More than any year since the band's return from its 4+-year Breakup, Phish has earned a special halo of anticipation around the upcoming New Year's Run. As you ramp up for the Run starting on Saturday, here's a handy guide to the highlights of the recent tour, written by nine different contributors.

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We are pleased to launch a dynamic and robust new search feature for the Jamming Charts. You can check it out here (or via the main home page nav bar, Music>Charts>Jamming Charts). In the past, the ability to search the Jam Charts was limited to scrolling through the chart, a Google Doc, for a particular song. Now, you will be able to search the charts by 18 different methods, including by song, by year, by city, by venue, and by tour. You will even be able to search by shows that you have attended in person.

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Former creative director for Phish, Lars Fisk, was recently interviewed about his cross-country exhibition entitled, "Self Storage." You can read the interview here, but get far more than you bargained for, for your self, here.

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With only twelve days to go until the MSG run begins, take your shot at the 170th installment of Phish.net's Mystery Jam Monday. As usual, this week's winner will receive an MP3 download courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of the mystery jam clip. Each person gets one guess per day, with the second “day” starting after I post the hint. A hint will be posted on Tuesday if necessary, with the answer to follow on Wednesday. Good luck!

Hint: As of Tuesday at 10:00am, not one of the 22 comments has guessed either the correct song or show that this jam is from.

Answer: We have yet another first-time winner, as @12zlavin recognized the 7/12/13 David Bowie -- well done!

MJM #171 will return in January. I just want to express my appreciation for those of you who participate in Mystery Jam Monday. I'm constantly in awe of your knowledge of Phish's music, and the challenge in stumping you makes this as fun for me on this side of the game as it was on the other side. Have a great holiday week, enjoy nine more sets of 2013 Phish, and hope to see you at the official MBF Phish.Net Meetup on 12/29.

Today marks two years since Mike Gordon’s current quintet – featuring Scott Murawski on guitar, Craig Myers on percussion, Tom Cleary on keyboards and Todd Isler on drums – last performed in the U.S. That mini-tour produced The Egg, a three-CD set featuring the tour-closing gig from Albany’s The Egg Center for the Performing Arts on December 11, 2011 and released earlier this year.

Gordon just announced an 18-date 2014 spring tour, along with the release of his hotly anticipated new album, Overstep. Before we turn our attention forward, we wanted to take a quick look back at the last time we saw this vibrant force on today’s improvisational rock and roll scene...

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Welcome to MJM #169, presented by Phish.net! As usual, this week's winner will receive an MP3 download courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of the mystery jam clip. Each person gets one guess per day, with the second “day” starting after I post the hint. A hint will be posted on Tuesday Wednesday if necessary, with the answer to follow on Wednesday Thursday. Good luck!

Answer: Well, that went a whole lot faster than I'd anticipated. A mere 90 minutes after being posted, @PersnicketyJim wins his first MJM in impressive fashion by IDing the 11/16/94 Stash, making this the first in the last three Stash MJMs to result in a Blog loss.

As many of you are aware, the Mockingbird Foundation has produced two volumes of The Phish Companion to date with a third volume on its way. In other words, my collaborators and I are to some standard or another fairly accomplished in the field of literary works about the band Phish. Although these works are predominantly fact based, there is a certain amount of leeway that is inherent in writing about the art of another. Art, whether it be visual, auditory, theatrical, or literary, can be experienced both objectively and subjectively. It is almost impossible to separate one from the other. Add social media to the mix and stir in a little bit of the natural tendency toward competition and the whole notion of crowdsourcing the quality of a given piece of art tends to become far too personal and self-serving. I therefore find myself in a predicament as I attempt to launch what will become a sporadic yet semi-irregular blog series wherein I am tasked with providing a literary review for another author’s work that is somehow related to the music of the band Phish.

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As you all undoubtedly know, today marks a huge milestone in the Phish world. So, in celebration of the 1,274th day since MJM Part 01, here's the 168th edition of Phish.net's Mystery Jam Monday! Per usual, this week's winner will receive an MP3 download courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of the mystery jam clip. Each person gets one guess per day, with the second “day” starting after I post the hint. A hint will be posted on Tuesday if necessary, with the answer to follow on Wednesday. Good luck!

Hint: In a way, the mystery jam is relevant to the actual Phish milestone celebrated yesterday.

Answer: First-time winner @tomwom51 wins his first MJM by IDing the 12/31/02 Walls of the Cave. Coming shortly: MJM #169.

The holiday season is just around the corner, you probably know a Phish fan who hasn't heard this great all-for-charity double-album tribute, and the more we sell, the more grants we'll be able to make...

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Welcome to part 167 of Phish.net's Mystery Jam Monday! (Give or take fifteen hours.) As usual, this week's winner will receive an MP3 download courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of the mystery jam clip. Each person gets one guess per day, with the second “day” starting after I post the hint. Because of the upcoming holiday, a hint will be posted at 10:00am ET Wednesday if necessary, with the answer to follow at 5:00pm ET Wednesday. Good luck!

Answer: The contestants extend their winning streak to six, as @eyesworld89 wins his first MJM by being familiar with the 3/8/09 Down with Disease. Check back in later today for MJM #168.

After a short, revitalizing hiatus -- taken to avoid becoming a charicature of itself, or worse yet, a nostalgia act -- Phish.net's Mystery Jam Monday is back! And as with MJM #165, this one's brought to you by the MJM OG himself, @RabeldyNugs. As usual, this week's winner will receive an MP3 download courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of the mystery jam clip. Each person gets one guess per day, with the second “day” starting after I post the hint. A hint will be posted on Tuesday if necessary, with the answer to follow on Wednesday. Good luck!

Answer: @mcgrupp81 wins his fourth MJM by IDing the Bowie-esque 12/9/97 Simple. Great job!

From the editors: We'd like to welcome Mike Hamad (@mikehamad) creator of the amazing @phishmaps to the blog today. Mike has a fantastic post digging into a musician's viewpoint of Wingsuit and its connections to other music you are already familiar with. We hope you enjoy it!

When songs are grouped together, I sometimes hear connections.

What I hear before and after one song, or a segment of a song, influences the way I hear that music. I think a lot of people listen this way, and probably a lot of Phish fans. We’re always talking about sets, pacing, song selection, vibes that carry over from one jam to another, whole weekends, tours, years, and so on. Everything affects the experience of everything else, musical and otherwise.

I hear a few connections, spread out all over the place, in Wingsuit. Did they intend this? Who knows. Brains make connections composers didn’t intend us to hear all the time. Composers are pretty good at creating cool accidents; in a sense, all they really do is create the conditions under which we experience a piece of music, right? The rest is up to us, to take from it what we will.

Some of the connections I hear have to do with melody, and some with harmony. (I think there are probably some lyrical connections that should be discussed as well, and they've probably all been pointed out anyway.) It's tough to talk about this stuff without getting a little technical, and that sucks. But I'll try to make it tolerable if and when I say jargon-y stuff.

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And we're back! Did you miss us? Let's go right after the elephant in the room, shall we?

Below the fold, you can use your thumbs to tell us what Wingsuit tunes you think most deserve a permanent home on the new album and in the repertoire. The staff here definitely has our own favorites, but this is about you, so get in there and get dirty. The action's in the comments...

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If you’re Phish, Halloween is a high-pressure gig. But what about the act of drawing the curtain on a tour like this one? Before we delve into AC3, let’s put it into context.

Before tonight, the tour consisted of 11 shows in 14 days. Those 11 shows produced no fewer than 8 essential jams. By “essential,” I mean that someday your roommate at the seniors home is going to doze off listening to you gush about them for the millionth time. Two of these jams were “Tweezer” (Hampton and Hartford), and two of them were “Carini” (Hampton and AC). Of the remaining four, three of them deserve mention in any conversation about all-time versions: the Hartford “Golden Age,” the Reading “Disease,” and the AC “Twist.” Rounding out the list is a behemoth in its own right: the Worcester “Drowned.”

Not too shabby -- and that’s barely the half of it.

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Wow. Are we having fun, yet, Phish fans? Holy moly! On Thursday, Phish set down one of the ballsiest, boldest, most innovative creative offerings of their storied thirty year career. The pressure is off and we are rounding the home stretch on what is arguably the best tour of the post-breakup era. Check that: in my opinion, we are easily, definitively, by a large measure witnessing the most consistently excellent, innovative, paradigm-breaking tour since the 1990s… we’re in the thick of artistic explosion that belongs in the discussion with August ‘93, December ‘95, summer and fall ‘97, or any other tour or era that you want to include in the conversation.

Given the magnitude and power of what is happening in the moment – and because I’ve been living a little large and am time pressured, again, sigh – I’m going to let these last few weeks settle and offer some hopefully coherent and reflective thoughts soon. So I’ve Tom Sawyer’d this recap with the help of my friends. Twenty plus years into this journey, and I’m as thrilled and jacked up about this band as I’ve ever been… the vibe reminds me of the afterglow of Big Cypress. This is it. Let go, enjoy it… take a look around you, give a good look to the people around you. There is a lot of love in the air, embrace it, give yourself to the moment. Music is the BEST!

Martin Acaster: We sat in my truck and listened to the show on the street corner outside the WOW Hall in Eugene while waiting for our daughter to emerge from the squealariffic and sweaty Hoodie Allen show feasting on cold pizza and chugging amp energy drinks. On the ride down from Portland "Under Pressure" came on the radio and I thought to myself… this would be a really cool song for Phish to play someday. You can imagine the holy shit chills I experienced during “Twist.” The band knows what I am thinking even when I am 3000 miles away. I chuckled at the “Halley's” > “Tube” juxtaposition… since they are now essentially the same song. Heard “Wombat” teases all over the place. That groove is so infectious. The Bush Kush freakout reminded me a lot of something Ed Zeppelin used to do on a couple of Dread Zeppelin tracks. Another winner… the Phish from Vermont is truly en Fuego.

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