Omens: The Songs Behind Phish's Best and Worst Shows

Phish.net’s community ratings aren’t a perfect measure, but I’ve spent enough time working with them to believe they’re directionally very good. They’re also useful for answering a different question: which songs keep showing up when the great shows happen?

Score each song by the ratings of the shows it appears in, with every show judged against its own year (so 1994 nights are measured by 1994 standards, for example), and the individual songs start to spread across a wide range. At one end are the songs that keep landing in the shows fans love. At the other, the songs that keep landing in the rest.

Best and worst

The songs at the top of the board appear in shows rated well above their year’s average; the songs at the bottom, well below. The gap between the two extremes is better than half a point on Phish.net’s five-point scale.

The two ends work differently.

The good omens tend to be old, rare, ceremonial songs that the band saves for special nights. The bad omens are ordinary staples that can turn up any time. The top of the board also carries a bias the bottom doesn’t: part of a rarity’s lift is fans rewarding the song’s appearance itself, not the playing around it. Auld Lang Syne is the extreme case. It only gets played once a year (New Year’s Eve), so its +0.70 measures the spectacle of the holiday show as a whole, not the song itself. On the other hand, no one scores a show up or down just because it contains Sugar Shack, so its number is a cleaner read on the nights themselves: it tends to turn up on the lower-rated ones.

The full board

Every song played in at least 25 rated shows (247 in all). Rating Δ is how far above or below its year’s average the typical show sits when the song appears. Bustout is how often the song returns after a 40-plus-show absence: high for the rarities at the top, near zero for the staples at the bottom. Tap any header to sort.