Photo: Frankie Cavone

Guitarist Trey Anastasio has announced that he will be putting out Mercy, his first-ever acoustic album featuring only himself. The new album was produced by Bryce Goggin and Robert “RAab” Stevenson and engineered and mixed by Mike Fahey.

Anastasio has always played solo acoustic shows but the inspiration came from his performances at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center back in June 2021. He stated:

“Then in June 2021, Anastasio played his first shows for live fans in more than a year – a week of solo, acoustic gigs in Saratoga, New York, and back at the Beacon.
The songs again were mostly from the Phish bag. But the emotional exchange ‘was like a direct path,’ Anastasio recalls, ‘from my heart to the audience. The honesty and simplicity of those shows – without it, this album would not have happened.’”

“’I’ve never done anything like this before,’ Trey said. But the last two years of fear, loss, and, at times, devastating quiet have been unlike anything most of us have ever known. Mercy is Anastasio’s account of that confusion and isolation in unresolved questions and conflicted passions, in a music of quietly gripping force. And it arrives with the same immediacy: just weeks after Anastasio recorded it and two years – almost to the day – since his adopted home, New York City, went into lockdown.”

Mercy is set to release this Friday, March 11th. For more information head over to Trey Anastasio’s website.  Watch Trey’s return to the stage after over a year from Saratoga Springs, NY below: