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    Singer/songwriter/guitarist Neil Young has become one of the most important figures in rock over the course of his career. His music may not have many similarities to Phish’s in sound, but it does in other ways. In his willingness to take risks, write music that spans a multitude of genres, and play with unfettered passion and intensity every night, he and Phish are kindred spirits.
    The Canadian-born Young first came to prominence in the mid 1960s as a member of the influential folk-rock combo Buffalo Springfield. After they split up he embarked on a solo career but soon reunited with former Springfield band mate Stephen Stills in Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. In CSNY, Young became a superstar. He soon rejected stardom, though, to follow his muse, which has produced many thrilling and confounding moments. Young has always been ambivalent about fame and has never stayed with one band or style for very long, though he periodically returns to acoustic music, CSNY, and his hard-rock band, Crazy Horse.
    While he has profoundly influenced the grunge-rock and acoustic singer-songwriter movements, he has also been willing to try everything from country to blues, from low-fi to synth-pop. He has released scores of influential albums including Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969), After the Gold Rush (1970), Tonight's the Night (1975), Rust Never Sleeps (1979), Freedom (1989) and Ragged Glory (1990).
    Young has a gift for writing simple music and making it sound complex, and because of that he has been a major influence on Trey in recent years. “A two-chord Crazy Horse jam is no less transcendent than anyone else's note-filled extravaganza,” Trey said in The Phish Book. “Neil Young blazes a direct path to the soul without clogging it up with too much thought. I didn't understand him at all in high school, but the older I get, the more he speaks to me.”
    Trey has also cited (in an interview with www.canoe.ca) the influence of Tonight's the Night on the making of Phish’s Farmhouse album, and (in The Phish Book) the influence of Young’s “Thrasher” on Tom Marshall's writing of “The Wedge.” Several Round Room tracks, especially “Thunderhead,” also show a strong Tonight's the Night influence.
    Phish first covered Young on 3/18/97, opening the Lake Champlain benefit with “Cinnamon Girl.” That song appeared once more, as the encore on 7/31/97 in Young’s home territory of northern California. In 1998 Phish added Tonight's the Night’s “Albuquerque” into its regular rotation. It dropped out the following year but re-emerged at The Show on 12/31/99. (It went missing again during 2003.) Also notably, Trey and Mike performed two Young songs, “Albuquerque” and “Cortez the Killer” (as well as “Teach Your Children” by Young’s old band mate Graham Nash), at an open mic night on 11/1/98 in Salt Lake City, UT. Marshall’s band Amfibian covered the title track from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and 1986’s “Hippie Dream.”
    Young invited Phish to appear at the 1998 editions of two annual charity events he helps organize, Farm Aid and the Bridge School Benefit. At Farm Aid, after an acoustic set of his own, he borrowed Trey's backup Languedoc to jam with Phish at the end of their set. The highlight was a 20-minute-plus version of “Down By The River” that featured a guitar duel between Trey and Young (during which one of Trey’s eyeglass lenses popped out.) To this day many Young die-hards cite that version as one of the song’s best performances ever; some even say it turned them on to Phish. Two weeks later at the two-day all-acoustic Bridge benefit, Young joined Phish at the end of their sets each day. They jammed on “Harry Hood” and Phish backed Young on his own “Helpless,” Ian Tyson's “Four Strong Winds” and Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released.”
    Trey was in attendance for what many Young fans consider to be the best show of his 1999 solo acoustic tour, 5/1/99 in Chicago. He did not join Young on-stage but got some pointers on playing solo sets from Young backstage, which Trey related humorously on 5/8/99 in Madison, WI.
    Given the unpredictability of both artists it is impossible to know whether there will be future Young-Phish collaborations. But given Trey's continuing adulation of Young, we can never rule it out.