The Unwinding

• Performances
• History
• Lyrics
• Artist
  • Phish
  • Fish
  • Mike
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  • Trey
  • All

Originally Performed By	Phish
Appears On
Music/Lyrics	(Anastasio/Fishman/Gordon/McConnell)
Vocals	Trey (lead), All (backing)
Phish Debut	2021-10-31
Last Played	2021-10-31
Current Gap	194
Historian	Michael Sell (meisenhower)
Last Update	2026-01-03

History

When Phish took the stage as (the) Sci-Fi Soldier on Halloween, 2021, they embodied alter egos to warn the world about The Howling, humanity’s self-inflicted apocalypse set to happen fifty years in the future. The story—and eventual album, Get More Down—with its accompanying comic book, is a convoluted narrative woven with past Phish lyrics, references to Kasvot Vaxt, and even mention of Ralph Malph.

“The Unwinding,” a sub-one-minute interlude on Get More Down, is a lullaby in the midst of the Howling’s impending chaos and upheaval. Set within songs tinged with bloody apologies (“Thanksgiving”), regret (“Egg in a Hole”), and the destruction of humanity itself (“The Howling”), “The Unwinding” is a gentle, tinkling ode to focus and inner vision. 

Provided to YouTube by JEMP Records

The song opens with a pointed, almost alarming, spacey synthesizer and eventually light percussion. A low somersaulting loop of melodic bass joins the mix, countering the beat of the synthesizers and eventual lyrics and guitar. Trey’s vocals are softly hollow, vacant, haunting, echoing as if nearby and far away at the same time. 

In the studio, the only lyrics that made it into “The Unwinding” are the repeated “And I listen / And I listen / In the darkness / In the darkness,bringing to mind isolation and the unknown, the voice relying on its ears to discern what is going on while the dark inhibits the ability to see for oneself. Is the singer listening to the end of humanity? For a clue as to the aftermath? Perhaps the unwinding itself makes a sound?

Listening in the darkness evokes “Lie in the dark and listen,” a poem by Noel Coward about English soldiers silently flying their planes over unknowing civilians during World War II. The esoteric differences between soldiers and civilians—their aims and goals, their journeys, especially in the midst of uncertainty and impending upheaval—parallels that of a Halloween Phish audience caught unawares by a fictional band of time-traveling “soldiers.” 

A lush troupe of voices joins the isolated narrator on the song’s chorus, repeating “the unwinding the unwinding the unwinding” as an unspooling mantra. The song’s fadeout in the studio suggests endlessness, an unwinding that continues into forever. 

Performed just once live, “The Unwinding” clocked in at over five minutes and included a second verse: “An illusion / An illusion / In the harbor / In the harbor.” Here we are given vague landmarks to entice our visual imaginations, suggestions of ships and shores, or beaches and breaking waves, possibly a place to relax and…unwind. The illusion could simply be hallucinatory visions due to sensory deprivation, or it could be suggestive of the Fata Morgana, a visual mirage often occurring near bodies of water where the earth’s horizon is visible. 

The scant performance history of “The Unwinding” suggests a limited or forgotten place in the Phish catalog. But with its lilting lullaby, melodic tones, and cyclic repetition, it certainly has the potential for a welcome comedown in the midst of any future Phish show.

Last significant update: 1/3/26

 

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