Shake Your Coconuts

• Performances
• History
• Lyrics
• Artist
  • Phish
  • Fish
  • Mike
  • Page
  • Trey
  • All

History

When Phish stepped onto the stage for the opening night of The Baker’s Dozen, it certainly felt like something was different, even if no one yet knew exactly what. Fans were already theorizing: could it really be thirteen shows with no repeats? While nothing had been confirmed, the writing seemed to be on the wall. Thirteen shows. Thirteen donut flavors. No repeated songs. The bigger unknown was how, or how much, those donut themes would seep into the setlists, and what that would mean once the music actually started.

While it would take some time to confirm the “no-repeats” theory, Phish wasted no time getting down to business with the donut themes. From the very first notes of the run, they made it clear to the fans at Madison Square Garden that whatever else was coming over the next seventeen days, it was going to be playful and fun.

Junior Senior’s chorus captured that moment perfectly: 

Just keep on dancing now
Just keep on getting down
Just keep on having fun
The party’s just begun

Those lyrics filled Madison Square Garden with a sense of the inevitable. This was not a concert slowly easing its way into a long run. It was a room being invited to dive right into a Garden-sized Phish celebration. The lyrics sounded like a mission statement for the coming couple of weeks.

Released in 2003, Junior Senior’s “Shake Your Coconuts” is a sugar rush of Danish pop-funk with rubbery synths, bubblegum percussion, and jittery dance-floor momentum. It feels deliberately over the top, exactly the kind of playful absurdity that would come to define the Baker’s Dozen. “Shake Your Coconuts,” while a semi-obscure pull for Phish, was the high water mark for Junior Senior, the Danish duo who paired Senior’s smooth vocals with Junior’s frantic, glitchy energy. 

Before Phish touched it, the track had already lived several lives, turning up everywhere from Looney Tunes movies to the menu screens of cult classic video games. Hilariously, It was a song so relentlessly infectious that it bordered on psychological warfare, a software patch was famously issued for the video game “Worms 3D” specifically to allow players to escape the loop of the track on menu screens. 

The song appeared on Junior Senior’s debut album D-D-Don’t Don’t Stop the Beat, which went platinum in multiple countries and landed on year end best album lists from Rolling Stone, NME, and Entertainment Weekly. Even Pitchfork heaped praise on the album, calling it one of the year’s best. “On first listen, their record sounded like an obscuro artifact dug up in a roller rink basement. Now, merely months later, it already feels nostalgic.” The album and the song were, by any measure, massive hits.

Phish would later close the second set with Harry Nilsson’s “Coconut,” neatly bookending the evening with the night’s namesake donut flavor. Where “Shake Your Coconuts” was frantic and silly, “Coconut” was deadpan and repetitive. One was a sugar rush, the other a hypnotic chant. It was the Baker’s Dozen in microcosm, Phish taking things that look like jokes and turning them into architecture.

“Shake Your Coconuts” would surface again exactly 100 shows later, during the first set at Moon Palace in Mexico on 2-20-2020. Like some other Baker’s Dozen debuts, the return to a Phish setlist was less like a novelty and more like a reminder that once you crack open a coconut, it never really goes back on the shelf.

Last significant update: 1/10/26

Submit notes/corrections