Phish in the Farmhouse: An Interview with Trey Anastasio

THE FIRST WORDS you hear on the new Phish album are, "Welcome, this is our farmhouse," and you are invited, as never before, into the band's world of rural Vermont. This is a world of deerflies clustered on the screen door while the Northern Lights shimmer overhead (the key images in the album's title song, Farmhouse); this is a world that still uses pine-plank outhouses (photographed on the album's cover); this is a world of dirt roads, maple-syrup taps, live-and-let-live Yankee philosophy, white steeples, village greens, unwashed pick-up trucks, four feet of snow all winter and lush green all summer.