Somebody was packing up their jacket, getting ready to leave. And it was weird. I was right in the middle, sitting on the stool getting ready to record, and I looked around and thought to myself, "Around me, as I'm recording this track, is my whole life." It's like Phish, which started off as a band of 18-year-olds, by this point, to me and to the four of us, it's become our entire....You know, children have been born and people have had good times and tragic events and all the things life has to offer, and it's all in this Barn that I plan on living at some day. Here are all my friends and new friends I'd met and the babies and the fireplace and Ann was serving food - we had the dinner table right behind the board - and it just felt right.... I don't know... Something hit me, like the whole thing had become completely full, like a full, rich life experience that had nothing to do with, "Now we'll go hole ourselves up in a little white painted hole and make music that we'll sell to people." It didn't feel that way at all, and that, to me, symbolized the whole thing.

Parke: Do you think you'll record at the Barn for the duration? Is there a point to recording anywhere else, now that you've got this dream studio set up in your own back yard?
Trey: I can say something about that. Obviously, I do want to do it again, but for me to say that and to plan that would be to deny the fact that life goes on. I mean, we might feel completely different next year and want to go record on the beach in San Tropez.

Parke: I wanted to address the fact that at least half if not two-thirds of the material was worked up during your solo tour - something like seven of the twelve songs, is that right?
Trey: Yeah, a lot of it. See, when Tom and I wrote a bunch of these songs in the farmhouse stint that we did, before Story of the Ghost, I had a general idea about this album in my head even before that album. We ended up doing something different at that time and it didn't happen, but part of my reason for doing that solo tour was to give myself a chance to flesh out some of these other ideas I had. Some songs were written for that tour - "First Tube" and whatnot - but then there was "Heavy Things," which I did for the first time on the solo tour and then moved into Phish world.

Parke: How did they translate from your solo tour with the trio to Phish?
Trey: They ended up translating really well. At first it was a bit of a struggle, before we got into the studio, because the ones that I wrote with Russ and Tony were written around grooves. I had those guys set up and do some grooves. The grooves ended up becoming "Gotta Jibboo," "First Tube" and "Sand." Then they left, and I ended up doing the rest of the writing with those grooves. So the only thing that was sticky about it at first, when we translated those three songs over to Phish, is that Mike and Fish had to learn somebody else's grooves. For a lot of bassists and drummers, that would've been impossible, as far as I'm concerned. But those guys are so experienced and so talented at it - this is where learning all those cover albums comes into play - that within five or six gigs of playing those songs, they had digested the basic feels and then turned them into their own thing. And then once that happened, there was no problem.

Parke: It's neat hearing Mike play a deep, grooving bass line like the one in "First Tube." You can tell it's not something he wrote, but it's something he inhabits really nicely.
Trey: Yeah, exactly. It's something we've been talking about a lot, and it's not something he might naturally do. Basically, the solution to that was I called up Tony, who does that better than anyone I've ever heard. That's all he does; he's never taken a bass solo in his life. Then we did the solo tour, and I wrote these songs with them, assuming that I'd then have songs that were based around really simple grooves, which ended up being the case. I took the best three out of seven or eight songs we worked up, moved them into Phish, and then everybody added their personality and Phishiness to those songs, and I think it worked fairly well.

Parke: The demo versions of "Twist" and "Farmhouse" are going up on Phish web site. Do you have any recollections of cutting the demo of "Twist" with Tom in the farmhouse? It sounds fairly close to the final version; in terms of arrangement, it's pretty developed on the demo.
Trey: Both those songs, "Twist" and "Farmhouse," were from the farmhouse thing I did with Tom. I had the idea for this album [Farmhouse] all the way back when we did that, 'cause we wrote this large batch of songs. They were all written in about seven days in this rented farmhouse by Tom and I. "Farmhouse," "Bug," "Twist," "Heavy Things," "Sleep," "Piper," "Dirt," and then a few of the ones on Story of the Ghost.

Parke: It's interesting to hear the demos, because you're not worried about how perfectly everything is phrased and there are fluffed notes here and there, but it's all part of the charm.
Trey: Those demos are, as much as anything, musical diaries. The one you should really listen to is "Farmhouse" itself, because that's probably the best example. On the way to the farmhouse for the first time, the northern lights were out and we pulled the car over and were standing in the road, freaking out and everything. Then we pulled in, and there's this beautiful farmhouse. We knew we were gonna be there for three days. We had bags of chips and beer and food and our little four-track machine, and it was gonna be this big hang. We wrote "Farmhouse" within five minutes: threw the doors open, the Northern Lights were out, we were on the porch, and the farmhouse was behind us, and there was this note from the cleaning lady that said, "Welcome, this is a farmhouse." We just instantly started. I sat down and started playing drums, and that song unfolded. As soon as that one was done - the whole thing only took three hours - we mixed it down to a cassette, and then put everything back to zero and started another song. This would go on all night and all morning. No sleep. Song after song after song. "Sleep" was another one that was just an incredible experience for me. We were running around in the woods. We left the house for awhile and went running around in the woods for two hours, taking pictures of weird things, and then came back into the farmhouse, sat down and in ten minutes wrote "Sleep," just as it is. A lot of the tracks that are on the album, Bryce ended up using the original guitar tracks from the farmhouse demos in the Barn.
Bryce: On "Sleep," yeah.
Trey: Actually, probably a lot of the vocals are the same. I remember Tom was sleeping upstairs and I started to put together "Twist" at four in the morning. I played drums, bass and guitar, and then started putting on "wouldn't twist around." I was singing through this amp, and it started to get good, started to come together. I remember Tom coming down like, "Oh my god, this sounds great!" And then we started throwing in the whoo!'s, all that stuff, as it started getting more and more cathartic.

Parke: I love the finished version of "Twist," where the vocals ping-pong from channel to channel and then it segues into the party sounds at the Barn.
Trey: Right, right. It's kind of odd to think you go down and do this farmhouse thing, and it's this really organic writing session, and then you go out on the road and introduce this stuff to the other guys in the band, and they start adding their personalities to it, and then you go into the Barn and play it with Bryce, who starts adding his personality to it, and we get excited about that, and eventually it got to the point that by the end everybody we knew is on this record!