Jambands.com - Need We Say More?

Published: 2012/10/05

Longtime Trey Anastasio/Phish songwriter Tom Marshall occasionally shares demos and other goodies on his Soundcloud page. His latest offering is something a little different: “Through the Polished Glass,” an unused song he wrote with Anastasio shortly before Phish’s 2009 reunion. As YEM Blog points out, Marshall describes the tune as, “A song Trey and I wrote in 2008. I still have great hopes for this one… This one was written first on the drums — an experimental track with fills and peaks and valleys with no music in mind. Then Trey added everything else and made it conform to the existing contours of the drum-scape. It sounds logical, but it was a backwards way of working and is one of the reasons I love listening to it.”

Here’s a look at the tune’s lyrics

I feel that I’m going back
there’s no where else to go
forward isn’t here yet
but backward seems so slow

perhaps I could go sideways
into another being
if I slipped into you
then who would I be seeing

and when you looked at me
alone upon my lawn
you’d see my vacant stare
and think that I had gone
through the polished glass

let’s go on a journey together
we’ll follow currents of air
it’s easy to move across boundaries
harder to see if they’re there

there’s something I’m dying to tell you
a whisper from some other time
I suddenly felt the idea form
I’m not even sure if it’s mine

Readers can listen to the demo here.