About this poster

This February marks the 30th Anniversary of the release of the Phish album Rift. I can't quite believe that so much time has passed. I still remember vividly the night I finished the painting for the album cover in my old studio on Lafayette street in Manhattan where the band visited me after completing the sound mixing in Nashville. They drove straight from the airport to my studio. The energy in the room was palpable when they arrived as we had all finished our contributions to this project at the same time after initially meeting in Burlington a month earlier during recording. They expressed to me their excitement about the album as a collective musical accomplishment and each one of them had their own personal sense of artistic and technical accomplishment that they conveyed to me individually. 

With most of the substantive decisions being made by phone this was an important closure for all of us. 

They truly had a kinetic power in their physical presence as we all circled around the painting. The energy of the album was crackling on them. We talked about how the main character did wind up feeling like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now. I showed them a book about Paul Delvaux, the French surrealist who painted his dreams and whose work influenced the outcome of the piece. 

They asked me if I wanted to go see a Led Zeppelin cover band in the West Village and I declined for the sake of another hour of finishing touches. I kind of regret that decision, but hey, we're all still alive. 

So thirty years later and a thousand interpretations of each song later I wanted to pay tribute to this milestone by revisiting the house where the story of the main character played out in an epic psychological dreamscape. 

This time I imagined it from the perspective of the final song "Silent In The Morning" as the sun rises after a night of storms on the landscape of the "House of Dreams". In the distance is the Mound. It's not an icy clump because the main character has chosen love instead of a life of buried regret. The footpath leading up to the House is riddled with thawed February puddles. The House looms in the distance as the source of the tempest, daring the viewer to enter it and find the Minotaur or climb over the hill to see the morning stillness. This piece will be screen printed by the masters at End Hymns. 

- David Welker