@kevinAreHollo said:

Don't interact much with him anymore, but if you're reading this @waxbanks, curious why you chose the least "album" of all of Phish's earlier output.

For me, it had to be a live album, since what I'm most interested in Phishwise is their improvisatory language, and it had to be out on mass-market CD. That left Slip Stitch, Hampton Comes Alive, and ALO, if memory serves. (NYE 95 and the LivePhish CDs were pretty limited releases, right?)

Slip Stitch is a great album and there's a lot of great story behind it, but I felt like I'd already told some of that story in my other Phish book. I get nothing out of Hampton Comes Alive, though you could riff on the title for 10,000 words easy.

So: ALO, then.

As for the album's flow, I now think it traces a coherent arc, but the second half of Chapter One in the book takes up the question of whether it's even a good album in the first place. (tl;dr: It's an OK album that contains really great music.) The Hood gets a lot of attention in the book, as does the Stash. There's a chapter about the Tweezer too, though it's about so many other things that Tweezer ends up sinking into the mix like Trey's funk-era guitar.