Art & Creativity Quote by Jon Fishman

Fishman’s line is doing a neat bit of self-defense and self-mythmaking at once: it elevates music from product to practice. By calling the attitude “religious,” he’s not claiming doctrine or divinity so much as naming the ritual seriousness that forms around sound - the way a show becomes a weekly service, a roomful of strangers synchronizing breath, volume, and attention. It’s a musician admitting what fans already behave like they know: the concert isn’t just entertainment, it’s a temporary moral order where feeling counts as proof.

The awkward little phrase “in of itself” also matters. It reads like someone thinking out loud, carefully trying to separate “music” from the industry around it - ticketing, branding, content churn. Fishman’s intent is to rescue the art from the marketplace without sounding precious. “Religious” gives him a language for reverence that dodges elitism: you don’t need a conservatory degree to recognize a sacrament, you just need to show up.

Contextually, coming from a jamband figure (and Phish’s drummer, a group with a famously devotional fan culture), the subtext is almost anthropological. He’s describing a community that treats improvisation like revelation: something unpredictable, shared, and impossible to fully reproduce later. The “religious attitude” isn’t about certainty; it’s about surrender - letting a song run long, letting meaning arrive late, trusting the collective experience to make it worth it.