“How did you feel?” one asks.

“I found it to be, well, rather irrelevant,” the other replies.

“I’m sure she will find a response somewhere.” Both evaluations are delivered in clipped British accents.

“I love the smell of commerce in the morning,” Jason Lee sighed in “Mallrats.” Yes, fall has arrived at Sony Records.

Decisions are being made, careers and images shaped, marketing strategies assembled, numbers crunched – all the things that the red-haired hipster aberration bopping coolly down the Sony corridors has spent the better part of his career skillfully avoiding.

It seems strange that Trey Anastasio should feel so relaxed in a place like this. Still, the happiness that Anastasio exudes during an interview today – and that anchors his new album, “Shine” – is largely painted atop a year of turbulence.

This is Anastasio’s first year without Phish, the band he led to an astounding 20 years of grassroots success, a group consisting of three other college friends with whom he remains “inconceivably close.”

There’s also Anastasio’s newfound sobriety and a caustic backlash from a once adoring fanbase. Anastasio, 41, is finally getting around to what most of his musical heroes have spent careers doing: demolishing a lucrative conception of himself, and discarding all the rules that went along with that identity.

“The guy who was just taking my photograph told me, ‘My brother’s a big fan,'” Anastasio says. “I said, ‘Oh yeah? Cool!'”

Anastasio’s smile changes from humor to a wan, slightly wounded bemusement. “‘Yeah,’ he goes, ‘he just wants to have your head.'”

AP: Did you find yourself writing a lot just after Phish stopped playing?

Trey: Yeah. It was not without its darkness, and its difficult period, but it was creative nonetheless. I have an easier time emoting – if that’s the right word – but I have an easier time expressing myself through music than I do verbally. I’ve kind of built my life around having an outlet with the audience, and what’s particularly interesting is this, the audience that I’m so used to having as my emotional outlet was, you know, not so thrilled about all this. So that made it hard for everybody. But hard can be good.