This is the next installment in my Top Shelf 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 2018. We usually take the top 25% or so of the tracks from a given year but with 266 total tracks for 2018, the proposed amount of 65 had me reaching to invoke the "or so" clause to pull that back to a more reasonable top 50. Frankly, that's still a little high for a year like 2018 but this where we ended up.
2018 suffers a little in comparison to 2017 in terms of the jams produced during the year. 2017 set a really high bar for 2018 to reach though and there was a wealth of jams that are worthy of being included in our Top Shelf series. The cancellation of Curveball also took a lot of the steam out of the year as the band was ready to throw down some legendary jams during the festival (adding a number of great jams to our Festival playlist too) and then Dicks didn't quite live up to the sky high expectations many had. Most years benefit from having a Fall Tour for the band to keep working on their sound and this year is definitely no different. Strong jamming was prevalent throughout the tour, culminating in the Vegas Halloween run and a familiar return to MSG for New Years.
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 50 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.
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