This is the next installment in my Top 25 PJJ tracks series for a year, which you can stream every track directly from Phish Just Jams. As with the previous installments, this is meant to be a list focused solely on the Phish Just Jams tracks from the year in question.
This is my version of the list for 2014. We're having to change things up a bit for this list. We usually take the top 25% of the total number of jam tracks for a given year. Since we've got 155 jam tracks from 2014, that would have been a Top 40 list and that seemed too many for this year. When only selected the jam tracks longer than 5 min we got 125 and the Top 30 we could come up from that sounded much better, so here we go. I'll fully admit to exerting my executive privilege in this case. I'm not suggesting that it is the definitive list and there are a few choices that I could swap out with others depending on the day. I'm not ranking these 1 to 30 but just presenting the list as a whole because really what difference does it make which jam I think is 11th or 8th or 23rd or so on. The purpose of this list is just to provide a Phish Just Jams playlist of the best jams from the year. The list will be presented chronologically and can then be parsed and dissected from there. The list will also link to the full version of each song from the terrific resource that is www.phish.in for those want to take in the whole song instead.
By 2014 we were now 6 years into 3.0. The band was coming off their 30th anniversary and had a new album of material to include in the repertoire. A full summer tour capped by the traditional stop at Dicks was followed by a fall tour that concluded in Vegas for Halloween for the first time since 1998. The Halloween set was revived after the polarizing Wingsuit set in 2013 with what has to be one of their crowning achievements, the Chilling Thrilling set.
The year overall is a little uneven but it reaches some great heights. While the new album didn't add a lot as far as jamming goes (outside of Fuego early on in the summer) and the year seemed to lack the deep exploratory jams that set themselves apart from the rest. What we end up with is a lot of quality jams but, outside of the Randall's Chalkdust, not a lot of all-timer type jams. Still this is a very satisfying year with a lot to sink your teeth into.
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