Page McConnell
Page McConnell is the keyboardist and a songwriter in Phish, which he joined in 1985, the only member of the band’s long-standing quartet who was not there at its founding. Alongside Phish he has led the band Vida Blue, recorded four solo albums and made two albums with Trey Anastasio.
McConnell was born in Philadelphia on May 17, 1963, began piano at four, and grew up from 1969 in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, playing in bands with friends by the seventh grade. He spent two years at Southern Methodist University, then transferred in the fall of 1984 to Goddard College in Vermont, where the saxophonist Karl Boyle supervised his senior study, The Art of Improvisation; he graduated in December 1987. He first played with Phish on May 3, 1985, and has written Phish songs including “Cars Trucks Buses,” “Magilla,” “Army of One” and “Halfway to the Moon,” as well as co-writing many others with the band.
Outside Phish he played keyboards on the title track of Travis’s debut album, Good Feeling (1997), and recorded with Tenacious D on their first album in 2001. That year he founded Vida Blue with the bassist Oteil Burbridge and the drummer Russell Batiste; the band played from 2001 to 2004, released Vida Blue (Elektra, 2002) and The Illustrated Band (Sanctuary, 2003), and re-formed to record Crossing Lines (ATO, 2019).
After two years away from music, he recorded a solo album in 2006; Page McConnell came out on Legacy Recordings on April 17, 2007, and he headlined the High Sierra Music Festival that July. From 2012 to 2015 he toured from time to time with members of the Meters as the Meter Men. His later solo albums are Unsung Cities and Movies Never Made (2013), Maybe We’re the Visitors (2021) and Something Will Land (2025), and with Trey Anastasio he made December (2021) and January (2023).
