[We would like to thank Rob Mitchum (@robmitchum) aka @robmitchum on Bluesky for recapping last night's show. -Ed.]

I’m gonna clue you in on a dirty music writer secret: when we’re assigned to review a concert, we hardly ever go in with a blank slate. Given the quick turnaround time that a live review demands, it’s useful to go into the show with a framing device already in mind, then adjust accordingly. One might even pre-write a few paragraphs before the show, making an educated guess about how the night would unfold. Come back home, fill in the details, and voila – you can make deadline and go back to hanging out with your friends.

I’ve certainly written enough about Phish to know better, but I still use this strategy when I draw the prestigious phish.net assignment. I’d been thinking a lot about my expectations for these shows and why I chose them from the surprising abundance of Midwestern options this year, so I wrote down a handful of paragraphs between nights one and two, naively thinking I could predict the general parameters of how the evening would unfold.

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