Page McConnell - Something Will Land (2025)

Page McConnell Surprise Releases New Solo Album, ‘Something Will Land’. Phish keyboardist Page McConnell surprised fans on Friday morning with a previously unannounced studio album, Something Will Land. The half-hour collection of eight ambient instrumental tracks follows McConnell’s 2021 ambient synthesizer album, Maybe We’re The Visitors. In an accompanying profile by GQ‘s resident Phish demystifier, Grayson Haver Currin, McConnell went into detail on the album, a partial Vida Blue reunion, and what is turning out to be one of the 62-year-old’s most productive artistic periods. In some ways, Something Will Land can be seen as a sequel to Maybe We’re The Visitors, as the prolific improvisor “yes-anded” his last solo effort by combining use of piano and synthesizer—the first time he’s done so on one of his instrumental albums. He recorded the album at the studio he keeps across from his home in Burlington, swiveling around on an office chair between an upright piano and three synthesizers, recording and mixing everything himself. “My appreciation for space has grown and grown,” McConnell told GQ of the album he made with an emphasis on simplicity. “It’s hard for me to listen to my own stuff, Phish or any of it, because I want to edit it all. I hear it and think, ‘I wish I could have played just a few less notes there.’”

One of the middle tracks, “Mystery Meat”, almost served as the album’s title. As Currin points out, rather than a reference to Phish’s “Meatstick”, McConnell’s new composition is more a nod to the keyboardist forgetting which instrument he used to make it. Originally written ahead of the sessions for January, his stripped-back 2023 album with Trey Anastasio, McConnell opted to keep the song for himself.

When his manager suggested “Mystery Meat” might be too silly for an album title, McConnell remarked that, eventually, something would land. “Actually,” he thought, “I kind of like that.”

Something Will Land, aka Mystery Meat, is far from the only project McConnell has percolating. In May, during a break between Dead & Company weekends at Sphere, McConnell convened bassist Oteil Burbridge and guitarist Adam Zimmon (Ziggy Marley)—3/4 of the reunited 2019 lineup for Vida Blue—at The Killers’ Battle Born studio in Las Vegas.

McConnell formed Via Blue as a trio in 2001 with Burbridge and The Meters drummer/New Orleans funk royalty Russell Batiste Jr., who died of a heart attack in 2023 at the age of 57. For these 2025 sessions, the group enlisted Santa Davis, whose dub and reggae bona fides include playing on Bob Marley’s Uprising and being shot in the same home invasion that killed icon Peter Tosh. Still, despite Davis’ legend in the reggae community, McConnell acknowledges there’s no replacing Batiste and, thus, no reviving Vida Blue. If anything comes from those May sessions in Las Vegas, it will most likely just be called Page McConnell, according to the GQ piece.

Beyond Page McConnell’s Almost Vida Blue, the keyboardist has written and recorded a cache of songs with Urian Hackney, son of Death singer Bobby Hackney, Sr., who moved to Vermont in the late ’70s and started a reggae festival and band, Lambsbread. In one of those cosmic connections, the first time McConnell met Anastasio in the mid-’80s, Trey showed Page an impromptu collaboration his nascent band Phish made with Lambsbread. McConnell estimates the new album will be released later this year or next year, although he didn’t seem too concerned with adhering to a rigid timetable.

“I’m working pretty constantly on new projects these days, which is really fun—writing lyrics, singing, arranging, doing overdubs sometimes—but the amount of time I’m actually sitting at a keyboard is small,” he said. “It’s not what’s happening in my life all the time. I’m not scrambling so hard that I’m beating myself up.”

There are lots of other chestnuts in the GQ profile, including Anastasio repeatedly telling the profiler that McConnell is his best friend. There’s also good stuff on McConnell’s early entry to music, exposure to Brian Eno, nitty-gritty about how Phish composes its setlists, and daddly quotes about how Page’s daughters are mostly indifferent to Phish, but we’ll leave you with this nugget from Anastasio on Phish’s early days.

“You had Jon Fishman at one end of the stage, whose hair was down to his ass at the time and who was eating entire sheets of acid every night. And then there was Page, who was guarded and conservative by nature,” Anastasio recalled, laughing. “He used to tell me that he was raised in such a way that there were two white lines you lived your life between, and this is the path. I had been raised exactly the opposite—‘You see those two lines? Go 100 yards to the left of them.’”

Tracklist
01. Page McConnell - Amaranth (3:53)
02. Page McConnell - Borrowed Scenery (2:03)
03. Page McConnell - Something Will Land (3:57)
04. Page McConnell - Weightless (2:06)
05. Page McConnell - Mystery Meat (2:33)
06. Page McConnell - The Trees Were Blue (5:59)
07. Page McConnell - Octopi (1:25)
08. Page McConnell - Dropping In (7:57)