This is the next installment in my Top Shelf PJJ tracks series for a year, which you can stream every track directly from Phish Just Jams. As with the previous installments, this is meant to be a list focused solely on the Phish Just Jams tracks from the year in question.
This is my version of the list for 2016. We usually take the top 25% or so of the given PJJ tracks from a given year, and with 215 total tracks for the year I am invoking my right to use the "or so" clause for this list. Coming up with 50+ tracks from 2016 was a tad daunting to be honest, so I've scaled it back to 40, and even that wasn't easy. 2016 is in a tough spot being sandwiched between two highlight years in 3.0 and while there are some tracks that would easily find a spot in our Top Shelf series for any year, there are more fringe level tracks included in this year than in others.
2016 was the first year that the band headed down to Mexico for 3 nights of fun on the beach that gave us a few take away jams for their initial visit. The Summer Tour of 2016 didn't deliver the large, highlight quality jams that were prevalent in 2015 (from Atlanta on, at least) and 2017 but what 2016 has that the other two years don't is a Fall Tour. Following a strong showing at Dicks the band embarked back on the road for a few shows in the South before heading to Vegas for Halloween before ending the year traditionally at MSG.
I'm not suggesting that it is the definitive list and there are a few choices that I could swap out with others depending on the day. I'm not ranking these 1 to 40 but just presenting the list as a whole because really what difference does it make which jam I think is 11th or 8th or 23rd or so on. The purpose of this list is just to provide a Phish Just Jams playlist of the best jams from the year. The list will be presented chronologically and can then be parsed and dissected from there.
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