What’s The Use With Words? — Phish’s Instrumental Song’s Lost Lyrics

Phish’s deep live repertoire contains several original, instrumental compositions like “Buried Alive,” “Dave’s Energy Guide,” “I Am Hydrogen,” “The Oh Kee Pa Ceremony,” “Magilla,” The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday,” “Cars, Trucks & Buses,” and “The Landlady,” among others.

Currently, one of the band’s most frequently performed instrumental originals is the atmospheric “What’s The Use?,” which made its live debut on July 4, 1999, and has been played 60 total times by Phish, most recently on April 19 during their Spring Tour run at The Greek Theatre in Berkeley, California.

A sprawling, 11-minute, studio-recorded version of “What’s The Use?” appeared on the band’s album called The Siket Disc. According to Phish.com:

Originally self-released on CD in June 1999 and introduced to retail by Elektra in November 2000, The Siket Disc contains 35 minutes of almost entirely instrumental, live-in-the-studio improvisation recorded by its namesake, engineer John Siket. The music was culled by Phish keyboardist Page McConnell from The Story of the Ghost sessions that took place in 1997 at Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, New York.

Highlighting the band’s millennial, sometimes-ambient explorations of the time, The Siket Disc yielded a few songs that have since been incorporated into live shows including “What’s The Use?,” “My Left Toe,” “The Happy Whip and Dung Song,” and even the vocoder soundscape of “Quadrophonic Toppling.”

Those four songs happen to also be the only tracks on The Siket Disc that Phish has performed live, though “What’s The Use?” outpaces the others in setlist appearances by a wide margin. Both in concert and on The Siket Disc, “What’s The Use?” is a completely instrumental song.

However, at one point in its development, “What’s The Use?” included a brief lyrical passage.

Additional The Story Of The Ghost sessions were held by Phish between April and June 1998. At some point during the recording of The Story Of The Ghost, which came out in October 1998, Phish tracked an outtake version of “What’s The Use?” that featured guitarist Trey Anastasio singing the following lyrics:

What’s the use of going fast when you’re not in a race?
You’ll find soon that everyone accepts the slower pace
I’m hoping for emotion, yet it seems that none remains
Tangled in the tablecloth that’s holding in my brains

Apparently the band decided that there wasn’t much use for lyrics within “What’s The Use?” and left them on the cutting room floor. Seems almost tragic to let go of a line like “Tangled in the tablecloth that’s holding in my brains.”

Give a listen to “What’s The Use?” with lyrics below:

In March, Anastasio and McConnell appeared on SiriusXM Phish Radio to discuss their joint album, January. The scrapped lyrics to “What’s The Use?” came up during their conversation. Here’s part of the exchange:

McConnell: We had these, I thought, great instrumental tracks starting from day one. We had great instrumental tracks and it [January] could have just been an instrumental album of eight instrumental tracks, and it might have gone that way, but we chose to try and put some lyrics on it.

When you have a good instrumental track, if you or I were to put a little scratch vocal on, “oh, let’s try these lyrics,” immediately the song completely shifts. It’s no longer an instrumental track because the ear is going to go to the voice and it’s going to hear that first, and it’s going to hear everything else in relation to the voice.

So you work on these things and then when you pull them all away, it’s like it’s a completely different beast under there than I even realized it was. Once you take the lyrics back off again, it’s not just that something has gone away, it really transforms it into something else.

Anastasio: A great example of that, funnily enough, is “What’s The Use?,” which I love so much, and which was also recorded with a jam. And then we had lyrics on for a little while. And I like it so much better without them.

Phish’s 23-date Summer Tour 2023 celebrating their 40th Anniversary begins with Phish’s debut at the new Huntsville, Alabama venue Orion Amphitheater on July 11 and 12. Mainly focusing on the East Coast, including seven nights at Madison Square Garden in New York City, the tour ends with their traditional Labor Day Weekend run at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park outside Denver.