How Is Phish Therapeutic? Reflections through Self-Inquiry

Isaac Slone

Abstract

In this article, I examine how the American rock band Phish plays a therapeutic role in my life. I discuss the connection that Phish’s following feels towards the band and the meaning it plays in their lives. Additionally, I consider how Phish’s pursuit of the unexpected in their approach to music impacts their audiences therapeutically. I use psychologist Clark Moustakas’s heuristic research methodology to investigate my own therapeutic journey and meaning-making experience and how it is linked with Phish. I focus on concepts of meaning-making and the therapeutic alliance and discuss Phish's musical philosophy and lyrics.

1. Introduction

In this article, I examine how the American rock band Phish plays a therapeutic role in my life. Phish has built a legacy centered on their live performances. Beyond the significant milestones of the band’s three decades and growing career, the group maintains their devout fan base in part because of their dedication to live improvisation. Phish’s ability to provide the unexpected at their concerts distinguishes them from most major touring acts that perform songs that the audience expects to hear and do so the same way nightly. Phish fans return night after night, following the band across the country (and occasionally internationally)—as no two shows are the same and vary in both setlist and performance. Live performances are central to Phish’s model and their appeal; local, national, and global communities form around an appreciation for the band’s music. While other bands have adopted Phish’s model and style, Phish continues to be the quintessential modern touring band of their idiom. I am interested in the connection Phish’s following feels towards the band, the meaning it plays in their lives, and how Phish’s pursuit of the unexpected in their approach to music impacts their audiences therapeutically.

In this article, I convey aspects of the therapeutic alliance I feel towards Phish through self-inquiry. The term therapeutic alliance commonly refers to the relationship developed between a mental health clinician/therapist and a client or patient. This relationship relies on shared goals between the parties about the nature of their work together. Psychiatrist Jerome Frank writes: “The success of all [therapeutic] techniques depends on the patient’s sense of alliance with an actual or symbolic healer.”^[1] Although the alliance Phish fans feel towards the band does not develop in an explicitly therapeutic context, fans have spoken about this alliance and how it offers a kind of healing. Additionally, the band has recognized and discussed the uniqueness of this audience–band relationship. In a New York Times article entitled “Phish’s Breakup? That Was Then. But Tough Times Call for a Reunion,” Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio reflects, “For people in hard times, we can play long shows of pure physical pleasure …. They come to dance and forget their troubles. It’s like a service commitment.”^[2] Here, Anastasio acknowledges that he is not simply the purveyor of a musical product but also that his shows are a kind of service for fans who find inspiration and meaning in attending Phish concerts. He touches on the escapism of a Phish concert as well as the physical pleasure felt through dance at the band’s shows.

Beyond the enjoyable and escapist environment Phish creates, the band brings meaning to their followers’ lives through their music’s communicative nature. The opportunity to participate in and learn from Phish’s lore broadens the chance for meaning-making. Meaning-making refers to the way in which people achieve different understandings about subjective life experiences. It is a practice that puts the individual in the role of ascribing meaning, language, and value to lived experiences. Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl is an example of a clinician who emphasized the importance of meaning-making practices in one’s life. Frankl began a school of psychotherapy known as logotherapy that focuses on the value of meaning. Frankl argued that people function and flourish best when they feel their lives have an identifiable sense of meaning.^[3] Often, therapy sessions are spaces where a patient and therapist can discuss life experiences, emotions, and other subjects that arise. New meaning is brought to these aspects of life by reflecting on them. I explore how Phish implicitly broadens meaning-making practices for their followers.

Many of the qualities of the Phish concert experience I describe throughout the article can be more widely applied to the jam band genre. It is within this genre that improvisation is the hallmark, and the audience has the opportunity to experience the liveness of improvisational jams. That said, Phish continues to pursue this liveness relentlessly, in their signature way, over their thirty-plus-year career. They have brought this approach to some of the largest stages, and in some of the most ambitious ways (their thirteen-night residency at New York City’s Madison Square Garden exemplifies this). They continue to reinvent traditions and recently debuted two sets of original material for their Halloween shows both in 2018 and 2021—this breaks from their model of covering a full album by another artist. New material continues to enter Phish’s live repertoire, despite already having enough songs to keep their audience coming back. The unique scale at which Phish operates fuels me in my own life. As they embrace vitality, subjectivity, and the subversion of norms in the mainstream concert space, I am encouraged to do the same.

This article is also a contribution to Phish studies, which is a burgeoning academic field dedicated to the study of the band. That the band warrants a dedicated area of scholarship speaks to their uniqueness and the depth to their history, music, and culture. Phish studies presents a compelling opportunity for scholars to engage with their direct and personal encounters with the Phish phenomenon and to put them in conversation with their academic disciplines. This article is an example of qualitative research that contributes to cultural studies and the literature on the relationship between psychology and music. In this study, I explore Phish concerts as cultural sites where audiences, myself included, experience meaningful engagements with music that in turn lead to psychical experiences.

2. Phish in Moustakian Terms

I use Clark Moustakas’s thinking as a guide to interpret my therapeutic journey and meaning-making experience and the way in which it is linked with Phish. Moustakas was an American psychologist and a leading expert in the field of humanistic psychology. Humanistic psychology involves a rejection of a reductive and pathological model for understanding a person in favor of a view that emphasizes the individual's values and choices as a kind of data to develop meaning.^[4] In this humanistic sense, I examine my choice to follow Phish on tour and the value I see in their music in order to understand what might be therapeutic about this relationship. Moustakas conceptualized the process of heuristic research as an internal search into the nature and emotional relevance of an experience.^[5] Moustakas’s approach encourages using one’s direct and personal encounters with a phenomenon as the basis for research. Thus, the Moustakian framework can ground a researcher’s writing in that “the initial ‘data’ is within [the researcher]; the challenge is to discover and explicate its nature.”^[6] The phases associated with this approach exemplify a mission to bring qualitative descriptions to experiences and intuitions. I will now discuss them in turn.

3. Initial Engagement

The first phase of Moustakas’s method, “initial engagement,” marks the moment when the researcher recognizes a phenomenon as having “important social meaning and personal, compelling implications.”^[7] Moustakas’s call for the heuristic researcher to return to the initial moments of engagement brings me back to 2009 when I entered high school and Phish returned from a five-year hiatus. Around that time, I was interested in classic rock music. Music therapist and musicologist Even Ruud posits that rock music, particularly in its lyrics, often creates a “universe of signs that [creates] a space in which to articulate [feelings] about growing up, going to school, and interacting with society in general.”^[8] Listeners of this kind of music make sense of their lives through this language and work out problems that arise in a humanized way. Songs such as The Who’s “Cut My Hair” and Pink Floyd’s “Hey You” stand out to me in this way. The lyrics of both songs speak to human feelings of isolation and frustration that are almost ubiquitous, yet often hard to speak about during adolescence. As an adolescent listener, I found these songs soothing because their lyrics articulated these emotions in a way that helped me feel understood. Aside from the lyrics, rock music's fierce and dramatic power attracted me more so than other artistic forms.

I was turned on to jam band concerts as a unique musical context, genre, and style of improvisational performing by way of an interest in the Grateful Dead. I attended concerts by Grateful Dead cover bands, as well as by surviving members of the Grateful Dead in different ensembles. I was elated by the communal aspect of these shows. Unlike other concerts I had been to, audiences at these jam-centric concerts were invested in exploring and articulating different aspects of the bands’ performances. The kinds of participation included ecstatic dancing, attending multiple shows on a tour, and delving into sophisticated conversation and analysis of the performances. Though these concerts opened my eyes to the jam band genre and culture, these shows were often tribute or cover configurations without new original music. Those jam bands playing new original music were doing so on a smaller scale in clubs and theaters. Phish’s return—marked by a sold-out tour in amphitheaters and arenas—signaled an opportunity to participate with a musical act and culture that had an established history, but that was also beginning a new period both personally and creatively. Seeing Phish for the first time, I was aware that the band was entering a new phase of their career—one marked by triumphs, development, and change. Also, it was something that I could be a part of in a firsthand and authentic way.

4. Immersion

Following one’s initial engagement, Moustakas’s method calls for an “immersion” with a phenomenon. Moustakas saw this process as allowing the individual researcher to “come to be on intimate terms with the [subject]—to live it and grow in knowledge and understanding of it.”^[9] Phish fans often develop an appreciation for the band by immersing themselves in Phish, whether through their catalog, over a few concerts, or an entire tour. This immersion alone has a therapeutic significance as it often involves more commitment than that of appreciating other rock bands. This is due to the scope of Phish’s lore and the shared understanding amongst Phish’s appreciators that the band’s music is best experienced at live concerts. Upon the announcement of Phish’s return in 2009, I mapped out shows to see on the band’s summer tour.

I was peripherally aware of Phish when they reunited. I felt compelled by the discourse that followed the band as I began to discuss the music with friends, family, and through my immersion with Phish’s community—others seeking to further their understanding of Phish. The variations between Phish’s performances and those dedicated to understanding the variations stood out as something I wanted to take part in. The complexity of Phish’s lore, the notion that one becomes a fan of Phish not by hearing a handful of songs but instead through an immersion, compelled me and still does. Ruud writes, “Music cannot mechanically depict identities …. It is all the talk about music that gives it meaning.”^[10] I explored myself through the phenomenon of the band: traveling alongside them, making friends through an appreciation for them, and letting their music influence and shape my understanding of the world and myself. Ruud picks up on this quality of music discourse, acknowledging that music can bring out a feeling of mastery and empowerment, particularly in younger people, which leads to finding community and integrating socially.^[11] In this way, fans of Phish are expressing their enjoyment for the band when seeing them multiple times a tour and, either implicitly or explicitly, are attempting to understand the band on a higher level.

I became attached to an idea that Ruud puts forth that, “music reaches into or mirrors our personalities [or] our true selves,” and that, “there might be some connection between music and the way we look at and present ourselves.”^[12] The level of dedication to the band and the discourse around them mirrored a striving for deep and meaningful engagement with music rather than experiencing it as purely entertainment. Phish became a way for me to travel the country and meet new people through a shared commitment to the band and their community. In retrospect, the choice to immerse myself in Phish by seeing twelve shows in one summer was an initial moment of alliance formation. Rather than attending a single show as a tourist in relation to the culture, I made a choice to immerse myself as a part of it. Though I was new to this community and relatively young, I didn’t encounter any gatekeeping on the part of others in Phish’s audience. Rather, I found recognition that I was like them in my drive to immerse myself in knowledge and experiences around this band.

Aside from the versatility mentioned earlier in Phish’s live performances, their songbook tends to avoid musical or lyrical transparency. The meaning and significance their lyrics connote vary depending upon the idiosyncratic prior experiences and the current stance of the particular listener. Phish’s lyrical style offers an opportunity to participate in meaning-making, as their subversive and sometimes seemingly nonsensical lyrics elude clear interpretations. Listeners can then take an active role in ascribing meaning in a personal and playful way. Phish’s older songs tend to exemplify this quirky and original quality more than their newer songs do. For example, lyrics from “Tube” debuted in 1990 and penned by Anastasio and drummer Jon Fishman: “What’s that rubber bottle doing here? / How's that napkin for a roof? / Ten cents to a dollar now / For a shelf of pregnant hens.”^[13] Though these lyrics seem to have no obvious meaning, the insider knowledge of this song, its past performances, and the potential of what may come from any improvisation to follow it lead to specific recognition and reaction from Phish’s crowd.

This immersive experience with Phish’s touring, songbook, and mode of music-making introduced me to a kind of insider knowledge. Once familiar with Phish’s songs, different live shows, and other details about how the band operates, I could communicate with other Phish fans about the specificities of performances. During my first summer of seeing Phish live, I heard rarely performed songs, such as “Icculus,” which hadn’t been played in ten years. When Phish hit the first notes of these rarely performed songs, colloquially referred to as “bustouts,” the shared enthusiastic reaction amongst the crowd felt palpable. The audience knew that these songs are seldom played and special. Looking around the audience, I could see that others also found the appearance of these songs in the setlist to be meaningful. Immersion with Phish may happen authentically for many people following their seeing the band live. This is particularly true for those music fans who appreciate improvisation, silliness, and the chance to make meaning through musical discourse. Yet, others may attend a Phish show and feel turned off by the amount of insider knowledge. The chance to share in the making of that meaning instills a therapeutic sense of joy and possibility in me. I find myself more discomforted by popular music in which one can know what to expect and the song is cemented by a singular version. In my opinion, Phish’s subversive songs, which give way to long improvised jam sequences and which their audience listens to with both reverence and a critical ear, are a way of challenging expectations and norms. Phish offers an alternative to listeners like myself who feel an enhanced sense of self and belonging when immersed in a creative setting with others who engage similarly with Phish’s music.

5. Incubation

Moustakas’s “incubation” is a period of reflection—to look, listen, and think back on one’s experience with the phenomenon in question and to understand it anew from afar.^[14] Defined in this sense, incubation took place for me when Phish was not touring. Moustakas emphasizes that during this period, one recognizes that they are extending their understanding of the phenomenon to other spaces and places. Entering high school after my first summer tour seeing Phish, I recognized that the spirit to embrace improvisation and the unknown was not easy to find outside of the concert context. As a unit, Phish trusts in each other’s creative choices on stage. As performers, Phish rely on their audience to participate with their ambitious improvisations and antics. Phish can expect the same enthusiasm and cheers from their audience when something goes wrong onstage as they can when they play well. Seeing a band willing to perform at such a caliber, committing to the unknown, resonates with me personally and implicitly makes me more comfortable showing my own vulnerabilities. It is a heroic act in that Phish exposes their creative process to be celebrated through all of its imperfections. Phish’s mistakes and vulnerabilities in their performances are therapeutic to witness and listen to because they are human as well as an affirmation of the transmission of creativity and spirit from one person to another through music. Yet, this kind of intimate vulnerability isn’t widely embraced. Many hold the belief that inconsistencies or moments of inaccuracy in a performance are signs of weakness. As an adolescent with my own inconsistencies and vulnerabilities, I took solace in Phish’s creative approach, and the audience they created through their unrelenting embrace of the present moment.

Phish shows mark time in a particular way. As music becomes a way of mapping our lived experiences, music helps us understand our values, relationships, and positioning. When Phish is not on tour, the Phish community connects through online message boards and social media. A response to a Phish.net message board topic entitled “Memorable Moments During Shows” captures this sentiment:

About 3 months ago we had to put our dog Halley to sleep. Whenever [Phish] would play “Halley's [Comet]” we would always smile and think of our dog (she was named after the song after all). When she died we were worried that the song would no longer be a happy occasion for us. So somehow it just felt like a meaningful little coincidence for us that our first Halley's after her passing was preceded by “Joy,” and we joyfully sang along in her honor.^[15]

The open and vulnerable sentiments shared in this post typify the kind of empathic social sharing that occurs regularly within the Phish community. While similar emotional engagements may occur for other audiences at other shows, Phish creates not only a space of meaning-making, but also a community that values sharing these experiences with each other.

6. Illumination

In Moustakas’s “illumination” stage, one experiences a breakthrough in understanding regarding a quality or qualities of a phenomenon.^[16] At this moment, aspects of implicit knowledge emerge as knowable and explicit. For me, this moment occurred in 2016, during the first installation of Phish’s international Riviera Maya event in Mexico. In the short seconds between the lights going down and the band starting to play, I considered how the Riviera Maya concerts had come to be. I reflected on how the four-piece band from Vermont had extended their legacy to that point; how their team marketed such a happening to a point at which the event sold out immediately; how there were people hard at work at all hours to ensure the weekend ran smoothly. I then found myself thinking about my early childhood and time spent in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. As an emotional child with existential questions and fears, I sought a means of connecting socially, while also fearing stigma and rejection. This said, I was not depressed in a generalizable sense. In therapy, I began to articulate aspects of live music that brought forward a sense of greater connectivity, and left me feeling less emotionally and socially inhibited. Standing next to one of my closest friends, I thought of his successful experience in therapy. The alliances we formed in therapy, and with each other as a result of our passions for Phish, helped bring us to that moment just as much as the band and their team did. They helped us to understand that our experiences with music are valuable tools for creating meaning in life.

The relationship I felt with the band was akin to the relationship I felt with my therapist and the experience of therapy. Both in therapy and at Phish shows, I was encouraged to think deeply, speak about my feelings, and embrace the unknown. In therapy, this happens through free association, while at Phish shows, it happens through attending and discussing live shows. In therapy and through attending Phish shows, I was brought to new places and encouraged to explore alternative, improvisatory, and intersubjective ways of making meaning. My work in therapy was not to discover my objective history but rather to better understand how I felt about my past, myself, the world around me, and its effects upon me. Instead of a process of diagnosis and cure which is based on a description of my unwanted feelings or behaviors, I was encouraged to speak about what came to mind around these experiences and therefore, to try and understand them and how I relate to them. Many fans approach analyzing Phish under the assumption that they are reaching for objective truths. Often, these analytic approaches are a result of personal and collective preferences and criteria that reveal just as much about the listener/observer as they do about the band. Practices of analysis in psychoanalysis, heuristic research, and Phish fandom are interpretive. This helps patients, fans, and researchers to build cohesive narratives around our not-so-objective realities. These practices encourage both creativity and the search for meaning in unexpected places rather than according to a scientific manual.

7. Explication

In the “explication” stage, the researcher develops a comprehensive and further analyzed depiction of the lived experience.^[17] As mentioned earlier, I realize I entered into the Phish phenomenon at a unique time. The reunion of the band marked guitarist Trey Anastasio’s recovery from drug addiction. The band’s return following Anastasio’s arrest in 2006 and time spent in drug court allowed a new generation to participate in the Phish phenomenon. The chance Anastasio experienced with sobriety contrasts with the fall of Jerry Garcia, lead guitarist and in many ways leader of the Grateful Dead, who lost his battle with addiction in 1995 and died in rehab. Anastasio sings on “Everything’s Right,” a song Phish debuted in 2017, “The rest of your life don't take it for granted.”^[18] These lyrics exemplify the tone of Anastasio’s more recent output and approach to music-making: spiritual, full of hope, and in acknowledgement of the unifying power of the community built around the band and genre. Robert Ker remarks of “Everything’s Right” on Phish.net that, “It’s all just vague enough that the song is about whatever you want it to be.”^[19] Of course, this is in keeping with the Phish’s lyrical tradition. The effect of this song’s lyrics and the refrain, “Everything’s right, so just hold tight” offers a mantra of encouragement, solace, and joyfulness clothed in a playful obscurity that inspires me.

As I explore the question of how Phish has played a therapeutic role in my life, I have also begun training as a psychoanalyst—learning and practicing the methodology of the psychotherapy that informed my early treatment. Psychoanalysis is a field with many different theories about the human condition and a global community that values a commitment to the discipline and the depths of knowledge about it. This is similar to the way that Phish’s community engages with the band’s music. I enjoy this field in part because the intensity of engagement and discourse is similar to that which I experience at a Phish concert.

Psychoanalytic treatment never pinned me with a diagnosis. I was able to explore my emotional life without the consequence of having it described through the language of a diagnostic manual. Phish’s lyrics always seemed a better way of explaining my feelings anyway. Many models of treatment force individuals to grapple with diagnoses as a kind of mirror, which puts them at risk of living out pathologies rather than working to overcome them. Oftentimes, diagnoses come with a pre-ascribed meaning. For example, depressed individuals are thought to lack energy, motivation, and interest in activities. Instead, psychoanalysis taught me to tolerate a certain amount of ambiguity around my emotional life. Sometimes, I do not know what ails me or why until I find ways—in and outside of analysis—to create meaning around what I feel and put that into language. Inversely, a lack of ability to make meaning in one’s life can bring about mental suffering. The materials for meaning-making that are shared by Phish and their audiences become the tools used by followers of the band to relate to each other and the larger world.

8. Conclusion

As a follower of Phish, I look for new ways to explain my relationship with them to those who do not take part in the community or are new to it. I often revert to the explanation: “Phish is more than just a band” or “it’s more than just a concert.” Yet, these phrases do little to articulate what that “more” refers to. The interdisciplinary nature of Phish studies allows scholars and fans to explore this more than, contextualizing it within their disciplines and frameworks. I am now a psychoanalyst in training who thinks deeply about the therapeutic and liberating value of live music. Even though the connection between the two is not always apparent, my career choice has been influenced by my illuminating experiences in therapy and as a part of Phish’s following.

Moustakas’s method offers a means of revealing the truths of lived experiences. It helps me further convey that individuals are permitted to speak about their therapies, mental health, and more, using a methodology that in Moutakas’s words, “defies the shackles of convention and tradition . . . [and] pushes beyond the known, the expected, or the merely possible.”^[20] Similarly, the notion that an experience with music can hold a therapeutic value has become culturally relevant. Headlines such as, “Science says gig-going can help you live longer and increases well being,” catch the attention of many.^[21] The notion that live music can be scientifically proven to increase well-being is exciting. However, the psychometric and heart-rate tests employed in attempts to measure such matters do nothing to elaborate on the intimacies of these experiences. I hope that my exploration of Phish in relation to therapeutic alliance and the value of meaning-making can become one of many scholarly meditations on Phish’s therapeutic qualities.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Ken Aigen, Jnan Blau, Jake Cohen, Eduardo Duarte, Stephanie Jenkins, Bethany Laursen, David Lichtenstein, Kurt Milberger, Philip Pellino, and everyone at the Public Philosophy Journal.

Bibliography

Campbell, Robert Jean. Psychiatric Dictionary. 6th ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Ker, Robert. “Everything’s Right History.” Phish.net, 2021. Accessed June 5, 2022. https://phish.net/song/everythings-right/history.

Lewis, Bradley. Narrative Psychiatry: How Stories Can Shape Clinical Practice. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2011.

MattG. “Memorable Moments During Shows.” Phish.net, 2011. Accessed June 3, 2019. http://forum.phish.net/forum/show/1298313768#page=1.

Moustakas, Clark. Heuristic Research: Design, Methodology, and Applications. California: Sage, 1990.

O2 The Blue. “Science Says Gig-Going Can Help You Live Longer and Increases Wellbeing.” Virgin Media, 2018. https://news.o2.co.uk/press-release/science-says-gig-going-can-help-you-live-longer-and-increases-wellbeing/.

Pareles, John. “Phish’s Breakup? That Was Then. But Tough Times Call for a Reunion.” New York Times, March 4, 2009. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/05/arts/music/05phish.html.

Phish. “Everything’s Right.” Track 3 on Sigma Oasis, JEMP Records, 2020.

Phish. “Tube.” Recorded August 13, 1996. Track 2 on Live Phish 12, Elektra, 2002.

Ruud, Even. Music Therapy: Improvisation, Communication, and Culture. Gilsum, NH: Barcelona, 1998.

Steger, Michael F. “Making Meaning in Life.” Psychological Inquiry 23, no. 4 (2012): 381-85. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43865601.

Contributor Information

Isaac Slone is a psychoanalytic candidate at the Contemporary Freudian Society. He received his BA and MA from the New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study where he studied the relationship between psychoanalysis, music, and literature. At NYU Gallatin, he was honored with the Interdisciplinary Academic Excellence Awards for his undergraduate work on the relationship between narrative theory and concepts of identity formation and his graduate work on psychoanalytic technique and performance studies. He is the director of development for the psychoanalytic online and print magazine, ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action. He writes and lectures on James Joyce, the Grateful Dead, and Phish. Isaac is also a student of Zen Buddhism at the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care.

1. Bradley Lewis, Narrative Psychiatry: How Stories Can Shape Clinical Practice (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2011), 38. ↑

2. John Pareles, “Phish’s Breakup? That Was Then. But Tough Times Call for a Reunion,” New York Times, March 4, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/05/arts/music/05phish.html. ↑

3. Michael F. Steger, “Making Meaning in Life,” Psychological Inquiry 23, no. 4 (2012): 381, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43865601. ↑

4. Robert Jean Campbell, Psychiatric Dictionary, sixth edition (New York: Oxford UP, 1989), 229. ↑

5. Clark Moustakas, Heuristic Research: Design, Methodology, and Applications (California: Sage, 1990), 9. ↑

6. Moustakas, Heuristic Research, 13. ↑

7. Moustakas, Heuristic Research, 27. ↑

8. Even Ruud, Music Therapy: Improvisation, Communication, and Culture (Gilsum, NH: Barcelona Publishers, 1998), 94. ↑

9. Moustakas, Heuristic Research, 28. ↑

10. Ruud, Music Therapy, 37. ↑

11. Ruud, Music Therapy, 85. ↑

12. Ruud, Music Therapy, 31. ↑

13. Phish, “Tube,” Recorded August 13, 1996, track 2 on Live Phish 12, Elektra, 2002. ↑

14. Moustakas, Heuristic Research, 28. ↑

15. MattG, “Memorable Moments During Shows,” Phish.net, 2011, accessed June 3, 2019. http://forum.phish.net/forum/show/1298313768#page=1. ↑

16. Moustakas, Heuristic Research, 29. ↑

17. Moustakas, Heuristic Research, 31. ↑

18. Phish, “Everything’s Right,” track 3 on Sigma Oasis, JEMP Records, 2020. ↑

19. Robert Ker, “Everything’s Right History,” Phish.net, 2021, Accessed June 5, 2022. ↑

20. Moustakas, Heuristic Research, 17. ↑

21. “Science Says Gig-Going Can Help You Live Longer and Increases Wellbeing,” O2 The Blue, Virgin Media, 2018. https://news.o2.co.uk/press-release/science-says-gig-going-can-help-you-live-longer-and-increases-wellbeing/. ↑