Now Hear This: Glen Phillips

April 17 -- WHO:Glen Phillips

SOUNDS FAMILIAR:He was the frontman and chief songwriter for earnest rockers Toad the Wet Sprocket from 1986 until the group's dissolution in 1999.

PERSONAL:Born Dec. 19, 1970, in Santa Barbara, Calif.

COMPARISONS:R.E.M., Michael Penn, Tom Petty, and, well, Toad the Wet Sprocket

DID YA KNOW?:Three years younger than the other members of Toad, Phillips took a high-school proficiency exam so he could graduate at the same time as the others.

FIRST IMPRESSION:Abulum (Brick Red Records)

What's different about being a solo artist?Phillips: It was a convoluted experience. After the band got done, I was a little aimless; I was doing a lot of work but also doing a lot of deprogramming and reprogramming. I just had a lot of processing to do after working with Toad since I was 14. I never did anything else and had no idea who I was outside of that context. I had kind of expected I would pick up precisely where I left off, and after telling everybody to go away, I could do it myself and all of a sudden a bunch of new people would pop up and go, "You're great. You're a genius. Work with me!" They didn't.

A rude awakening, in other words. Phillips: Oh, yeah. I had one long period of just being pissed off, feeling very entitled — which is wrong. Then, when I got over that, I had a period of wanting to do music to prove something to those who had "abandoned" me, which was another foolish sideline. It just took a little longer than I imagined it would to rediscover myself — or discover myself for the first time, maybe. I had to start it all from the ground upwards.

Was there ever any question of whether you'd stay with music?

Phillips: There was. It was a weird two-year period of spending all my energy, deciding whether I was going to want to do some prose writing and giving that up, to a dot-com business that failed, to getting cast in a film and having that fall through. There was plan after plan where I was working my ass off, and everything fell through — and there was a little bit of despair setting in since I'd had two children, 13 months apart. It's seriously psychologically damaging to have kids and be unemployed. Coming through all that, I eventually knew I had to focus on the things I was best at — "All right. I write songs. I play songs. That's the one thing I'm pretty sure I do well and will work." I had to drop everything and focus on that.