Lotus History - Phish.net

Lotus

Originally Performed By	Trey Anastasio
Original Album	Lonely Trip (2020)
Appears On
Music	Anastasio
Lyrics By	Marshall
Vocals	Trey
Historian	Ben Bunting (lazyblazers)
Last Update	2026-01-07

History

In fiction at least, the end of the world is almost never really about the end of the world.

These days, “apocalypse” immediately conjures visions of end-times scenarios and expensive special effects shots, but the word comes to us from the Greek apokalyptein, which means “to uncover” or “to reveal.” In fact, the use of “apocalypse” in the modern, pop-culture-cataclysm sense is so new, it only shows up in the Oxford English Dictionary after the Second Edition was published in 1989. “Tweezer” has been around longer, is what I’m saying.

The point is that apocalypse stories are almost never actually about the world ending, broadly speaking. Instead, they’re about what unprecedented trials and tribulations reveal about the people who suffer through them. If ends-of-the-world have to do with the end of anything, it’s most often the end of one’s preconceptions, or one’s assumptions, or one’s naivete in the face of a cataclysm small, large, or total. “Lotus” is one such story.

“Lotus” debuted online on 3/27/20, during a time that felt like the end of the world for many, and truly was for some: COVID-19 quarantine. The original version was thirteen minutes long, and it immediately felt grander in scale than the other quarantine songs that Trey had posted and would continue to post from his home throughout the first half of 2020, even if its accompanying video was decidedly more straightforward.

Video by Trey Anastasio

The song would be pared down a bit for the release of Lonely Trip that July 31st, but it lost none of its gravitas: at ten and a half minutes long, the “official” version sits in the middle of Lonely Trip’s tracklist, the sonic and thematic center of gravity for the rest of the album. It’s surprising, then, “Lotus” so far remains the only song off of Lonely Trip that has never been played live, neither by Phish nor by any of Trey’s side projects.

According to Trey’s Instagram post introducing the song, “Lotus” is an Anastasio/Marshall composition, and features Jon Fishman on drums. Presumably, Trey plays the rest of the instruments. The song’s multiple movements, as well as the grace with which it moves through them, recall fan-favorite long-form compositions like “You Enjoy Myself” and “Fluffhead,” and yet–perhaps due in part to the fact that it hasn’t been played live–“Lotus” seems to have quickly fallen off most fans’ radars in similar fashion to other latter-day long-form compositions like “Time Turns Elastic,” “Petrichor,” and “Forward People”/“Perseid.” It feels unfortunate because “Lotus” does something that’s rare in Trey’s oeuvre: it successfully marries his ability to write complex, emotionally evocative pieces of music (“Divided Sky”) to his ability to write lyrically dense songs that tell a compelling story (“What’s Going Through Your Mind?”).

Video by Trey Anastasio

If you’re looking for a shortcut to understanding what this particularly lyric-heavy tune is about, the man himself explained that

“This song is about escaping earth, to a different planet, and arriving to find a civilization that has advanced enough to survive its flaws, but in the process, has lost its ability to experience beauty, love, art and even hope. They've sacrificed all their flaws in favor of being completely transparent.”

For the sake of discussion, though, let’s assume that you believe in The Death Of The Author, and use Trey’s explanation as a jumping-off point for understanding “Lotus” instead of the one, authoritative statement on What It All Means.

In a somewhat rare move for a Phish/Trey song, “Lotus” opens with the chorus. Catchy, yes, but it also establishes the stakes: the narrator’s planet is about to be destroyed, so they’re leaving for somewhere else. By the end of the journey, they’ll have faced the obliteration of their own humanity and (maybe?) caused the destruction of the glass creatures’ civilization in the process. Three apocalypses for the price of one!

Following the initial chorus, the song has a pretty standard verse -> chorus -> verse structure up through the third chorus. The lyrics here seem to be describing the narrator’s rush to get off of their own planet and their ambivalence about what they’re leaving behind. The third time we hear the chorus, it repeats twice, and on the second time through, a new, drone-y guitar joins the mix (3:07 in the Lonely Trip version). This presages a transition into the next section of the song, which is a spacey instrumental passage weaving guitars, bass, marimba, and drums in and out of each other before fading out as individual instruments drop out completely one by one. If you wanted to, you could imagine this as the musical equivalent of space travel from one planet to the next.

The next section of the song starts from almost-complete silence, and feels like a duet between Trey’s voice and the lead guitar as he describes the narrator’s meeting with the glass creatures. This is the civilization that has “sacrificed all their flaws in favor of being completely transparent,” and slowly but surely the narrator begins to turn into one of them, giving up hope in favor of stasis. The slow, mellow music here feels like the narrator’s surrender.

At 5:20, the intensity of the music starts to ramp up–complete with a quick, repeated electric guitar lick–as the narrator grabs a lotus flower and, on the verge of losing hope completely, comes back to life instead. Elements of this song recall the lotus-eaters from Greek mythology, but ultimately, it seems that the lotus is this narrator’s salvation instead of their doom.

A new, heavier section of the song begins at 5:48. Likely because of Fishman’s drumming, this section–which details the narrator’s rebellion against the glass creatures, and the subsequent trial–recalls “46 Days”. Here, the narrator refuses to give up hope (“My crime was I did not renounce / The hope that they all lived without”) and turns opaque again as a result. The glass creatures judge them guilty, but the narrator shakes a lotus tree and a rain of lotus petals fall, shattering and destroying everyone around them but leaving them alive, whole, and opaque.

This leads to another musical transition at 7:06, into a section of the song that recalls the Traveler track “Scabbard.” The beat changes up a bit at 8:18, but the mellow, acoustic tone of the music stays the same as Trey sings the peaceful conclusion of the narrator’s story. After the final lyrics (“Wash my body clean”), we briefly revisit the “space travel” instrumental before a final, cyclical return to the chorus.

The moral here seems clear. The real apocalypse in the story of “Lotus” isn’t the destruction of the narrator’s home planet, peopled in the end only by those not motivated enough to escape (“People will be left behind / Around their feet are growing vines”), and it isn’t the destruction of the glass creatures, who are, for all intents and purposes, already dead before the narrator finds and then shatters them. Instead, it’s the narrator’s apocalyptic trial that uncovers, that reveals to us a truth: that beauty, love, art, and hope are inextricable from the experience of truly living, and that our individual opacities are, in the end, what makes our civilization vibrant. The real cataclysm would be the surrender of our complex humanity, whether it be in the face of a global pandemic, a falling comet, or just a particularly bad day.

“Lotus” is one of the most ambitious latter-day Trey songs, so here’s to the hope that it gets played live some day!

Last significant update: 1/6/26