Ruby Waves Carried Me Home
I feel the feeling I forgot
Standing twenty feet from the stage the first night, the sound was so close it blurred: distorted, heavy, and physical as well as musical. With only a routine amount of cannabis in my system, the whole thing widened into a psychedelic experience. Out of the thick, tactile noise came a message I had heard before in long meditation retreats and earlier psychedelic work: live from the feeling of love, and let that guide your life.
To say this was not what I expected from a Phish show would be an understatment. I came to Austin for my first concert in decades expecting time with my brother, maybe a little nostalgia, but nothing spiritual. Instead, something I thought I already understood resurfaced in a crowd and from a band I had dismissed years ago.
Back on the Train
The last time I saw Phish was 1999 in Kansas City. They were also the first major concert I ever attended, in 1997. Twenty-five years later, I finally accepted my brother’s invitation to join him for a show—their first ones in Texas in more than a decade. They had returned to the stage configuration, four across the front, that they abandoned just after I stopped seeing them. The symmetry of that detail struck me as an odd coincidence and a reminder of how much time had passed.
My brother had been offering this invitation for years without any pressure. His relationship to the band has always been steady and consistently loyal. It echoed something else: when I asked him to join me in family therapy years earlier, he said yes without hesitation. He stood with me when I asked him to, the same strong and consistent presence he brought to these shows.
I didn’t go to Austin as a fan. I went because I wanted to spend time with him doing something he loves. I expected to enjoy the musicianship, tolerate the lyrics, and leave the rest alone. I didn’t expect any of it to matter beyond that.
Maze
The experience landed differently because I am not the person I was the last time I saw them play. In the 1990s, I was porous in ways I didn’t understand, absorbing entire systems—religious, philosophical, musical—to escape the collapse of an alcoholic, narcissistic, evangelical Christian family structure. The jam band world offered one such alternate system: community, freedom, the sense of a coherent reality organized around sound and shared experience. But I used it in a dependent way because I didn’t yet have a center of my own.
Over the years, therapy, meditation, yoga, and somatic work helped me build that center. I couldn’t fully address my family’s patterns until I saw them repeat inside an abusive relationship, which opened another layer of confrontation I had avoided. When I asked my brother to join me in that, he stepped in immediately.
By 2025, I was no longer walking into cultural spaces asking them to give me an identity. I had one, and that shift meant I could appreciate aspects I may not have noticed before.
So when the familiar message surfaced again—live from love—it arrived in a situation I hadn’t associated with that kind of clarity.
Wilson, Can You Still Have Fun?
The demographic reality of a Phish show in 2025 isn’t subtle. It’s an overwhelmingly white, male room, a configuration that often passes unnoticed by the people inside it. My politics and my history do not predispose me to trust spaces like that. The rougher edges of the 90s scene—queer expression, the strange brilliance of parking-lot culture, the loose sense of counterculture—have mostly receded. In their place is a curated version of the old aesthetic: printed button-downs, trucker hats, well-groomed hippie chic. Polite, orderly, nearly frictionless.
And yet the deeper mechanisms of the scene remain intact. Psychedelics, repetitive musical structures, and ecstatic physical movement are ancient instruments for shifting consciousness. During “Split Open and Melt,” a long, tense two-over-three pattern dissolved into a thick field of noise that held the room in a kind of collective pause for nearly fifteen minutes, an eternity in that kind of sonic environment. Music as a consciousness tool is something I’ve always been drawn to and has always been part of Phish, but I didn’t expect to encounter it here so personally, or see others in a seemingly similar state.
I would not have considered the room as an ideal container for anything mystical. It didn’t need to be. Ancient techniques work in any place where people let their guard down. Whatever I experienced didn’t come from the demographic makeup of the space but from the simple fact that thousands of people were willing to let this type of sound move through them for a while.
These experiences make it clear that the assumptions you arrive with are part of the room’s atmosphere, woven in alongside the button-downs and the cheesy lyrics. The psychedelic moment shifts the meaning of both at the same time.
Strange Design
This capacity for deep experience emerges through the music even with the unevenness in their catalog. I remain unconvinced by much of Phish’s songwriting. Many of the lyrics feel like sketches for songs someone should finish. The absurdist tendencies echo Frank Zappa, though without the precision that gives absurdism its force. Harmonically, complete randomness rarely holds the coherence or beauty that intentional structures can provide. Even so, their approach draws from three distinct musical traditions, each carrying a different function.
The creation of a public ritual space connects them to the Grateful Dead. The Dead’s role as house band for the Acid Tests helped define how live music could act as a catalyst for shifts in perception, and Phish continues this lineage in its own language. They aren’t copying the Dead so much as working inside a tradition shaped by them: using performance to create conditions where large groups can move through sound in ways that alter how they experience themselves.
The absurdist lyrical content connects directly to Frank Zappa’s satirical approach to songwriting. Phish’s seemingly random psychological descriptions of mundane events—a man who steps into a freezer, characters named Wilson or Fluffhead—echo Zappa’s use of nonsense as response to existential absurdity. When confronted with the fundamental chaos of existence, traditional narrative structures can feel inadequate. This approach creates linguistic spaces where meaning becomes playful rather than urgent, fostering a party atmosphere among casual listeners while offering insider knowledge for dedicated fans who recognize deeper patterns.
On the other hand, this can serve as cover for what is actually just really lazy songwriting. For example, the chorus of Ruby Waves strings together mystical phrases—”sea of love,” “ruby waves,” “prison of lies,” “ocean up above my head”—without coherent relationships between images. How does an ocean exist above your head while also carrying you up from below? Why does touching stars enable doors to open? The repetition of “prison of lies” and “ocean of love” creates the impression of thematic depth while remaining deliberately vague about what lies or what kind of love. Unlike genuine absurdism, which requires precision in its meaninglessness, this approach allows cosmic imagery to substitute for the hard work of careful artistic construction—the kind of integration between technical innovation and aesthetic beauty that makes art compelling rather than just functional. I wish the same person who whispered in Trey’s ear about voice lessons would also mention edits on lyrics.
But we saw Ruby Waves on the second night, and after a couple of minutes of painful lyrics the jam opened into 25 minutes of interesting and fun improvisation. Their sonic exploration at its best represents a lineage rooted in classical serialism and minimalist composition. The band routinely established repetitive patterns anchored by droning bass and drum foundations over which guitar and keyboards shifted imperceptibly. These sections reminded me most of minimalist composers like Philip Glass or Steve Reich. Despite the high-powered light show and arena-rock presentation, Trey Anastasio often operates within serialist frameworks when constructing written foundations for improvised explorations.
At their worst, the combination of serialism and absurdism produces embarrassing lyrics and jarring musical compositions that serve no clear purpose. It sounds like what it is: music written in a dorm room, early experiments with serial musical language that capture the technical but not the aesthetic qualities of that movement.
People disagree with me on this, arguing that absurdism represents freedom—that reality’s incoherent nature opens space where life is best served by generating meaning, however that resonates for each person. While I appreciate this attitude, it reflects what seems like a human-centric universe. Which is more convincing: that humans create meaning from nothing, or that meaning—essential to all forms of life—forms a baseline of the universe that we understand in our own, human, way?
The serialists created new musical language to express integrated thought—not random ideas jumbled within novel time signatures. The radical elements of serialist music—shifting tempos and bar counts—are woven into larger wholes, and the integration of parts into a whole remains one measure of beauty. The coherence of larger systems, in which humans participate rather than dominate, represents the deeper message I don’t hear consistently in Phish. Even their straightforward songs about love and shared grooves suffer from this same lack of integration. I need my art to demonstrate greater coherence between technical innovation and aesthetic beauty. More artful, in other words.
My Friend, My Friend
The second night we positioned ourselves further from the stage where sound quality proved superior, though less visceral. The message from the first night—live from love—shifted from insight into something embodied. My chest opened slightly. My posture softened. Old resistance showed up quickly, the familiar sense that caring for oneself can feel indulgent. I tried to stay with the sensation while my brother listened beside me, unaware of the small adjustments happening inside me.
I watched Trey Anastasio more closely that night. Years into sobriety, his steadiness shapes the sound in ways I hadn’t noticed before. It contrasts with the hesitant leadership that marked earlier psychedelic bands—Jerry Garcia being the clearest example. Trey’s leadership isn’t dramatic, but it is clear, and it affects how the band plays together.
His recovery seems to influence the atmosphere of their live shows as well. The performances feel more intentional than the recordings I remember from my teenage years, less tied to open-ended experimentation and more grounded in mutual awareness. He has become a public advocate for addiction recovery, speaking directly about the opioid crisis that has affected communities in the northeast. That commitment appears to shape the band’s internal dynamic too.
The same steadiness shows up in his musicianship. His recent vocal work is noticeable, especially compared to the shout-singing of earlier years. There is care in how he approaches the songs now, a willingness to refine fundamentals decades into a successful career. Quiet changes like that have more impact than may be immediately apparent.
All of this shaped my experience of the second night: not as a continuation of the first, but as a different kind of presence. The message was the same; what shifted was how I recognized myself inside the space that carried it.
Ruby Waves Carried Me Home
What stayed with me at the end of the weekend wasn’t a dramatic shift but a return to something I had known for years, heard this time in a place I didn’t expect. I wasn’t seeking anything from these shows. I wasn’t looking to the band or the scene for coherence, and that absence of urgency created room for a familiar message to land without friction.
Earlier in my life, I went to concerts like these hoping they would offer an alternative structure—something to replace what had collapsed at home. That kind of seeking made it difficult to hear anything clearly. Over time, the work of therapy, meditation, and somatic practice gave me a different kind of foundation, one that didn’t rely on external systems for orientation. My brother’s steady presence across those years, including his willingness to step into difficult conversations when I asked, shaped that foundation more than I realized.
Standing in an imperfect cultural setting, inside a room I had once written off, I recognized the message again: live from the feeling of love. Nothing in the demographic or aesthetic of the scene predicted that moment. It didn’t need to. The space offered enough—sound, movement, repetition, and the simple fact of standing next to my brother while he listened to something he loves.
The band had changed in certain ways, and the crowd felt different than my memory of it, but the more significant change was in me. I wasn’t leaning on the music for meaning. I was simply present in a room that surprised me. In that space, the message I had carried for years returned in its plain form, familiar and unforced.
