Now Hear This: Glen Phillips
April 17, 2001 -- 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.
Now that you're back and actively making music, do you miss Toad at all?
Phillips: Honestly, not much. There was no joy in it anymore. As much as we respected each other and liked each other, I think we'd kind of said our bit and were going through the motions. While I expected that I would choose something new and it would go easy, and instead it was really difficult, I don't think I've ever regretted the choice to move on. The thing with change is it's usually pretty traumatic, and being afraid of change usually results in a life where you don't have any deep troughs but you don't have any peaks, either. Usually we forget to think about the trough side of things, but you can't have one without the other. But I do appreciate the fact there's some serious movement in my life again.