This guest post is written by Michael Mastroianni, user SimpleMike.

We’re into 2016, between tours and with plenty of time to reflect on the music we’ve enjoyed for the past 7 years. Instead of focusing on the great jams of the “3.0 era,” we turn our attention to the data in hopes of revealing what has become the band’s unspoken preferences of what to play and when.

The following analysis is restricted to the 285 shows between 2009 and 2015, since I think these years essentially comprise modern Phish and, in all probability, patterns prior to 2009 would be different and less relevant to make current predictions than those in the present, so-called “3.0 era.”

Set Bias

Are there certain songs Phish prefers to play during set 1? Similarly, are there certain songs Phish usually reserves for set 2? The graphs below show the top 20 songs by number of plays where the dominating set represents at least 80% of the shows in which the song was played. In other words, the graph for set 2 shows the top 20 songs with a set 2 bias, i.e., songs that were played in set 2 in at least 80% of the shows they were played in. "Tweezer," for example, was played in 80 of the 285 shows (28% of the shows). Only 10 of these were played during set 1.

It is interesting that “Divided Sky,” “Funky Bitch,” “Lawn Boy,” “Gumbo,” “Poor Heart,” “Ya Mar,” “Foam,” “Train Song,” “Alumni Blues,” “My Sweet One,” “Brian and Robert,” “Beauty of a Broken Heart,” “Vultures” and “Crowd Control” have only been played in Set 1 since 2009. Similarly, “Piper,” “Golden Age,” “Crosseyed and Painless,” “Waves” and “Drowned” have only been played in Set 2 since 2009. (Note, however, that I have excluded encores and any third sets.)

Transitions

What are the most common song transitions? I restricted my analysis to only include sets 1 and 2, and to consider one song following another within the same set as a “transition.” I also only examined transitions that occurred in at least 6 shows. The graph below shows these top transitions in descending order:

Some transitions are no surprise to see, of course, but it did surprise me that “Harry Hood” has led into “Cavern” so frequently. Similarly, “Down with Disease” into (or followed by) “Free” isn’t something I would have anticipated to have occurred in so many shows.

I visually examined a heat map of the “transitions” and their frequencies and there were virtually no patterns to be found. With the exception of the “transitions” shown in the graph above, there were mostly just a scattering of equally frequent events. This shows that Phish truly finds a way to make these happen on the fly. They do not pick certain songs that are easier to transition between seamlessly.

Predicting Songs During the Show

You have almost certainly been at a show and wondered, if they play song X, then what song (Y) will I most likely hear later on in the show? If I hear “grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, bum bum bum …” then will I hear my favorite song “You Enjoy Myself” in the same show? It turns out that the answer is “most of the time.” I calculated every probability for every pair of songs played from 2009 to 2015 and collected the most relevant for you.

In the table below, “Likelihood” is the chance that the second song listed in each row in the “Implication” column will be played during the show at some point before or after the performance of the first song listed in the “Implication” column (e.g., the actual timing of the song’s appearance in the show is not considered, which is why you’ll see that “Tweezer Reprise” implies that “Tweezer” will be played, even though “Tweezer Reprise” would never precede “Tweezer” in the show). “% of Shows With Antecedent” is the portion of shows during the 2009-2015 period in which the first song was played (ie. “Weekapaug Groove” was played in 27% of the shows and “Mike’s Song” was played in every one of these shows). The higher this percentage, the more likely the information in this table will be relevant to you at a future show, so keep it handy. The lower this percentage, the more likely that the information is coincidental (However, note that 4% here is at least 10 shows):

Other Useful Observations

The following also applies to shows between 2009 and 2015:

Most frequent set 1 openers: “AC/DC Bag,” “Kill Devil Falls,” “Chalk Dust Torture,” “Sample in a Jar,” “Runaway Jim,” “Crowd Control”

Most frequent set 1 closers: “Run Like an Antelope,” “David Bowie,” “Character Zero,” “Walls of the Cave,” “Suzy Greenberg”

Most frequent set 2 openers: “Down with Disease,” “Rock and Roll,” “Chalk Dust Torture,” “Carini,” “Crosseyed and Painless,” “Golden Age,” “Mike’s Song,” “Drowned,” “Backwards Down the Number Line,” “Tweezer.”

Most frequent set 2 closers: “You Enjoy Myself,” “Run Like an Antelope,” “Slave to the Traffic Light,” “Character Zero,” “Weekapaug Groove,” “Harry Hood”

Most frequent encore songs: “Tweezer Reprise,” “Loving Cup,” “Character Zero,” “Good Times Bad Times,” “First Tube,” “Sleeping Monkey,” “Suzy Greenberg,” “Show of Life,” “Julius,” “A Day in the Life”

Closing

It would appear, from all of the juicy results above, that we can make some solid predictions at our next show. It is true. I calculated the results in the Predicting Songs During the Show section above halfway through Saturday’s (1/16/16) show and correctly predicted not only that “Harry Hood” would close the second set, but that “Character Zero” would be the encore.

Despite some successful predictions, the most glaring property of the data was the chaos within it. This study looked at 285 shows. Among these 285 shows there were 99 unique set 1 openers, 60 unique set 1 closers, 68 unique set 2 openers, 52 unique set 2 closers and 102 unique songs played in encores. Phish evidently makes an effort to surprise us with the opening song of each show. Furthermore, 57% of the shows contained a song that was only played in 1 or 2 shows throughout all 7 years. Hats off to our favorite band for making every show special!

Good luck calling songs at your next show, but don’t blame me when they open with “Mexican Cousin.”

Happy touring,
Michael Mastroianni

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