Listen to Lonely Trip and you get the feeling Trey Anastasio has been spending some time inside. “Locked in a capsule, for time without end,” he sings on “When the Words Go Away.” “Watching the world through a pane or a lens.” Conceived and recorded while quarantined at his home studio in New York City in 2020, Lonely Trip is, in Anastasio’s own words, a message in a bottle: raw, mysterious, sent in isolation but written in hope. With a couple of exceptions (“Lotus” and “...And Flew Away”), the music here is surprisingly concise, and said exceptions have more in common with the eerie, suite-like intricacy of early Phish—think “Esther,” think “Stash”—than anything jammy per se. And while the folksy stuff is comforting (“Lost in the Pack,” “When the Words Go Away,” “Lonely Trip”), the heart of Lonely Trip lies in squiggly, stripped-down sketches like “Are You There Colleen” and “Shaking Someone’s Outstretched Hand,” which find Anastasio where he was thirty-plus years ago: joyfully chasing down the strange little ideas bouncing around his head.