Trey Anastasio

He was born on 30 September 1964 in Fort Worth, Texas, and moved with his family to Princeton, New Jersey, when he was three. At the Taft School in Connecticut he formed his first bands, Red Tide and Space Antelope, and wrote songs with his schoolmate Steven Pollak. At the University of Vermont, where he enrolled as a philosophy major, he met Jon Fishman, Mike Gordon and Jeff Holdsworth, and the four played their first gig at a dance in the Harris-Millis Cafeteria on 2 December 1983. During a semester at home he renewed a songwriting partnership with his childhood friend Tom Marshall, who became his main lyricist. He later transferred to Goddard College, where the composer Ernie Stires taught him composition, theory and arranging, and he wrote the song cycle The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday as his senior project, graduating in 1988.

His early writing for Phish was through-composed and intricate, in pieces such as “The Divided Sky,” “You Enjoy Myself” and “Reba,” and he is credited as composer of 152 Phish originals, 141 of them alone. The band also took up bluegrass. From March 1990 it played Ricky Skaggs’s arrangement of Bill Monroe’s “Uncle Pen,” with Anastasio playing the fiddle melody on guitar, and in February 1997 it added the Del McCoury Band’s “Beauty of My Dreams”; Anastasio later said McCoury’s Blue Side of Town was always playing on the band’s bus in the 1990s. In July 1999 Phish played the song with Jerry Douglas, Ronnie McCoury and Tim O’Brien in Antioch, Tennessee, and with the full Del McCoury Band at Oswego, New York, and that May Anastasio had sung it alone on acoustic guitar in Albany. Hampton Coliseum performances of “Beauty of My Dreams” (1997) and Tim O’Brien’s “Nellie Kane” (1998) were later released on Hampton/Winston-Salem ’97 and Hampton Comes Alive.

Outside Phish he led the free-jazz ensemble Surrender to the Air in 1995 and 1996 and, from 1998, the Trey Anastasio Band, which began as a Vermont trio with Tony Markellis and Russ Lawton and grew to ten players with horns and percussion by 2002. In 1999 he and Page McConnell joined Phil Lesh and Friends, the first time members of Phish and the Grateful Dead shared a stage, and in 2000 he formed Oysterhead with Les Claypool and Stewart Copeland, which released The Grand Pecking Order in 2001. His solo studio albums run from One Man’s Trash (1998) and Trey Anastasio (2002) through Shine (2005), Traveler (2012), Paper Wheels (2015), Ghosts of the Forest (2019) and Lonely Trip (2020) to Mercy (2022), his first all-acoustic album, and Atriums (2024). In 2015 he played lead guitar and sang with the Grateful Dead at their five Fare Thee Well concerts in Santa Clara and Chicago.

He has kept up the bluegrass connection in his own band. The Trey Anastasio Band shared the Ryman Auditorium stage with the Del McCoury Band on “Beauty of My Dreams” in February 2010, and at its first DelFest, in May 2013, was joined on the song by Del, Ronnie and Rob McCoury and Jason Carter. When Phish played Nashville in October 2023, he introduced the song as “one for Del.”

His orchestral work began with the Vermont Youth Orchestra, with whom he played Carnegie Hall in 2004. Time Turns Elastic, orchestrated with Don Hart, premiered with Orchestra Nashville at the Ryman Auditorium on 27 September 2008, and he has played his music with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in 2009 and the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2012. With Amanda Green he wrote the score for the Broadway musical Hands on a Hardbody, nominated for the Tony Award for Best Original Score in 2013 and winner of the Dramatists Guild’s Frederick Loewe Award. In the fall of 2020 he played an eight-week series of streamed concerts from the Beacon Theatre in New York that raised $1.2 million for his Divided Sky Foundation.