Today, the 59-year-old Texas-born musician Trey Anastasio is known as one of the most inventive and prolific guitar players on Earth. The frontman for the jam band Phish, Anastasio has in many ways taken up the mantle left by Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead.
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Playing in front of tens of thousands of fans—fans who don’t think twice about following and traveling with the band—Anastasio has wowed with lengthy solos and mind-bending melodies. With so much experience as a talented musician, some may wonder what Anastasio has to say about his career, hard lessons learned, theatre, the power of music, and more. Below are the best Trey Anastasio quotes.
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1. “As long as your intention is pure, and you know what you’re in it for, then you’re alright. And I’m in it because I enjoy it. I take it seriously… real seriously. I mean I could sit and talk all day about the music.”
2. “I consider myself extremely lucky to have worked with so many great collaborators in my lifetime.”
3. “The band feels loose in all the right ways, and it’s just so cool looking out and seeing all of these people that I haven’t seen in a while.”
4. “Things have gone beyond my wildest expectations and dreams, and I feel like I’ve been given so many blessings in my life, between my friendship with the guys in the band, our wonderful audience, being able to play this music, and then my family.”
5. “The folk music definition has changed in this fast music world and musical styles are blending really quickly.”
6. “Music has always been my protection against the world, from a very young age. I feel safe inside of a jam.”
7. “My life had become a catastrophe. I had no idea how to turn it around. My band had broken up. I had almost lost my family. My whole life had devolved into a disaster. I believe that the police officer who stopped me at three a.m. that morning saved my life.”
8. “Anyone who writes knows that ultimately the majority of your time is spent alone in a room with a piano or a guitar, no matter what the project is.”
9. “Musicians from the beginning of time have been there to express the mood and the musical feelings in the air for whatever’s going on in that particular culture. It’s the greatest joy as a musician to be able to translate that, be part of something and watch the scenery around you.”
10. “I’m not trying to pull the rug out from under anybody, but the music really does tell you where to go.”
11. “I’ve always loved the experience of working together with other people toward an artistic goal.”
12. “I’ve learned that in the theater the story is everything. Every lyric, every line and every musical gesture has to propel the journey of a given character or the overall plot.”
13. “There’s so much excitement around the Phish tours, and if it stopped feeling that way, it would ruin everything we’ve done for seventeen years.”
14. “Working on a play is a vibrant and collaborative business. Everyone from the choreographer to the music director to the director to the writers work together toward the same goal, and everyone chimes in on everything.”
15. “Things don’t go on forever, and the quicker you accept that change is inevitable, the happier you’re gonna be.”
16. “What I thought at the moment was the worst thing that could happen was absolutely the biggest gift I’ve received.”
17. “When you’re a musician and you break new ground it resonates into the common consciousness.”
18. “The biggest sacrifice to me is to not be in an atmosphere where I can keep writing and moving forward.”
19. “I understand that transposing a song a half step can effect the believability of a lyric.”
20. “If there’s one thing I discovered since I came back from hiatus, it’s that you can’t go backwards.”
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