Tonight’s Dinner and a Movie takes us back to the four-night 2018 Phish New Year’s Run at Madison Square Garden. Of particular note, this marked the first run of Phish shows after the band tricked audiences on Halloween in Las Vegas by devising a made-up Scandinavian band, Kasvot Växt, and “covering” their obscure album, i rokk, from 1981. Of course, we now know that “Kasvot Växt” was an elaborate prank and that the songs on the “covered album” were actually written “in character” by Trey Anastasio, Page McConnell, Jon Fishman, and Mike Gordon following the cancellation of Curveball earlier that summer. You can read Trey’s remarks about how the Curveball cancellation directly inspired Kasvot Växt here. So, why all the talk about Kasvot Växt? Well, with this new crop of songs now on the table, this run saw the band begin to insert the new material into their regular setlists. Of the ten new songs debuted on Halloween, nine of them (all but “Everything Is Hollow”) would go on to show up during the 2018 MSG run. Many of them were featured in key slots in the four 2018 YEMSG setlists, from the “We Are Come To Outlive Our Brains” that opened night one on 12/28 to the “Say It To Me S.A.N.T.O.S.” that lifted Trey and Mike to the rafters as part of the outer space-centric gag on 12/31. Kasvot Växt material figured prominently into the 12/29 performance, as well. The first-set “Turtle In The Clouds” confirmed to fans that the associated Trey/Mike choreography was a permanent fixture of the song and not just a Halloween one-off, while the “Death Don’t Hurt Very Long” sandwiched between two slices of “Tweezer” jam during set two showed these songs’ potential for improvisational antics.