In a new cover story interview with Guitar World, Trey Anastasio gets to geek out over guitar talk with Alan Paul while opening up about the vast difference between Phish’s current chemistry and where they were during the hiatus of the early aughts and why he needs both Trey Anastasio Band and Phish in his life.

“It was just a few months after Big Cypress and I’m haunted by the memory of Fish saying to me there, ‘We really should stop this now. I feel like the wave just crashed into the shore. We should go home and chill and wait for the next wave,’” Anastasio recalls, citing Big Cypress, Phish’s millennium celebration, as the catalyst for a year that ended in a all-too-necessary hiatus for the band. “That year was like Caligula. It was fucking crazy. What can I say?”

Anastasio also recounted the story he told at October’s TAB tour opener in Brooklyn about Phish’s post-Cypress trip to a Crosby Still Nash & Young show where Graham Nash congratulated Anastasio on his success then promptly yelled at him “Now don’t fuck it up!”

“Then he threw me backwards and walked away,” Anastasio says. “And a month later, we came back on the 2000 tour and we fucked it up! We fucked it up!”

Anastasio assures his fans that things are much better now, however. “The thing that’s amazing to me,” he says, “is how all these years of playing together in Phish would lead to such a depth in our musical and personal relationships, especially this summer. Everyone cares about each other so much now. I’d be shocked if people weren’t noticing this. The way we play is a language that allows you to safely express deep love and caring in a way that I would be too embarrassed to do in words. It’s hard to have a bromance that deep – but in music you can do it and it just keeps getting deeper.”

The guitarist also touched on the differences between Phish and his solo band. “Playing music is listening to music and reacting and those guys play differently than Phish does,” Anastasio says. “Russ [Lawton, drums] and Tony [Markellis, bass] are deep, solid groove and Mike [Gordon] and Fish are more watery, fluid and ever-shifting. Fish is also a little more full in his measures of music.”

Sometimes, Anastasio says, he can learn things about songs by playing them with the two bands. “I couldn’t stand the way “Sand” sounded with Phish; it gave me the willies,” he says. After a sit down with drummer John Fishman, they agreed that Lawton had the right idea. “Let me be very clear about something: Fish is the greatest drummer going and he can play anything, so I would never say I hate the groove. I said: “Something is out of whack on this song. Would you mind if we referred to the original?” And he’s happy to do that, because he’s like a happy learning machine. That guy just eats music.”

“It’s a learning process,” Anastasio reflects. “And it’s a very healthy thing as a musician and a person to not put all your eggs in one basket. It only makes Phish better for me to work with other musicians and the more you play the better you are.”