PHISH’S CHILLED-OUT VERMONT CLUBHOUSE
AS A TEENAGER, Phish frontman Trey Anastasio recorded “fake” albums with his friends on a four-track cassette machine. When the jam heroes exploded in popularity in the early 1990s, he “wanted to maintain that joy” — a tall order at rigid, expensive recording studios. So Anastasio, newly married and freshly relocated to the tiny northern Vermont town of Westford, built his own in the woods, minutes from his home. “I can’t even describe how much I love this place,” says Anastasio of The Barn, Phish’s 4,000-square-foot home base since the late ’90s, which has also welcomed Herbie Hancock, Toots & The Maytals and more. “There were no plans, no architects, nothing. The whole thing was all planned out as it went. They let me push the button and blow up the dynamite to put the foundation in.” Like Phish’s music itself, inspired improvisation yielded startlingly realized results.
Acoustic Serendipity
Anastasio purchased The Barn “from a Vermont farmer with rough, rough hands” for just $1,000. Then, the farmer broke the news: That handshake deal was to buy the building itself, not the land it was on. Anastasio decided to move and painstakingly re-create the structure a few minutes down the road, which ultimately paid off. “Every producer I’ve ever worked with has been like, ‘I’ve never been in a room that sounds so good,’ ” says Anastasio. “It sounds unbelievable because all the walls are rough barnboard, and they’re jagged. There are no flat surfaces.” The floor, a poured concrete slab topped by boards culled from the trees cleared to make a path to The Barn, is another result of the “magical bunch of decisions that yielded this anomalous acoustic space,” says producer Bryce Goggin, who has worked with Phish since producing 2000’s Farmhouse, the first album recorded at the studio. “It has this great combination of very diffuse and very varied surfaces, which is something that acousticians are always just trying to do to recording spaces already.”
Stories Wherever You Look
“There’s nothing new at The Barn at all,” Anastasio says. “Every piece of furniture is from family or hand-me-down.” After walking through hand-carved doors (Anastasio’s mother found them on a trip to India), visitors can relax next to the recording console (the 64-input API that Anastasio is fairly sure was used to record the Cops theme) on the Davenport couch Anastasio jumped on at his grandmother’s house as a 2-year-old, or unwind in the chair his father watched TV in when Anastasio was growing up in New Jersey. During breaks, “the table that we eat on is my Italian grandmother’s that I ate every meal on when I was 6, 5, 3 years old.” Other pieces are locally salvaged, like the overhead lighting fixtures, taken from the gym of a nearby school before its demolition and still wrapped in the mesh that once blocked wayward volleyballs.
The Clubhouse Is The Key
Road life wore Phish down, and the band took two extended hiatuses in the 2000s that cast doubt on its future. Today, Anastasio credits The Barn with the group’s longevity. “I don’t think there would be a Phish — I know there wouldn’t — without The Barn, because it’s our clubhouse,” he says. “It isn’t a recording studio. When we go there, everybody just starts laughing and cracking up.” Anastasio credits absurdist creations like Kasvot Växt, the fictional Scandinavian band Phish concocted and “covered” an album’s worth of material by at its 2018 Halloween show, to The Barn’s freewheeling atmosphere. The lack of a control room helps, as does the console, which Goggin calls “the backbone of the operation” and has so many inputs that “we can leave everything set up and just flow and flow and never have to pause to tweak anything.”
A Good Hang
The Barn’s laid-back aura — and its 50-mile view of Mount Mansfield and the Green Mountains — has a way of making other artists stay awhile, too. For their 2004 album,
True Love (a set of collaborations with other musicians), Toots & The Maytals visited the studio, planning to record just one track with Anastasio. “But once they got there, the stars were out, the doors open up, the moon is out. The Maytals are in the corner, consuming pounds of ganja, and everybody’s laughing and having a good time,” Anastasio recalls. Toots had plans to rerecord Willie Nelson’s “Still Is Still Moving to Me” with the country icon, and spontaneously decided to lay down the track’s instrumental then and there at The Barn. “Nobody gives a fuck at The Barn,” Anastasio says with a laugh. “You’re just there with your friends. It’s a hang.”