Phish.net

The Story of the Ghost provides an interesting twist to a common thematic device in the recording industry: as the “final” track – “The Moma Dance” – winds down, the band offers a reprise to the chorus of the album’s first track, “Ghost,” seemingly to provide the record a sense of closure. But we are not yet done, as the band instead finishes with “End of Session,” a delightful, lilting, melodic segment of jamming with sparse and simple lyrics delivered almost as spoken word. 

While many fans and critics tended to discount this beautiful song as a simple afterthought, among all the disc’s tracks “End of Session” epitomizes best the approach that was used in the creation of Story of the Ghost. Many of the songs on the album were based on the best cuts from among hours of band improvisation at Bearsville Studios, which were then combined with lyrics from Tom Marshall’s vast array of yet-unpublished lyrics and poetry. “End of Session” is perhaps the purest reflection of this specific creative process that occurred during these Bearsville sessions, eschewing more traditional song formats for an ethereal forging of poetry and sound. “End of Session” provided a hint of the style later fleshed out in the 1999 release of The Siket Disc, which contained both fully-developed songs, as well as smaller “jam-lets” and other “non-traditional musical entities."

“End of Session” was performed for the first time during Phish's legendary show on 7/25/17 at Madison Square Garden, and a second time on 10/20/21 in Eugene, Oregon (after a 126-show gap) sandwiched in between “Split Open and Melt."

(Anastasio/Fishman/Gordon/McConnell/Marshall)
© Who Is She? Music, Inc (BMI)

a silent bird / a raging tide a mountainside
an open door / looming from the surf
a whispered word / a steady wind as we begin
and then no more / to close in on the earth