Evening Song History

Evening Song

Originally Performed By	Phish
Appears On
Music	Anastasio
Lyrics By	Marshall/Herman
Vocals	Trey
Phish Debut	2019-12-28
Last Played	2023-07-28
Current Gap	113
Historian	brendandriscoll
Last Update	2025-11-16

History

"Evening Song" warns us of the perils of the night:

Approach the night with caution
It's the best that you can do
Move quickly through the darkness
'Til the daylight is renewed.

Night is when safety disappears, and scary things emerge:

For evening is when all things dark can
Slide around with ease
And good things all get shoved in shadows
By a wicked breeze.

With night comes an inversion of daytime morality, and the dangerous liberation of otherworldly, perhaps ghastly, beings:

For night is the dividing line that
Blends the right and wrong
Spirits crossing freely over
Can hold you there too long.

The best thing to do, "Evening Song" advises, is to get yourself home and wait out the darkness until "tomorrow's morning quells the thumping in your chest."

Phish frequently dispenses advice in lyrical form. Much of it blends wisdom and whimsy, a Zen koan set to music:

Toss away stuff you don't need in the end
But keep what's important
And know who's your friend. ("Theme from the Bottom")

Keep the tires off the line
Just relax, you're doing fine. ("Strange Design")

Whatever you do, take care of your shoes. ("Cavern")

"Evening Song" continues the advice-giving. But this time the advice is more serious–as serious as an anxiety attack. There isn't much whimsy here, just a warning as old as humanity itself: The nighttime is dangerous. Be careful.

As Page has described it, "Evening Song" has a "pretty melody" and "a great groove," and he "got to…add some synthesizers," which he liked. "Evening Song" follows a common Phish pattern of setting worried, dismaying lyrics to a gentle, even uplifting major-key harmonic palette. We see this in "Sparkle" and "Lifeboy," among copious other examples. But its closest cousin, harmonically and thematically, may be "Strange Design," which uses a similar ascending chord progression to accompany advice about finding safety in difficult moments.

By Tom Marshall's account, Trey wrote "Evening Song" in a Washington D.C. area hotel room in September 2019, following a Vida Blue show at the 9:30 Club the two attended together. Knowing that Trey would rise early the next morning, Tom left his guitar in Trey's hotel room and had previously shared some lyrics–a poem–that Tom and writing partner Scott Herman had been working on. When the two reunited the following day, Trey played the song for Tom on Tom's guitar. An early version of the song was recorded by Tom and Trey alone, a version Tom still professes to enjoy equally with the album version. The official release of "Evening Song" appears on the Sigma Oasis album, credited to Anastasio/Marshall/Herman.

The best thing to do is to stay home, advises "Evening Song." But what if your home is a Phish show? According to Trey, a fan suggested that they should end a concert set with "Evening Song," as a way of sending off the audience "into the parking lot" with a word of goodbye caution. Trey instead inverted the idea. "I actually thought it would be more fun to open with it," he said, "because you're walking into a whole crazy night ahead." You could take it further, he suggested, "if you really wanted to bend the lyrics, and you think about a Phish concert as being home, which I kind of think sometimes…you could say 'approach the night with caution, no longer shall you roam / when darkness stains the eastern sky, be sure that you are home,' meaning, come into the concert." The concert, in other words, could be either the dangerous darkness in which we need to exercise caution, or it could be the safe space within such darkness. Perhaps, he seems to suggest, the darkness isn't as dangerous as the lyrics might maintain.

Video by William Corcoran

Phish would lean into Trey's idea, and "Evening Song" debuted as the set opener on 12/28/19 night one of the four-night 2019 NYE Run at MSG. Since then, as of the time of this writing, "Evening Song" has been played five times in concert, approximately once per year from 2019 to 2023. In four of those five instances, it opened the set, and in three of those four instances, it opened the show. For everything else that "Evening Song" may be–a caution about the perils of the darkness; a pretty song about an anxious subject–within the Phish catalog the song is also a set-opener, albeit a rare one.

Although written and first performed in late 2019, it would not appear on a studio release until Sigma Oasis, on April 20, 2020. And thus, for many fans, "Evening Song" remains strongly associated not with live performance, but with the experience of being at home, in relative isolation, as COVID-19 slid around the globe with terrifying ease.

A particularly poignant version of the song was released on Trey's YouTube channel in October 2020, as the pandemic continued. On a deck at the Barn, overlooking a beautiful evergreen skyline, Page and Trey move an electric piano into place, a scene openly reminiscent of the iconic image of them carrying an electronic piano across Colorado Avenue in Telluride, Colorado in 1988. In the 2020 video, Page and Trey are wearing cloth masks. They park the piano on its stand and fiddle with microphone mounts. They are dressed casually: Trey in a hooded sweatshirt and Page in a flannel shirt. There is a barbecue grill in the background. This is someone's house, but we are outdoors–for the view, but also perhaps for safety. They sit down, Page on a padded stool behind the Wurlitzer and Trey on a simple wooden chair, the pandemic-requisite six foot distance between the two. Next to each is a small table bearing a silver tea service.

Video by Trey Anastasio

They remove their masks. "Hey," says Page. "Nice to see ya," says Trey, "how have you been?" For many watchers, it is a familiar scenario: a mid-pandemic reunion, genuinely warm but a little awkward. "Wanna play a song?" asks Page. "I do," responds Trey, positioning his weathered Martin acoustic on his thigh. Arpeggiating the opening chords, Trey leads them into "Evening Song." The duo harmonize through both verse and chorus, and smoothly trade off solos, these two men that have been playing music together for nearly four decades and are now deep into middle age, with all of the accumulated fear and wisdom that comes with age. "Approach the night with caution," sings Trey, unaccompanied, as the song eases to its end.

Last significant update: 11/15/25