2000 Great Songs #1413: The Divided Sky
Recently got myself into a Very Online Phish Twitter kerfuffle by admitting that I am not enamored with some of the band's earlier, dorkier material (relegating myself to what some phans called the band's "dadrock" era). So be it! But that said, they certainly had some memorable, and musically impressive, songs dating all the way back to their beginnings. Like "The Divided Sky," from their 1989 debut Junta . Like that record's previously-discussed landmark " You Enjoy Myself ," "Sky" is a sprawling epic, with some spellbinding performances. More than most of their material, the instrumental suite (setting aside one vocal line) is downright proggy, deeply indebted to early Genesis , and maybe a bit of Zappa , with some classically-derived piano bits and majestic fugue-ish interplay among the band. Live 2022: At the Sphere, 2024: See the entire Top 2000 to date in a sortable database !
