Song of the Day 1/17: Phish, “Farmhouse”

The venerable jam band Phish is coming to the Woodlands, the Dover Downs-adjacent campground that hosted the Firefly festival for a decade, for a four-day festival in August. Travel package tickets for the Mondegreen Festival go on sale tomorrow, weekend and camping passes Friday.

Summer music festivals are pretty common now, and Phish was a pioneer of the form in the ’90s. The Bonnaroo Festival, for example, was inspired when its founders attended a Phish festival.

Tourism in Dover has taken a big hit in recent years, and not just because of the pandemic – the Firefly festival is still on hiatus, and NASCAR only comes to town once a year now instead of twice. Phishheads should help fill the void. Like Deadheads, people will travel from all over the country to attend

Phish is like a National Hockey League team – they can fill a stadium, but almost nobody else is interested. They’re usually compared with the Grateful Dead because they go in for long jams and have hyper-dedicated fans who trade tapes of their concerts. Musically, though, they’re more like Frank Zappa, silly and experimental, and like Zappa, they’re an acquired taste.

This song is the one Phish fans play for people who say they don’t like Phish, because it sounds more conventional than just about anything else in their catalogue. There’s a good reason – the chorus is the same chord progression as Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” and about a thousand other songs. The lyrics, more typically, were taken from a sign posted in the farmhouse where they recorded part of the album. It became the title track of the band’s ninth studio album, released in 2000.