Trey Anastasio: I pretty much am. Every year my family and I come down here, and I also do a lot of writing. Right now I'm working on these horn charts. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them. I've had this vision in my head for a long time -- I've always wanted to write for a bigger band than a four-piece, to be able to work with a lot more colors. The idea is at least a 10-piece band, where you can get into five-part horn arrangements with a lot of improvisation with a very heavy groove and at least two drummers. That's always been in the back of my mind.

PB: Are you hoping your new record will make you the next Leonard Bernstein, or Tommy Dorsey?

TA: The idea was that there have been moments in musical history where popular music was also pushing the artistic envelope. Like in the swing band era, pre-World War II, late Thirties, you had an audience that was so educated that you could have a schmaltzy song, like Moonlight on the Ganges, come out, and then Tommy Dorsey would do a really wicked arrangement of it. And everybody that danced on Friday nights knew that arrangement. So when in the early Fifties, Eddie Sauter, of the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra, comes out with a really, really deep arrangement of Moonlight on the Ganges that references Tommy Dorsey's arrangement, you had an educated audience that understood that.

PB: Isn't all that composition antithetical to a band like Phish, where so much is based on improvisation and playing in the moment?

TA: Part of the reason our improv developed the way it did was that there was so much deeply charted music that everybody had to learn. There used to be five people in Phish, and one of the reasons that the fifth person quit was because of the song You Enjoy Myself. I handed everybody all these sheets of paper at band practice, and three of them were like, "Great!" And one of the guys was like, "I'm not doing this." We always thought that playing all that music was training our brains to hear the group as four parts of a chord. So you end that discipline with a free improv, having just spent five minutes being part of a very intricate machine. I think that what we found was that going through all the discipline made our improvisation much more interesting, because you want to be that tightly connected. Mindless banging sounds really horrible after swimming in this ocean of musical cohesiveness.

PB: When you hear any of the various acts you've performed with referred to as "jam bands," do you consider that a compliment?

TA: I think it's funny that we became a jam band, because like I said, if you listen to the first album, it's all composed. But there's an energy when you're in front of a live audience, and to be able to somehow combine those two things is just so unbeatable.

PB: Has that gotten harder for you as the size of your audiences increased? Can you still have that same kind of connection when you're playing for 80,000 people?

TA: Strangely, it hasn't, and I think that's a learned skill as well. The last Phish tour, I felt more connected to the audience than I ever have. I spend a lot of my time up on stage looking around. I'll see somebody dancing, especially the people who are sort of backlit in the doorways of the middle section. I feel like I can usually pick somebody out and I'll just kind of focus on them for five minutes.

PB: So you really are singling out audience members? Because there's always somebody coming out of a Phish show saying, "He was totally playing to me."

TA: I really am playing to people. Although it's not necessarily that person. [Laughs]

PB: There's been a growing sense that Phish isn't an equal proposition anymore -- that you're really the leader of the band. Has that been a difficult position for you to come to terms with?