See, Jeff Lang and his Phishtracks had solved one very big problem. You could now listen to any Phish song or show anywhere.

But unbeknownst to Jeff, in solving one very big problem he introduced an even bigger problem. Because now that you could listen to ANY show or jam, the question becomes, what the HELL do I listen to?

There exists no definitive guide nor even a framework for how to listen to a catalog as vast and varied, as complicated and diagonal as Phish’s. All that music, all that live art, waiting to be discovered.

The problem is that we don’t know every song or every jam. We know our favorite shows, jams, tours and years. We know that if we pick a show from Fall 97 or Summer 99 what we are likely to hear, psychedelic funk and millennial spaciness respectively.

But wouldn’t it be better if we could search. Or choose a jam we know and have the application deliver similar jams, indicated by style or genre or the elements within those jams?

For instance, a web platform that had drop down menus, and an algorithm that linked the data to a search engine so that for instance, if you wanted to hear all “David Bowie’s” that were “longer than 15 minutes” that contained “a Type 2 jam” with “Psychedelic” elements, you could. You might even, and probably would, end up discovering a host of jams you had previously overlooked. Those jams would lead you to shows you weren’t aware of, styles, and you might end up with a deeper appreciation or understanding of how Phish evolved over time.

Using the search criteria above, he database could easily return 14 “David Bowie’s” that matched those criteria, and a playlist would be automatically generated. That playlist could be saved, shared, even commented upon. We envisioned a little card, a social notation where people could share, like, follow each created input. This would create a massive curated list of jams, songs, shows, elements. It would be linked to a Phishtracks or PhishOD style stream and boom, you were off to the races.

But there is more. Let’s say you didn’t even care what song you were after and all you wanted to hear was a “bliss jam” from “Summer 1999.” The service would punch out 25 jams from Summer 99 that had Bliss elements. Same with any of those criteria we hardwired into the database. Did you know that Phish toyed with Plinko jams all the way back in the late 80's? You would if you queried the database, because our researchers found a few instances of that.

Now we were getting somewhere. And you know? We still might. For as you can probably tell, the reason we are opening up this project to the community, is obviously, so anyone can see for themselves just the staggering amount of work that we and our team conducted. Yes, you should marvel. We killed ourself for this thing. Totally worth it.

But secondly, and perhaps more seriously, we believe that opening this up to the community will start some brushfires and we can use the wisdom of the crowd to figure out the best way forward. Perhaps some developer or designer will see this and take on our challenge to figure this all out. Perhaps it means we need to start a kickstarter project to fund this thing and see if we can’t build something by the community for the community. I can think of no better way to thank Phish than for creating something that honored their art, made it accessible to experts and newcomers alike. Done properly, the new app/ project/ platform would be a valuable guide to Phish, another in a long series of projects, curated by the fans for the fans.

We had some initial designs done by our friend @ShanePisko an artist and fan living in Philadelphia. Here are some of those images.