Songfacts®:

• "Guyute" (rhymes with "coyote") is very ambitious musically and very strange lyrically, even by Phish standards. Running 8:27, it has a verse at the beginning and another at the end with no lyrics in between. The song was written by Phish frontman Trey Anastasio with his buddy Tom Marshall, who was often his writing partner. We learn a bit about the character Guyute in the opening lines:
  
  Guyute was the ugly pig
  Who walked on me and danced a jig
  
  On the Under The Scales podcast, Marshall offered some explanation. "He's definitely some screw-up, this Guyute," he said. "He's got it in for me - he walks on me, pulls weapons on me, lectures me. He's a terrible person to have around. Then it gets dark."
  
  That darkness shows up in the second verse at the end of the song when the music turns sinister. Marshall calls these the "hell lyrics" and says they're "kind of an evil incantation." This is part of it:
  
  Guyute glances in my eyes
  And manages to hypnotize
  
  But then the song takes a strange turn, going very upbeat musically with some lyrics that are very foreboding but delivered buoyantly by Anastasio:
  
  Me as I sleep the sleep of death
  He suck from me my only breath
  
  "And then just like that the spell is broken in the last verse and the music gets downright triumphant," Marshall explained. The song ends with the line:
  
  I hope this happens once again
  
  The song is a riddle, which is typical of Phish. "Did Guyute win? Did you trick him by playing dead?" Marshall said.
  
  That's the think about a boogyman: we all have a very different vision of what ours looks like. Guyute is Anastasio's.
• The song is the centerpiece of the 1998 Phish album The Story Of The Ghost, but they started playing it live in 1994 and it was written years earlier. Trey Anastasio has a very strong connection to the song, and he didn't want to record it until it was polished to perfection through live performances. It's the only song on the album that wasn't written specifically for it.
• "Guyute" plays like an orchestral piece, with four movements and lots of musical twists. Phish are known for their wild improvisations on stage, but this one they play true to the studio version, which is no easy task. The four band members are known for their virtuoso musicianship and tight musical bond, which is demonstrated on the track. You won't hear any sensible bands try to cover it.
• The day after Phish went on hiatus in 2000, Trey Anastasio started working on a symphonic version of "Guyute." He spent about four months orchestrating it, and it was finally performed by the Vermont Youth Orchestra in February 2001.
• Trey Anastasio played various instrumental versions of Guyute during the second Phish hiatus (2004-2008). One version appears on his 2004 album Seis De Mayo; he also played it with the Nashville Symphony Orchestra at the Bonnaroo festival that year.