Trey Anastasio comes alive at the query.

"Great question. It’s so interesting you asked that," says the once and, fans pray, hopefully future guitarist and principal songwriter of that beloved improvisational band on leave of absence, Phish.

Anastasio’s interest is raised when, after talking about the joys of life in his home of Vermont, he is asked what impact, if any, geography -- where he lives, where he travels -- has on his creativity.

"I found it influences me to the point where, Tom (his longtime lyricist Tom Marshall) and I, when we write together or I write alone, I almost go on a trip."

While preparing for Phish’s 1996 "Billy Breathes" CD, he and Marshall went to the Cayman Islands. "We just sit in a different spot. We never do much," Anastasio says.

"Cayman Review," found on Anastasio’s current self-titled first major label solo album, also was penned there. "Tom and I lived in a farm house for nine days. Three of the songs on this album were written at a resort in the South Bahamas."

Geography very much is a motivator for his creativity, Anastasio elaborates, as he speaks from his New England home. He says he finds that moving inspires creativity.

That was the catalyst for the earliest Phish songs, he says. "I found at this point it doesn’t even have to be an exotic place, though most of the places I just named are."

To write "Night Speaks To A Woman," off the new solo album, he and Tom checked into a Holiday Inn in Saratoga. "Anywhere that is different and new. When I get into a new place I write something. It’s almost like marking my territory," he explains laughing.

The Phish founder is offering a new place of sorts with the music from "Trey Anastasio."

"It’s the first time I was in a pure band leader role," he says. "There was little debate. In fact there was no debate (he laughs) about what the sequence would be, or any of it."

He insists he was not nervous about going it alone.

"Not really. I record in my barn now, so I feel very isolated in a certain way, and it’s liberating. We didn’t feel like we were in a recording studio because we weren’t."

A lot of the recording was done on last summer’s tour during rehearsal. "I had so much material to teach the band, we just rolled the tape. A lot of the stuff is live and some of the tracks came from the tour itself. They started as live tracks," Anastasio says.

He says he always wanted to play in a band that could fuse his rock interests with Afro-Cuban rhythms and the feel of larger group interplay found in African music. Add to that the musical class of swing bands and you get an idea of what he was trying for with this solo effort.

He says he always wanted to make music that was more rhythmic, pattern-based and group-oriented, but with horns so that he could explore harmony.

As one reviewer expressed it, "If Phish is all about the jam, Trey’s solo thing is more about the groove."

The multi-artist group he brought together for the project includes Cyro Baptista, Brazilian percussionist, and a four-piece horn section.

Anastasio says he is pleased with the results. "At this point in my life, as a 37-year-old, and having done music publicly for 18-20 years, I’ve gotten so much bad press over the years that it all just washes away. It gets to a point where you just don’t care any more. At this point it seems so irreverent how people react. It won’t change what I do. I’ll wake up tomorrow and do something."

After all, he adds, music is the language with which he can express his emotions.

"I have a harder time verbalizing, getting my thoughts across verbally and I feel very lucky to have found something I can purge myself of something when I write."

When he writes something, he feels there is order to the universe, he explains. "You put the notes in the right place and it all fits together and there is harmony in that little piece of music. For a second I think, ‘Oh, there’s order.’ Everything changes because you are growing, so you have to do it again."

While geography has it place in the creative process for Anastasio, so, too, does just the simple act of getting up every morning and living, he says. "I find sometimes the mundane daily things are inspiring to me. I write and I live my entire life. It’s habitual. I just write almost every day."

If he doesn’t he becomes very frustrated, he says. "It’s become less and less important to me who is gonna play the music, and honestly even if anyone’s gonna play it. It’s definitely the most nourishing part other than my family and my wife. I need to write something. I have piles and piles of songs and piles of music just floating around."

Does that mean that there will be a "Lost Tapes" CD some day?

"A lot of stuff gets lost," Anastasio says, laughing again.

He says when he writes it usually takes the form of music. "It’s rare if I have a thought that it takes the form of words." He did pen the pastoral "At The Gazebo" for this solo album.

"I don’t write that many lyrics. That’s why I write with Tom. On this album (though) I did a lot of lyrics."

He reminds that he wrote a lot of lyrics when Phish first started. "The lyrics were a little more fantasy-like and word play. This album, the lyrics I wrote were autobiographical."

He just talked about what was going on around him, he says. "It was all about my friends and family and house."

Has the Phish family embraced this solo work, or is there a new audience?

"I hear more reactions from people who weren’t Phish fans," he says. He is concerned that a huge Phish fan might not give the CD a chance.

"I talked to a women who reviewed the album, liked it but was a big Phish fan. She said it will be hard for her to listen to any one person from Phish, like the pie crust without the pie." He laughs

Anastasio would like people to listen to the music purely for what it is. "That would be easier for someone not into Phish," he admits. "I’d like people to listen for its own merits. I wouldn’t expect Phish fans to just like it (because he is a Phish co-founder). They’ve got to like it on its own merits."

He hopes that people take a positive feel, a joyousness "and a feeling that life is great" from his music.

He also could be talking about why many people have embraced Phish.

That success story, he says, "flabbergasts me in a certain way." "But I feel very lucky and I hope that very much if we left a tiny imprint in the stream of music it was of some kind of value to people."

Anastasio is thinking now of Bob Marley, who he considers "the torchbearer of all music." "He wanted to single-handedly stop all evil in the world, using only music as a weapon. That would be the ultimate weapon. I hope our contribution has been in creating a positive feeling."

And he hopes the journey is not over for Phish, which decided to take a break in the fall of 2000 and pursue solo projects. "We lived together so much we started to think we heard all the jokes," he says.

Phish is four parts coming together, he explains. He thinks, is even confident, those parts will come together again. "But it’s a very Phishesque thing. For a while we had a ‘No talking rule.’ It was illegal to talk about what went on on stage when we were off the stage. It was a test to live in the moment.

"Now this is our ‘No Playing’ rule. After our last show we thanked each other for 17 great years, and everybody was supposed to go out and do their own thing. We knew there was a possibility that we would never play gain, but we all were hoping that we would."

Their thinking was that they would not get involved in solo projects if they acknowledged that they were definitely coming back.

"But if we can’t count on Phish getting back together, we have to do other things," he explains. "Page (McConnell, Phish keyboardist) started his own band. For him to start a band, we are so happy for him. That’s not his nature. He is having this incredible experience being a band leader."

Everyone, including him, can use such solo experience when and if they come back to Phish, he says.

"That was the point for us all to go out and have experiences and grow and come back together and challenge each other again," he says.

Anastasio says his solo band is developing its own personality. "I’m starting to hear something very unique and high energy dance," he says. "We’ve done three to four previous tours. It felt like we were pointing at something. Now it feels like we are there."

In this summer tour, he plans to play about five songs Phish performed. "They are songs that actually started with this band. I don’t want to play Phish material with anybody other than Phish."

And so it gets back again to the appeal of Phish, why this group of musicians so struck a nerve with people. Was it filling a void?

"We didn’t understand it," Anastasio says. "We didn’t really think about it, the void it was filling for us as it was going on. We were sharing almost a life together and we spent so much time, an unbelievable amount of time, talking and debating and listening to music and trying new experiments. I don’t think we really stopped to address that."