All Pretending

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History

A riveting, lyric-driven, anthemic rocker, Trey Anastasio Band debuted “All Pretending” on 1/18/20 at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles just two months before the world went sideways. After its debut, there were seven additional TAB dates on that tour, and then… the pandemic came, shut everything down, and any momentum this song may have had coming out the gate was squashed by the world coming to a standstill. 

The song’s lyrics are a masterclass in wordplay, featuring a similar kind of anaphoric device that songwriters Trey Anastasio, Tom Marshall, and Scott Herman also employed on “Limb By Limb.” The anticipatory backing vocal arrangement gives the song an emotional acceleration, making it feel instantly unique, catchy, and interesting to the ears. Internal rhymes and a semantic reversal at the end of the chorus bring it all home, almost algorithmically. It works.

The lyrics describe a frequently intoxicated narrator that is socially masking as if life was a dress rehearsal, allowing him to distance slightly from his social engagements and, perhaps, romantic entanglements:

Your never ending words to guide me
Aren’t even close to the ones inside me.

All the signals I was sending
In the end, it’s all pretending.

By the time The Beacon Jams came around, in the Fall of 2020, most fans assumed the song was forgotten, perhaps even forgetting about the song themselves. So, it was both of note and of relief when “All Pretending” roared its head again on Week 7 of that eight week series.

That second performance (11/20/20) felt less rehearsed than the first. Neither version had any sort of jam embedded in it, nor did either version feel like the song had reached its performance potential. The debut version felt like a demo, as most debut versions do, and due to the pause for a global shut-down, the second one kind of did too. After that, “All Pretending” appeared to be shelved again, this time without a pandemic to blame. 

The next time the song made its way back into a setlist (5/14/24, Royal Oak, MI), it was three and a half years later and the band itself had evolved even if the song hadn’t—Trey took it out with his “Classic TAB” quartet and gave it a try with Dezron Douglas on bass, in place of the late Tony Markellis, and — for the first time — without horns. The quartet treatment benefited from Douglas’ short articulation bass notes, which gifted the song with an even stronger punch.

Over the span of the following seven shows, Trey brought it out twice more, each version slightly more confident and rowdy than the previous, with the one in the middle — 5/19/24, Montreal, QC — being perhaps the song’s current high-water mark.

Video by Blanks&Postage

And that’s where it stands today, with “All Pretending” in the modern-era rarity class. We have yet to see how it drives in a jam, but the showroom model is now detailed, sparkly, and road ready. It will be thrilling to see how it handles if and when Phish should ever take over the wheel, and until then, the hope is that it at least stays in Trey’s active repertoire.

Last significant update: 3/12/26

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