@Mikesgroover said:

It's not that they're playing "badly" right now, but they're content with rarely taking risks. Playing it safe is not what earned them a devoted following and not what kept people coming back for years.

I think they are taking risks, it's just that people aren't seeing them because they aren't the kinds of risks that they are used to and are expecting.

I have a sense that the shorter jams we are seeing are being interpreted as being "safe". I don't see it that way. Long jams, even when performed by Phish, can be masturbatory and aren't always called for. There is a time and place. While I can marvel at an hour long Runaway Jim, in the end, it usually only stands out because it is an hour long. The band's move to more self-editing is the 3.0 version of risk taking. Look at the negative response this has been getting among some of the more heady wooks - especially recently. The first sign of a significant change in anything is the backlash it gets from the people it affects and risk, almost by definition, is a change. Risk is happening. Some of us just aren't seeing it as such. Some of us are blind to it because it isn't the kind of risk we want.

Others see this kind of risk as sign of musical maturity rather than of the band's decline. This is a band that is working toward playing the right note at the right time rather than trying out all the notes in every conceivable fashion. They've done a lot of that work already and are moving on to the next logical step in their careers as musicians. Now that they've explored countless areas of musical territory, it's time to make sense of that exploration and give it some kind of context. It is time for distillation and, as many of us know, distillation makes for a smaller amount of end product, but what is there sure packs a powerful punch.

I offer you the career of Miles Davis as a good example of an improvisor who took lots of risks throughout his career and if you follow the arc of his work you will notice that his playing seems to get more conservative, perhaps less innovative, but in reality, his focus simply changed. He was still working on getting better, but to him (and to many musicians) getting better didn't mean going full bore and balls-out all the time. He accomplished that. He was interested in the beauty of conservation, of playing the right note at the right time to achieve maximum emotional impact.

Phish, in my mind, NEEDS to go through this process or they will simply become a one-trick-pony or, even worse, a novelty act. In order to grow, they must hold back. In a world where most of your fans want you to do the exact opposite, this is a HUGE risk and is one they are already taking. Thank Jeebus for that.