Suggested soundtrack: “Petrichor (Orchestral Version)”
Hello! There’s baseball being played on my TV right now and it’s still extremely weird! I have a lot of thoughts about the first week or so of the Pandemic MLB — the canned crowd noise is fine, the cardboard cutouts are terrific, the digital crowd is awful, and half the Marlins having COVID-19 is not great! — but I’m still sorting through those thoughts and I hope to have something out this weekend.
For now, though, I’m very excited about Trey’s surprise new solo album, hitting everywhere Friday (Trey and Beyonce on the same day!), and to share the below interview with composer and arranger Don Hart. Don is an extremely accomplished composer and he’s also a frequent collaborator with Trey Anastasio and, now, Phish! All of that and more below. Please enjoy, wash your hands, wear a mask, register to vote, and stay safe!
While you may not recognize Don Hart’s name, you’ve certainly heard something the talented arranger and composer has worked on at some point. With a collaboration list that ranges from Christian pop (Sandi Patty) to country (Randy Travis, Martina McBride) to classical (the Nashville Symphony), he’s touched all corners of the music world throughout his career. You’ve likely even heard some of the TV spots he’s composed, ranging from the History Channel to a jingle for a Jimmy Kimmel special.
But Hart is also a long-time collaborator of Phish’s Trey Anastasio, having contributed arrangements to many of Trey’s solo albums and projects, including Time Turns Elastic, the musical version of Hands on a Hardbody, and an orchestral arrangement for the song, “Petrichor,” seen above. And, now, Hart’s fingerprints are on Phish’s latest album, Sigma Oasis.
Contributing strings to a trio of songs for that album, Hart’s arrangements add depth and texture to these ballads. It’s a deft touch and one that works out well in the final product. With Hart’s arrangements, the ballad “Shade” unfurls in technicolor glory while the Phish re-working of the Ghosts of the Forest song “A Life Beyond a Dream” finds soaring new energy.
I caught up with Don over the phone from his home in Nashville back in April, as the pandemic and its ensuing chaos was unfolding, and the surprise release of Sigma Oasis gave Phish fans something else to look forward to even if the band was going to be off the road until (probably) summer 2021 (if we’re lucky).
You can also catch up with Don on this excellent recent episode of Tom Marshall’s “Under The Scales” podcast.
MG: You’ve had this rich background of artists you’ve worked with across a variety of genres, working with people from Amy Grant to even doing a jingle for Jimmy Kimmel. How have you managed to build such an extensive list of accomplishments?
DH: If nothing else, it’s been diverse. And that’s what’s so fun. I’ve described myself in the past as a musical chameleon, as far as the work I do. I feel like I enjoy a lot of different types of music and if you can enjoy it and can conceptualize within that style, you can do some work in it.
I think it's hard for people to wrap their minds around versatility sometimes, as far as how they’re familiar with me. At one point a client told me he thought of me as a writer that did horn arrangements, and that he didn't know I worked with strings. I think it was because that's what he had heard or what I'd been doing a lot of that he happened to know, not necessarily because I wasn’t doing other kinds of work. But earlier in my career, I had to work hard to broaden my writing experience.
MG: Yeah, I saw you even did some jingles for Jimmy Kimmel?
DH: A lot of things just seem to be right place, right time. A friend of mine called with an opportunity to do a spot for Kimmel. It was connected with the show he hosted right after The Oscars and it was an arrangement of the song “The Best Is Yet To Come.” It wound up being a really quick turnaround, more like what I did in my younger days – I got the call in the morning and we recorded that night. It was quick, but I’ve learned to be prepared to go in different directions in a hurry if needed.
MG: What else sticks out in your mind that you’ve done lately, not Phish-related?
DH: I really loved working with Lyle Lovett on his symphony show. I did a series of arrangements for him to play with the Kansas City Symphony over the course of several years and the symphony called last year and said, “Let’s do a few more and then we’ll have a full symphony show.” He’s such a great writer. And his songs might sound simple, but every one of them has this little unique angle to it or unique quirk or some sort of twist. I just love his writing.
The writing was really fun, but could be challenging. For example, one song had a repetitive bass line running throughout the song with the same chord–for the entire song! I felt like I was walking a tightrope trying to make sure the orchestration was interesting but not overdone in some crazy way.
And, of course, Trey’s orchestral stuff is a really fun challenge with all his odd time signatures or, you know, how in the world do I arrange the “You Enjoy Myself” vocal jam for an orchestra?
MG: How did you originally get set up with Trey?
DH: I was doing a lot of work in the early 2000s with the Nashville Chamber Orchestra and there were a few of us doing the writing and arranging for the group. In 2004, the orchestra called me and said Trey was coming to play at Bonnaroo and he wanted to conduct the orchestra.
He had just performed the symphonic version of the Phish song “Guyute” with the Vermont Youth Symphony and recorded it on Seis de Mayo, but because there wasn’t enough room on stage for a full symphony Trey wanted it pared down to chamber orchestra for Bonnaroo. So I was called to work on that -- I took it down from 70 or so players to maybe 30 or 40 -- and a few other arrangements.
And, you know, he liked what I did and we’ve been working ever since (laughs).
(Editor’s note: Trey conducted the Nashville Chamber Orchestra for set 1 before doing a more traditional solo show with his full, 10-piece backing band for set 2.)
MG: And you’ve done such a long list of stuff, right? From the solo stuff for him to the musical adaptation of Hands on a Hardbody and just the idea of Trey Anastasio scoring a musical based on that documentary, which I love, is tremendous.
DH: It was really fun. He brought his modus operandi to Broadway but Broadway also shaped some of what he did. He collaborated with Amanda Green on the music and she wrote the lyrics. He recorded demos for all the songs up at the Barn in Burlington and they were what we worked with when putting the score together. When the size of the pit orchestra was determined, more demos were done in Nashville using the show's instrumentation and I added string arrangements on several songs.
At this point, a team of us started transcribing these demos into books for each player in the pit and I worked on finishing the string arrangements. You can’t have anyone just winging it in a pit orchestra because the musicians will eventually get subs and the subs have to be able to come in and create the original part exactly. So everything–guitars, drums, keys–had to be totally written out. There were two string players, which doesn’t sound like a lot and it wasn’t (laughs) but Trey told me to write the string arrangements like I would for a larger group and we would cover the missing parts with keyboard strings.
I should note this process took place over the course of about three months in which the show was still subject to changes that could, and often did, affect the music. It felt like we were trying to hit a moving target at times but was totally worth the effort. It was such a talented bunch to work with, all working toward a singular goal: telling this story in the best possible way.
MG: What’s that process like working with Trey and what’s so appealing about working with him that you’ve been a consistent collaborator through the last 15 years?
DH: First of all - and this may sound obvious – Trey is immensely talented and just a joy to work with. I've worked with a lot of folks but I’m not sure I’ve seen someone as gracious as he is and as full of ideas. He’s never lacking an idea but he's always open to something that I suggest or bring up and it's always a pleasure working with him.
He is ultimately concerned about fans that come to a show enjoying themselves. I mean, he just labors over setlists. I’m not sure about the Phish routine, I guess they plan a bunch of that stuff out and then as the spirit moves, so to speak, they'll be playing something that wasn't planned.
But when we do a symphony show, you can't wing things onstage; the players have to know what's coming next. So Trey puts all that creative setlist energy into conversations we have leading up to a show, you know, brainstorming out loud, “Well, what if we did this?” And he'll come up with the perfect thing--best setlist ever! And then it'll change the next day. I love talking to him about it.
He takes it very seriously and really does care about fans having a good time at these shows. I know some folks can get antsy and opinionated about these things, but I've seen first hand how much he cares.
MG: Oh, yeah, I know, and I’ve been that fan. And that’s kind of an interesting segue because I think about “Petrichor” and how it has this funny place in the fandom’s hearts. I think every fan appreciates the complexity of the song, the talent and skill it takes to write something like that. And then you look at what they did with the song for the 2016 New Year’s Eve gag. But when it’s performed live, I know some fans aren’t huge fans for whatever reason. (Eds. note: It’s only been played 12 times so far, half of those in 2016 when the album on which it appears, Big Boat, was released).
But, listening to the orchestral version, it’s just fantastic, there’s a depth and an energy all its own. Those orchestral arrangements really fit the movements, the time signatures, the different moods across a 15-minute piece of music.
DH: For my part in it, thank you (laughs). So that was a side project for him during down time while working on Hands On A Hardbody. During all of those rehearsals, if there was something going on that he wasn’t involved with, choreography, lighting, or whatever, he was working on “Petrichor.” And that's pretty believable when you think of his output even just during this pandemic. The word tenacity comes to mind.
We got together in Nashville and he went over the piece with me so I could get an accurate takedown into my computer program that I could work with while orchestrating. He gave me a guitar-only version and also gave me a band version that he put together where he played everything – drums, keys, percussion – did everything himself. So I worked from those demos while doing the orchestration. The band version was the less pertinent of the two, but Trey thought there were some ideas on it that I might want to refer to and, in fact, there were.
When Phish was working on Big Boat, producer Bob Ezrin heard Trey's band demo and tried, and eventually succeeded, in talking him into doing the song on the album. Trey originally intended for it to be an orchestral piece, and not a song for Phish.
MG: Jumping back a little bit, I know you did arrangements for Trey for his orchestral tours throughout the years. Is that a matter of him asking for certain songs arranged or is there a collaboration between the two of you?
DH: A lot of it has been him suggesting titles. The Phish repertoire is huge so I'll take what help I can get. I’ve gotten more familiar with popular titles but am still playing catch up. Some songs can be a challenge orchestrally but others are very well-suited to that setting.
I had written strings for the song “Goodbye Head” on one of his solo albums (Bar 17). It’s actually a song he wrote with one of his daughters–an unassuming little song with a good message, and then the end just goes off. It’s an amazing piece of music. Since we had that string arrangement I suggested we do an orchestral version.
Same with “Stash.” We did it with string quintet at Princeton and I used those string parts as the basis for the symphonic arrangement.
Orchestrating the song's Latin groove was really fun. Two others he suggested are “You Enjoy Myself” and “Divided Sky.” I received three versions of YEM to work from for that arrangement. Aside from figuring out what to do with the vocal jam, my biggest concern may have been the "Boy–God–Man..." sequence. Trey didn't want to verbalize any of that so I turned it into a trombone solo which became a performance for the ages at the arrangement's premiere by New York Philharmonic principal, Joe Alessi.
“Divided Sky” was written for string quintet but we do it with the symphonic string sections in his symphony shows. The string orchestra normally has five sections–multiples of each instrument making up a quintet–so the sound of the ensemble changes but the parts generally work pretty well as originally written.
MG: On Sigma Oasis, a lot of my favorite moments are from your arrangements. What was the process of arranging those songs like, the process, for you this time around?
DH: I know they did the basic tracks up in The Barn in Vermont but then I learned it was being worked on down here in Nashville (Ed’s note: the album was co-produced by the band and Vance Powell, who runs Sputnik Sound in Nashville, where the album was mixed). And then I heard from Trey in December (2019).
He sent me “Shade” and asked what I thought of putting strings on it and I said, “Sure.” As an arranger, it’s my job to hear strings or anything else I’m asked to do. I can basically hear strings on anything (laughs). Then Trey touched base a bit later and sent me “Life Beyond the Dream” and asked me to do those two. That was a couple days before Christmas. On Christmas Eve, I heard from Trey’s manager and he said Trey wanted me to hold off on the writing for now and that he'd get back to me after Christmas. Well, "after Christmas" turned out to be over a month later, when I got the go-ahead and was asked to write a third arrangement along with the two we had already discussed. We recorded them about two weeks later, on February 24th. These songs were the first arrangements I’ve actually done for Phish.
As an arranger, you want to make things appropriate, but then you also don't want it to be boring. And sometimes you – not that I did this here – but sometimes you want to make things inappropriate for effect. You have to figure out who the audience is, who you're doing this for, who the band is, obviously. There are all these things that go into trying to do the right thing and be a creative force. Ultimately, it's a band album, and I really had to try to enhance what they were saying and what they were playing. I feel pretty good how it came together.
I wondered what to do in jam situations: how active to be or even whether to write anything at all. There are places on this album where instead of working around the solo I picked up on a line or two of it and actually doubled it for a bit. I think that worked out pretty well.
MG: I saw someone compared these string arrangements to what John Paul Jones did with R.E.M. on Automatic For The People and that really resonated with me because R.E.M. is one of my all-time favorite bands. It also got me thinking about how these arrangements on both these albums, they really hit the right spot. They’re not over-the-top, they’re not maudlin but they still provide emotional texture to the songs. As an arranger, how prominent is that in your mind when you’re writing?
DH: I’m definitely thinking about that the whole time I’m writing. You can't mail anything in in these situations. You really have to weigh what you’re doing and what the band’s doing. On this project, obviously, Trey, the band, thought that strings would be a good fit, so I needed to have them show up. But you walk a tightrope trying to make sure the writing doesn't cross over the line for the project, all the while knowing everyone could have a different idea of what that line is. I’m appreciative people think the arrangements added something to the record.
I want to be careful and make a meaningful contribution. Strings are great at providing simple texture–a style relatively easy to write and often what the listener expects to hear. That's not the hard part. The hard part is putting some hook value in what you're writing and picking the right moments to do so. Your hope is it will be something that sticks with the listener and will be memorable after the fact. But in order not to outshine the band, all of this has to be thought out carefully. Picking the right moments, pacing–so very important.
MG: Talking about Phish, there's a thread that runs through their shows and their albums in that each album kind of has its own unique sound but that there is this thread that goes through them all. In working with Trey for as long as you have, from stuff like Time Turns Elastic all the way through Sigma Oasis, do you feel because you're intimately working with someone else’s compositions as well as creating your own that there is a connective thread between all these songs? Or is each one its own beast? (Ed’s note: thanks for the question, Caroline!)
DH: It's hard for me to tell, but you might consider my arranging and orchestrating style a thread. I was surprised one time by a musician friend of mine when he said something about my style. And I thought, Gosh, I never thought I had a style. Writers all have their own little preferences–melodic contours, voicings, etc.–so I guess it translates to that. But it's hard for me to see it.
I try to treat each song individualistically and see what it needs. I really don't want to be formulaic in anything I do musically. From that standpoint, I try to go at each song in a unique way, I guess. All the songs are pretty unique as well, so that helps.
I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I wonder if I wouldn't have approached the songs on Sigma Oasis differently early on, when I was first getting to know Trey and Phish and their music. I have much more of a sense now of who they all are musically, and that informed a lot of my writing decisions on the album. Also, it helped that I had previously heard those songs and was somewhat familiar with them.
When I think about arranging “Divided Sky” back in 2006, I had only known Trey for a few years at that point and had never heard Phish live. I was flying blind in a lot of ways and looking back at it almost 15 years later, I wonder what I would have done with that song knowing what I know now.
MG: It’s interesting that you’ve worked with such a wide variety of styles of music. You’ve worked with Trey, Lyle Lovett, Christian pop acts but also a lot of classical and even hymns. When you’re arranging and working with an artist, whether it’s a church choir or Phish, what are your priorities in terms of supporting that artist?
DH: If there’s a lyric I try to figure out what is being said. The thing with a song lyric is somebody went to the trouble of writing it and they wanted to say something. At least I'm going to give them that benefit of the doubt. Personally, I’m rarely drawn to song texts–my ear naturally hones in on melody and harmony and I have to make myself listen to the words being sung. After all these years of seeing firsthand how important a lyric is to what I do, the music is still a distraction to me. So, I make sure I get a lyric sheet or just download one off the internet and put the text in my Finale file (my music notation program). The lyric along with the track arrangement help me set up a mood in the parts I'm writing.
When I do an arrangement from the ground up, I'll shape a harmony or put some little motive or groove or different feel into a song to try to make something special musically, but my intent is still to enhance the lyric. With instrumental music, I guess you could say I’m still trying to help say something.
On Sigma Oasis, Phish did the basic tracks and I just added strings, but following the lyric was an important part of my job, I think especially on “Life Beyond A Dream.” I met Trey's friend Chris [Cottrell, a lifelong friend of Anastasio’s for whom Trey wrote the Ghosts of the Forest album, including “Dream”] not long before he passed away at the Atlanta Symphony show we did in 2017.
The Ghosts of the Forest Album really resonated with me–Trey got into some of that in his documentary last year (2019’s Between Me and My Mind). I knew it was very important to him so I wanted to be sensitive and supportive to what he was saying.
MG: Do you go see the band live when you have the chance?
DH: Yeah, I was looking forward to seeing them here [Nashville] again in August. I’ve only ever seen them in Nashville and once in Indianapolis back in 2010. I was working on the arrangement for “Stash” at that point and was also up there to show him how the arrangement was progressing.
MG: As someone who’s worked with Phish and interacted with their music in a different way than most people have, what do you think someone who isn’t familiar with their work should know about them?
DH: If you have a funky bone in your body, man, you’ve got to listen to this band, holy cow (laughs). I guess it's kind of an easy sell for me, but I think their funk grooves are so much fun! That’s not all they do, of course, but it's an aspect of the band I do enjoy and wasn't really aware of.
There are so many good songs with great hooks and you never know when the band will turn a song on its head and establish a given performance for posterity, which helps explain the idea of "favorite versions" of a song, a concept I'm still trying to get used to. I have a lasting visual of Mike and Trey in my mind from one of the shows here in Nashville, I think in 2015.
They faced off, close to each other, and then turned toward the crowd and were doing this stomp thing. Rene Humer caught a great photo of the moment. I was still relatively new to Phish but the moment stood out to me.
Another thing I really love is the crowd vibe and the fun they have with all the quirky little rituals in the songs, singalongs, and so on. I don’t go to a whole lot of shows or concerts but I’ve never seen a fan base having that much fun, enjoying the music and camaraderie.
Apologies for any typos, except the ones I totally meant to make.