About Phishtories

Somebody should have written this down.

The best stories this community has are told out loud — in a lot, in a car at 3am, in a message-board reply four people ever read. Then the thread rots, the forum goes down, and the night somebody met their wife during the whistling section is gone.

Phishtories is a permanent home for them, tagged to the exact song, show, venue and year they happened — so a story is never just a story. It's a story attached to a night that other people were also standing in.

Stories
22
Tellers
14
Shows indexed
2266
Venues
1680

Why it exists

The mission, in one line

To give forty years of unwritten community stories a permanent, searchable home — and to attach each one to the music it actually happened to.

Setlists are archived beautifully. Tapes are archived beautifully. The part nobody archived is the human one: who you went with, what you were running from that summer, which song was playing the moment something changed. That part has always been word-of-mouth, and word-of-mouth doesn't survive a forum migration.

So the whole design of this site is one idea: a story is worth more when it is pinned to a night. Tag yours to Reba, to Deer Creek, to 1997, to a specific date — and it lands next to everyone else's memory of the same room. That is also why the archive can be read as Best of collections instead of a search box: sometimes you don't have a query, you just want the good ones from a year you loved.

Every show ends. The story shouldn't have to end with it.

Who built it

One fan, not a company

There is no team, no investor and no growth target behind this. It is one person who got tired of watching good stories disappear with the thread they were posted in.

A note from the person who built itdraft

Hi — I'm [your name], and I built this.

I'm not a music journalist and this isn't a startup. I'm a fan who has been going to these shows since [year], and who has told the same handful of stories at the same handful of tailgates for long enough to notice that everyone else has them too — better ones, usually.

Founder's note — for the owner to write

[Bradley, drop your story here: when Phish got you, the show that made you want to build this, the friend or the night that made you realise these stories deserved somewhere permanent. A paragraph or two in your own voice beats anything I could write for you.]

The one I keep coming back to is [the show, the song, the night] — and the reason I keep coming back to it is that I've never seen it written down anywhere. Not on a setlist page, not in a review. It only exists because a few of us were there and we still say it out loud to each other.

So: this is that, for everybody. Built by a fan, for fans. If you have a night that only exists in your telling of it, this is where you put it. I'll keep the lights on and the ads off; you bring the stories.

[your name]

Everything in brackets is a placeholder, waiting on the owner's own words.

How it operates

No fine print version

Excess donations go to

  • The Mockingbird Foundation
  • The WaterWheel Foundation
  • Divided Sky Foundation
Every dollar, in public
The money

Free to read, free to write, no ads.

Donations cover hosting and the phish.net sync. Whatever is left over is passed to the three funds below and posted publicly, dollar for dollar, on the transparency ledger. Nobody draws a salary from this.

The data

Every tag points at something real.

Songs, albums, venues, shows and years are synced from phish.net, the community setlist archive. Tag a story to a night and it joins every other story tagged to that night.

The audio

The tape, next to the story.

When a story is tagged to a show, Relisten supplies that night's recording, so you can hear the set somebody is describing while you read about it. Neither the tapes nor the setlists are ours.

The people

Anyone can read. Signing in lets you add.

No account is needed to read a single word of this. Sign in with Google or Facebook to post a story, leave a comment, or upvote — and the upvotes are what build the Best of collections. One steward moderates, by hand, in public.