A Conversation with Glen Phillips – HuffPost 4.25.14

Mike Ragogna: So I hear Toad The Wet Sprocket is going on tour with Couting Crows soon!

Glen Phillips: Yes, that will be our summer vacation, which will be a lot of fun.

MR: And you guys have definitely toured together before.

GP: Yeah, we’ve toured in the past. Counting Crows was also the band that kind of got us back together. We’ve been broken up for maybe five years, and Adam asked if we would play a few shows opening for them and that was the first time we actually tried it out again. But yeah, we’ve been friends for a while. I’ve gone around with them solo. Toad played with them, I’ve known them since the day. I think Adam [Duritz] was actually on our mailing list from Pale-era, our first or second record back before Counting Crows got together.

MR: Pale, wow. Can you remember when Toad first got back together, did you end up feeling like, “Wow, this could work?” Was there a feeling of this being more permanent than one show?

GP: Honestly, initially no. [laughs] The first time we got back together was not a lot of fun.

MR: But it got better.

GP: Yeah, we were willing to play maybe four or five shows, maybe only three, and we stopped pretty much immediately. I don’t think we tried again for another year or two. We would all like it to work, but we had a lot of history, a lot of stuff to get over. The good thing was we didn’t air all our dirty laundry publicly, so we were able to do it on our own terms and get back together when we felt it was right and when we felt it was good. It took us a while to find our feet and get over the past but eventually we did it.

MR: When you got together, was there something obviously different from when you were younger?

GP: Yeah, you’ve got to let go of the past and also let go of unrealistic expectations, kind of re-accept everybody for who they are instead of who everybody wishes everybody else was and just kind of reconcile ourselves with reality. Once we managed to do that we could kind of accept each other for who we were and what we were now instead of any of this other strange stuff that we filled it with. We didn’t even have a really aggressive break-up period, but you get used to telling stories a certain way and I think in the years we were apart myabe we got further away than we expected we would. But yeah, once again, it’s been really cool to come back and I’m amazed that we managed to get to the point where making an album felt like something that would be fun and felt like something we all wanted to do and we were all excited about. We could’ve done a new record at any time as some business thing and it would’ve been the record that I think everybody would be scared of from a band that’s broken up. We waited until we could make a real record, and make something with a lot of heart. Something that was the band again. We’re all really proud of it.

MR: Let’s talk about New Constellation. What went into making it? Was it like the old days or was there some new way you all approached creating the album?

GP: It wasn’t really like the old days. In the old days it was really our only outlet, and sometimes we were feeling like we were all on the same team, sometimes it was more contentious–mostly we felt like we were on the same team–but it was where everything we wrote had to fit. The big difference for me was coming back to it and really treating it like a project, I guess, is the best way to say it. All of a sudden, it was like, “Hey, what is a Toad song? What does a Toad song sound like?” It was really cool to go in and try to write for the three part harmony and think of spaces for Todd [Nichols]’ guitar and how the rhythm section’s going to be doing it. I really enjoyed that part of it, just kind of asking what a Toad song was the first time. It used to be like everything was a Toad song unless we didn’t play it. Now it’s a different thing, it’s a specific set of attributes.

MR: Did you use a more solo approach, sending each other tracks, or were you all together, playing as a band?

GP: It really depends on the song. There were some where we’d all just jump in and play together and other stuff that was built up. Some stuff we built out of demos. After we had broken up, we recorded a couple of songs for a Greatest Hits-style compilation that Sony had put together. I remember when we did that, it was our very first time ever recording on ProTools, after we broke up. We were always a tape band, so it was a very different thing to go into not recording on tap, being able to relax into that and bring stuff home. A lot has changed since Toad broke up. Those were a major sixteen years for recording; the world is a very different place now. But yeah, we still made it a Toad record.

MR: Are any of these tracks songs that you had with you for a while, but couldn’t record for whatever reason?

GP: No, not really. The big thing that we found toward the end of the project was I had been writing much more in this upbeat modality just because it was fun to go, “I actually have a drummer, a bass player, I’m going to be in a rock band! I haven’t done that in a long time!” I’d been doing much more solo acoustic and more folk or Americana-oriented stuff, so it was exciting to think about writing and we found ourselves with a lot of vaguely up-tempo–as up-tempo as Toad gets, we don’t get crazy up-tempo–bouncy numbers, and we didn’t necessarily have the quiet moments or the deep emotional moments. So I did go back into a couple of songs that I already had around but hadn’t thought would be for the Toad record, that I was kind of thinking would be on my next solo thing, but in thinking about the arc of the record, we didn’t want it to be one note. We wanted it to have some breadth to it, so some of those other songs came in just to flesh things out in a more emotional way.

MR: Personally, I always put you guys in with Gin Blossoms and Counting Crows, a really strong group of bands that, even if you weren’t influenced by each other, were all at least grooving on the same vibe.

GP: Yeah, I think we were influenced by a lot of the same bands–The Replacements and Hüsker Dü and earlier Elvis Costello, U2, R.E.M.. There had been this group of bands that was called “college music” at the time maybe? I don’t know if it even had a name, it was before they came up with “alternative.” Also, there was a post-punk attitude where it was taking some of punk, removing the fashion and some of the aggression from punk but still kind of not feeling affiliated with the mainstream and wanting to claim some artistic identity that was outside of mainstream pop music. I think also because of that, it’s more literary in general, especially a band like Counting Crows. There’s a poetry to it. I don’t know if we achieve that but I tried to aspire to it and the idea as well of being emotionally vulnerable, I guess. And instead of taking on a rock stance or an aggressive stance, it was about talking about your more–not necessarily weak points, but your vulnerability, I guess, is the best word for it. Where you’re questioning life, where you’re unsure. I think that group of bands…

There was always an amount of that. I remember when we started getting played on the radio, it was a very awkward time because there was all this music that was becoming increasingly aggressive again and we never felt like we totally fit in with that. We played all these radio shows and it would always be Henry Rollins and Hole and Green Day who I all thought were great but we were kind of the ugly stepchildren in that batch of bands. We didn’t really fit in, and there was a second wave that included bands like Counting Crows that made us a little less alone in that realm.

MR: I think another aspect that the post-punk world held onto was an aggressiveness in the lyrics. I mean, your own “Hold Her Down” was pretty disturbing.

GP: That was the intent.

MR: [laughs] Yeah, it’s the poster child for your point. “Hold Her Down” was so in your face. I guess that’s also what happened in the post-punk world, people weren’t afraid to be in each other’s face anymore.

GP: Yeah. [laughs] I had my punk period; I still have those periods.

MR: What’s the separation between Glen Phillips’ solo material and Toad The Wet Sprocket? Are you doing both things simultaneously?

GP: Well, no, I did a quick record right before the Toad album just to kind of get it out of my system. I did a one microphone record called Coyote Sessions up at a friend’s place on Coyote Road, hence the title. But I knew that Toad was going to be doing a much more extensive production-oriented recording process and I really enjoy getting in depth like that, though I also really enjoy making a manifesto and making a bunch of rules for myself so that I’ll have a new challenge in the studio.Coyote Sessions was a single stereo mic, so instead of mixing anything after if the bass was too loud you’d just move him back a couple feet. It was a really interesting process. It was also the first record I’d done that was all Santa Barbara musicians, I didn’t do a lot of work with people from Nashville or LA. It was just a bunch of friends, we hung out in this other friend’s barn and everybody had to really concentrate and quiet down because whatever we played was the record. So it was fun, but it was kind of also a high pressure environment. I had a really good time making that, and I’m excited about doing another one once this Toad thing is more wrapped up. I still need to be in writing process for my next project, but I’m very excited about getting back to that side of things as well. I like variety.

MR: Speaking of variety, the cover artwork of New Constellation is gorgeous. I love the woods and the stars and the DNA strand reaching up to the sky with garbage.

GP: Thanks. My friend’s wife Michelle brought up the idea of junk DNA, DNA basically made of trash. They were sitting around a fire, she suggested that, he drew it the next day and sent it in and that’s the cover. Ben Ciccati is the artist on that, he’s a really good friend, he lives just down the street from me.

MR: If the DNA’s made out of junk, might the bigger statement be “as we’re evolving we’re not evolving into something very pure?” Is there anything reaching towards that in the songs that I missed?

GP: I don’t know if it’s in the songs specifically, but we’re all trying to lurch forward and get somewhere. Part of DNA is about evolution, and part of evolution is about how you’re still carrying so many things around, right? You can switch a couple of genes around and grow a tail. Our past is within us as well, so as much as evolution is about moving forward we’re carrying every bit of our history with us. However, you want to carry that, metaphorically, even emotionally as individuals, we’ve got everything we’ve ever done, all our memories, all the decisions we made and it’s all still sitting there inside of us waiting for us to give it some kind of meaning.

MR: What advice do you have for new artists?

GP: Lord, I have no idea. Make something you really care about and keep your options open. You never know where you’ll end up. It’s a strange era right now, right? The labels can’t invest as broadly as they used to. I actually tell a lot of singer-songwriters that if they want to follow in my career path, what they want to do is make it to a time machine and get signed in the nineties when the labels had a ton of money and were investing in career development. These days, you’ve got to do it all yourself. You’ve got to know how to record and mix a record, you’ve got to know how to take care of your own artwork and your own website and your own social media and you’ve got to do it. There’s this dream people walk around with that they’re going to be “discovered” and everything’s going to happen to them. Maybe it’ll happen to somebody somewhere, but basically, you’ve just got to work your butt off and learn every job you can possibly learn because you’ll have to do them all and that’s kind of the way it works now.

If you talk to new bands, they’ve got one guy who designs the merch, another guy who does the website, everybody’s pulling three or four jobs, everybody’s working really hard and hopefully you choose people you love and you want to work really hard with. But my impression is more and more like that these days. Same as it used to be, every once in a while, maybe you’ll get a placement in the movie that makes everybody know who you are. It comes down to equal thirds: doing good music, working really hard, and then just being ridiculously lucky. Or maybe it’s like twenty-five, twenty-five, fifty, with fifty percent on the luck end. You’ve still got to get lucky. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t, but if you’re not working and the music isn’t good, the luck won’t matter either.

MR: When you look back at Toad’s success, how do you think you guys fared?

GP: Oh we were extremely lucky. We worked very hard, but we even assumed we were going to be signed for a couple years and then get dropped and break up. That just seemed to be what bands did, but it would be a fun story to tell. I don’t know, we were really insanely lucky. We didn’t even send out demos. There was a guy at ASCAP who started dubbing off casette copies of our first record and sending them to record companies and we got calls and we didn’t even know how these people got our music. If he hadn’t done that nobody would’ve heard about us at all. So that was lucky. You go beyond that into the rest of our scene, we were signed right when CDs were getting popular and all of a sudden the record companies had tons of available cash and Donnie Ienner was brand new at Columbia and decided he wanted to show he could do artist development and he was going to prove it with us. So we got total creative control, our advances were only for recording the records. We didn’t take money. We were like, “We’re an indie band even though we’re on Columbia!” We were cheap for the label; the label had time to wait on us and they let us grow. They put out our two indie records nationally and we got to tour for years and get better on the road and get a real audience; you could never do that anymore. “All I Want” didn’t come out…it was nine months into our third record before we actually had a hit. You can’t do that on a major label anymore. We were just insanely lucky.

MR: Your album Fear was a huge record. It also featured “Walk On The Ocean,” “Hold Her Down” that we talked about earlier, and it even seemed like “I Will Not Take These Things For Granted” took off in a subtle way. I consider that a classic album. Beyond the luck, the hard work, the magic, the hits, what do you think Toad The Wet Sprocket its? What do you someday want it to be remembered for?

GP: I don’t know… We were just making music we cared about. I think we spoke to a group of people that not a whole lot of other people were trying to talk to at that time. There were always nerds, but this is before nerds ruled the world, before it was cool and okay. I think we spoke a language–once again talking about vulnerability–that not a lot of other people were trying to do at that time. A song like “I Will Not Take These Things For Granted” was just not cool. It’s a little Howard Jones, it’s a little too much about your feelings, but it meant a lot and it was honest and authentic, and for people who were wanting that in their music, we were a band that was willing to be less cool and be more vulnerable. I think it was deeply appreciated and people stuck around for us because of that. I kind of think that’s why people stayed with us, why people liked us. We weren’t so busy being cool that we couldn’t be real people anymore. We weren’t somebody you’d aspire to be, we weren’t sexy rock people in any way, we were the band that you could’ve started, and there we were. “Hey, that’s my band that I thought of starting, that’s awesome! They made a record!”

MR: I guess you were sensitive in a period when people were learning to be sensitive–maybe “personal” and “smart” would also apply–in their pop music again after metal, etc.. What does the future look like? You’re going to be touring to support the album, right?

GP: Yeah, we’re out all summer with Counting Crows and what’s next, I have no idea. I’ve got to write another album and we’ll see if we do more Toad, there’s no hard plans, we may well. The fact that we got together and did this record is, I think, a huge achievement for us. We were as broken up as a band has ever been and we managed to get back together and get on a team again and I think that’s awesome. So I don’t know what it means for future, but we’re all just kind of keeping our eyes open and seeing what feels right, I guess.

MR: Excellent. All right, I won’t keep you any longer but thanks for the interview and let’s do this again sometime.

GP: Alrighty, we’ll be back around! Thanks.

Transcribed By Galen Hawthorne