Concert Reviews

The Phish frontman transformed his band’s jammy compositions into something awfully close to coffeehouse folk during his almost-solo Boston show.

By Marc Hirsh

March 10, 2025 | 1:32 PM

3 minutes to read

Trey Anastasio at Boch Wang Theatre, Sunday, March 9.

The last time Trey Anastasio set foot on the stage of the Wang Theatre, the singer and guitarist said Sunday night, it was 1993 and Phish was playing the Boston Music Awards. As the Vermont band chaotically blazed through “Rift” that night, he tried to make out who was in the front row only to realize that it was the entirety of Aerosmith, whose second wind was then at its giddy apex. And one thought crossed Anastasio’s mind while looking at them: “Wow, they’re so old.”

Well, Anastasio is, by his own admission, now 15 years older than the oldest member of Aerosmith (the then-45-year-old Steven Tyler) was at the time, but it mostly didn’t show. Billed (not entirely accurately) as a solo acoustic performance, he was on stage for nearly two and a half hours, and for more than half of that time, there was nobody else to pick up any kind of slack or give him a moment’s reprieve from having to carry the show entirely by himself.

But the Phish frontman didn’t flag, and if there was the occasional flub — a forgotten lyric here, a missed chord there — it seemed to be more attributable to having 16 albums’ worth of material over nearly four decades to recall without a glitch.

It started unassumingly, as Anastasio simply came out, murmured a word or two of hello, took his seat and began the conversational, offhand “Theme From The Bottom,” marked by the deep rumble of the low D string he hit periodically and his amplified foot tapping out a beat. Stripping them of their more layered full-band arrangements turned Phish’s jammy, expansive compositions into something awfully close to coffeehouse folk, Anastasio singing them in a strained, thin voice that seemed not to want to shatter the delicateness of the songs.

“Shade” and others could have come from the pen of Shawn Colvin in her own solo-acoustic days, and simple melodies pinged out of Anastasio’s fingerpicking on “Summer of ’89,” while his light half-strumming on “Brian And Robert” made room for occasional filigrees.

Somewhere around the half-hour mark, Anastasio began adding more layers to the sounds he was creating, first by electronic means and then more organically. He began by live-looping the choppy soul chords of “46 Days” into a pattern that he soloed over, a trick he returned to a few songs later in “Blaze On.” Whether because of the addition of moving parts or the fact that the loops meant that he didn’t have to be fully locked in to every note, the latter song got away from him once or twice — not enough to derail it but enough to register with good-natured abashedness on Anastasio’s face.

And more than an hour in, he was joined by keyboardist Jeff Tanski, whose glassy electric piano added still another dimension to the fingerpicked art-folk instrumental “Till We Meet Again.” Tanski largely provided color, though “Reba” and “Fluffhead” revealed the complexity that adding just one more musician permitted Anastasio; the instrumental sections of both songs featured coordinated unison notes, odd time shifts, jazzy tonality, and textural counterpoint.

By that point, the audience was practically a third instrument on its own, not only cheering songs from their first notes but singing lyrics like “I sure got some powerful pills!” and (proudly falling into a trap when Anastasio held it) “Silence contagious in moments like these,” doubling Anastasio’s guitar lines in “Fluffhead” and even hooting its own part on “Taste” unbidden. At one point during the extended solo of “Reba,” the rhythm nearly vanished and the crowd started clapping, and on the right beat, even.

But if all that assistance helped Anastasio reclaim the depth of the original songs, he didn’t need it. Nowhere was that more clear than on “The Wedge.” With a building momentum that was substantial but not overly heavy, it moved with or without the crowd singing along. And he left them behind by the end anyway, soloing without any accompaniment but the insistent thump of his foot, alternating between chord patterns and liquid solo lines. At that moment, it was just one man and a guitar.

Setlist for Trey Anastasio at Wang Theatre, March 9, 2025

• Theme From The Bottom (Phish cover)
• When The Words Go Away
• What’s Going Through Your Mind
• Brian And Robert (Phish cover)
• Back On The Train (Phish cover)
• Waste (Phish cover)
• 46 Days (Phish cover)
• My Friend, My Friend (Phish cover)
• Summer Of ’89 (Phish cover)
• Blaze On (Phish cover)
• Valdese (Phish cover)
• The Wedge (Phish cover)
• Turtle In The Clouds (Phish cover)
• Shade (Phish cover)
• More (Phish cover)
• Chalk Dust Torture (Phish cover)
• Till We Meet Again
• Taste (Phish cover)
• If I Could (Phish cover)
• Reba (Phish cover)
• Sand (Phish cover)

ENCORE:

• 6 1/2 Minutes
• Rift (Phish cover)
• Fluffhead (Phish cover)

Marc Hirsh can be reached at [email protected] or on Bluesky @spacecitymarc.bsky.social.

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