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Phish: Billy Breathes

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: JEMP Records
Released: 1999
Time:
 54:33
Category: Alternative Rock
Producer(s): Phish, Steve Lillywhite
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.phish.com
Appears with: Trey Anastasio
Purchase date: 2012
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Free (Anastasio/Marshall) - 3:49
[2] Character Zero (Anastasio/Marshall) - 4:00
[3] Waste (Anastasio/Marshall) - 4:50
[4] Taste (Anastasio/Fishman/Gordon/Marshall/McConnell) - 4:07
[5] Cars Trucks Buses (McConnell) - 2:25
[6] Talk (Anastasio/Marshall) - 3:09
[7] Theme from the Bottom (Anastasio/Fishman/Gordon/Marshall/McConnell) - 6:22
[8] Train Song (Gordon/Linitz) - 2:33
[9] Bliss (Anastasio) - 2:03
[10] Billy Breathes (Anastasio) - 5:31
[11] Swept Away (Anastasio/Marshall) - 1:16
[12] Steep (Anastasio/Fishman/Gordon/Marshall/McConnell) - 1:37
[13] Prince Caspian (Anastasio/Marshall) - 5:19

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Trey Anastasio - Guitars, Vocals, Art Direction, Producer
Page McConnell - Keyboards, Vocals, Art Direction, Producer
Mike Gordon - Bass Guitar, Vocals, Art Direction, Producer
Jon Fishman - Drums, Vocals, Art Direction, Producer

John Siket - Engineer, Mixing
Steve Lillywhite - Mixing, Producer
Chris Laidlaw - Assistant Engineer, Mixing Assistant
Bob Ludwig - Mastering
Alli - Art Direction
David Walker - Artwork, Paintings
Danny Clinch - Photography
Brad Sands - Production Coordination
Bruce Burgess - Liner Notes

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s



Thanks to producer Steve Lillywhite, Phish finally delivered a concise pop album with Billy Breathes. Lillywhite had the band cut away their jams and accentuate their songwriting, resulting in a series of tightly written, melodic folk-rock and psychedelic pop songs. Phish still delve into the deeper waters with sweeping songs like "Theme from the Bottom," but what truly impresses about Billy Breathes is the group's seamless eclecticism and how they master all varieties of roots rock and psychedelic styles. With the shorter songs, their musical depth and breadth is all the more apparent and impressive, making Billy Breathes the definitive Phish album the band has always strived to deliver.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine - All Music Guide



Phish's last album, the double CD A Live One, distilled a decade's worth of dedicated road work by a group that has reinvented improvised rock for a new generation. If Phish have an identity, it is one characterized by endless change and musical risk, a yesterday-today-and-tomorrow sound that draws liberally from rock history and jazz innovation. Combine that with a rich, interactive mythology binding the band and its audience into the coziest symbiosis since you know who, and you've got a cultural force to be reckoned with. An exhaustive — and nearly exhausting — consolidation of Phish's tightly wound tunes and electrifying jams, A Live One, which went gold, finally gave the rock mainstream a chance to see what all the fuss was about.

Then, on their seventh record, they rested: Phish take a well-deserved breather, so to speak, on Billy Breathes, shedding much of the sophisticated trickery that has been their musical trademark. Billy Breathes, the group's first studio release in two years, is a quiet gem of an album, and it confirms that guitarist Trey Anastasio, drummer Jon Fishman, bassist Mike Gordon and keyboard player Page McConnell are much more than a jam band from Burlington, Vt., with a swelling fan base. As rustic as the New England countryside, Billy Breathes is a warm declaration of optimism packaged in concise, radio-attractive songs.

Phish's studio work has always been iffy. While the band's self-produced 1988 debut, Junta (re-released by Elektra in 1992 with extra material), still buzzes with novelty, 1993's Rift is just shy of being a great concept album. Lawn Boy (1990), A Picture of Nectar (1992) and Hoist (1994), listenable albums with bright moments aplenty, seem more like rough sketches that get a lot juicier onstage. Downright organic in comparison, Billy Breathes — co-produced by the band and Steve Lilly-white — flows like a stream dream.

The album begins with "Free" (first line: "I'm floating in the blimp a lot") and ends with "Prince Caspian" (first line: "Oh! To be Prince Caspian/Afloat upon the waves") — songs that celebrate the weightless ecstasy of the group's instrumental allure. "Character Zero" and "Swept Away" start out unplugged before veering off into something wilder and more electric; "Waste," "Talk" and "Train Song" have all popped up during the acoustic mini-sets that Phish recently began integrating into their shows.

If A Live One was Phish's variation on the Grateful Dead's Live/Dead, Billy Breathes is part Workingman's Dead and part Abbey Road, focused on musical essences often obscured by rock-concert spectacle. The songs — written mostly by Anastasio with his longtime lyricist, Tom Marshall (whose craft has matured big time since his "rhinothropic microgaze" period) — unspool guileless images of transcendence set against the struggle to evade the pitfalls of everyday miscommunication. "Talk," one of several song titles reflecting the album's elegant simplicity, could be directed at either a lover or an intruding crowd: "Nothing's ever soaking through the filter that surrounds your thoughts," sings Anastasio sweetly.

Birth is the subject of the loose suite of tunes that constitute most of the disc's second half — no surprise, since the album's title is a nod to Anastasio's baby daughter. With its intrauterine imagery and dank-underwater jam, "Theme From the Bottom" could refer to society's rejects or a resident of the womb. The blue-grass-flavored "Train Song" is imbued with the surreal Americana of O. Winston Link's photographs of the last steam engines; in the lyrics, passengers hope "to review the coulds before we were born/And to invite a new game of can'ts."

The suite proper begins with Anastasio's mantralike acoustic-guitar solo, "Bliss" (written originally for an injured fan), which segues into "Billy Breathes," an airy lullaby with the refrain "Softly sing sweet songs." Anastasio's sustained feedback opens onto a shimmering, Enoesque soundscape. "Swept Away," an appeal for respite from a pressing mob (of fans?), glides into "Steep," a psychedelic instrumental portrait of a 19th-century factory. This fades into the yearning chords of "Prince Caspian," in which Anastasio longs for an austerity symbolized by a grotesque desire to have "stumps instead of feet."

While a folky vibe prevails in the back-porch guitar picking and the band's gorgeous vocal harmonies, condensed suggestions of Phish's style of surging stage jams are heard intermittently. The arrangements contain secrets — whispering drum brushes, the mating call of a theremin — that I didn't catch at first; they echo a wide host of influences, some obvious (the Beatles, Traffic, Jefferson Airplane and Pink Floyd), others less so. McConnell's "Cars Trucks Buses" recalls the funky sound of the Meters and the jazz organist Jimmy Smith, while some of the album's short, fractured song hooks almost call Pavement to mind.

Full of subtle detail and unfashionable heart, Billy Breathes changes moods like a cloudy spring day. It contains one too many ballads: "Waste," with its supplication to "Come waste your time with me," is just too precious. But like the band itself, Billy Breathes is a living thing, low in irony and high in deceptively laid-back ambition. Consider it a breath of fresh air from the country's biggest cult act.

Richard Gehr - December 9, 1996
RollingStone.com



You're either a believer or you're not when it comes to this hugely popular live band. Well, the lines get blurred here, just as they did a quarter century ago on the Grateful Dead's American Beauty. As he did with the Dave Matthews Band, producer Steve Lillywhite puts a crisp stamp on 13 likable, easy-going songs and instrumentals.

Jeff Bateman - Amazon.com



Phish, being a jam band, had a very unique songwriting method, with influences from psychoactive substances. Locking themselves in a room, under the influence of cannabis and LSD, Phish wrote entire albums with the aid of such matter. And those albums have gone on to give the northeastern psychedelic/funk jam band the notoriety of being one of the world's most astonishing, captivating, and intense live acts. Made up of the four college friends Trey Anastasio (guitar/vocals), Mike Gordon (bass), Page McConnell (Keyboards) and Jon Fishman (Drums), Phish has gained infamy as an improvisational magnum opus of American counterculture. Blending elements of funk, psychedelic, rock, folk and bluegrass elements into their music, Phish's musical catalogue is diverse enough to avoid classification into a single genre. But what is unique about Phish, more so than their juxtaposition of musical styles, is their ability to improvise for elongated amounts of time, while simultaneously avoiding the tedium that many jam bands bring. In 1996, after nearly fifteen years together, Phish released an album entitled Billy Breathes. Enclosed in a peculiar case, adorned with a photo close up of Mike Gordon's nostrils, Billy Breathes contains some of Phish's most interesting music. With music that is just as entertaining as it's artwork (thankfully, Mike Gordon trims the nose hairs), Billy Breathes is essentially Phish's most accessed album.

Suffice to say, Billy Breathes is an entertaining listen from alpha to omega. Trey Anastasio is an amazingly talented dualist as he coaxes the listeners with his mellowed out, yet gritty voice, whilst providing thick, rich guitar melodies textured in various waves of sound effects. Tremolo, wah wah, and and various degrees of distortion and overdrive accompany Anastasio's warm, thich hollow body guitar tones. And while his voice is thoroughly capable of driving, higher register runs, Anastasio's vocals reside in a deeper, mellow groove. Not unlike the guitar work, Mike Gordon's basslines are somewhat of a staple to the band's sound. While still remaining as the foundation of the groove that the band works from, Gordon knows how to tweak a simple chord progression into a complex groove, backed by Jon Fishman's thundering drum work, which takes full advantage of offbeats and double bass work. Page McConnell's keyboard work is exemplified into a more rudimentary level on studio albums, but his electric organ and keyboard playing are ever present in the sound mix, acting as more so of a medium for groove than anything else. For those of you who have seen or heard Phish's live sets, songs can be much more accommodating to Page's keyboard work, especially during long jams. Which leads me to my first unjust whine, making a negative comparison to Phish's live set. I mean, they're studio work is good music, but it is too concise and ineptly structured to even be associated with their live sets. As unfair as it may be, it just does not hold up. But on the bright side, it is still creative.

Lyrically, Phish falls nothing short of being a band commonly connected to drugs. In fact, most of the lyrics probably originated from LSD induced hallucinations or strange thoughts during a euphoric cannabis high. Even so, Trey Anastasio is a talented writer who has a very skillful touch on imagery. Melodically, Phish is a mind melting phenomenon, where so much sound is created by so little. And that is why so many fans of Phish are coincidentally cannabis consumers. As blunt as it may be, it happens to be a fact. But to keep this from turning into a drug based topic, I will conclude my review on the note that I intended to write this review on in the first place- As good as the music that is on Billy Breathes may be, it lacks the flow and free form improvisation that Phish is famous for. To compensate for it's lackluster, Billy Breathes keeps void of tedium by making every song accessible and concise enough to appreciate.

DesolationRow - June 25th, 2006
Copyright 2005-2014 Sputnikmusic.com



Billy Breathes is the sixth official studio album by American rock band Phish. It remains one of the most popular Phish albums, and is credited (like the later release Farmhouse) with connecting the band to a more mainstream audience beyond its strong cult following. Rolling Stone said that Billy Breathes is "a quiet gem of an album" that confirms Phish "is much more than a jam band from Burlington, Vermont."

The album includes the song "Free", the band's most successful chart single, which peaked at #11 on Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks Chart and at #24 on Billboard Modern Rock Tracks Chart.

Tracks 5 and 9 are instrumentals. "Bliss" is the only instrumental song on the album to have never been played live by the band. The album's final track, "Prince Caspian", is also the name of a mythical prince in The Chronicles of Narnia, a fantasy series by British novelist C. S. Lewis.

The cover of the album is a close-up shot of bass guitar player Mike Gordon, the first time that any member of Phish had appeared on an album cover. Phish frontman Trey Anastasio recalled in a 1997 interview that the cover came together very quickly on the last day of recording.

The album was certified Gold by RIAA January 8, 1999.

In February 2009, this album became available as a download in FLAC and MP3 formats at LivePhish.com.

Wikipedia.org
 

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