02.13.09 - Volume 3, Episode #4 - Length 21:28
Few musicians have achieved fame, but even fewer taste it at the age of 14. Glen Phillips was no ordinary youth. He founded Toad the Wet Sprocket in 1986 and five years later was on the top twenty of the Billboard Hot 100. Since then he has turned from fame to focused on playing were his heart is. From a notable solo career to collaborations such as Nickel Creek, and Mutual Admiration Society, Glen has a unique perspective on the music industry.
Please sit back and share the wonderful thoughts and music of Glen Phillips .
AAC 20.7 MB
MP3 19.7 MB
(♪ Something to Say ♪)
“Young success was a strange thing, especially ‘cause it was also young success in something I really cared about but had decided that I wasn’t ambitious about.”
(♪ Something to Say ♪)
Glen Phillips: I started playing because my big brother played music and he was playing keyboards and was the first kid on the block with a Moog and a sequencer and just wanted to do that and I ended up getting a band and had a bass. I wanted to Rush when I was in junior high. I was Geddy Lee, but without the chops, so…Yeah I met Todd (Nichols) when I was freshman in high school and I had a bass and he could he could play More Than A Feeling and so we started hanging out.
(♪ Something to Say ♪)
Glen Phillips: My high school drama teacher, he talked about how when he went to school he loved the theater and wanted to stay in theater no matter what but, didn’t have the ambition to go out and try to make it as actor. He didn’t want to compete in that way and I thought exactly the same thing. I didn’t have that ambition. I didn’t take it really too seriously. Strange as it’s been on either side of it, I always kinda’ knew it was a crock. The band got just incredibly lucky and we found ourselves on the road when I was 18 years old and it’s kinda’ what I’ve done ever since. So, on the one hand I’m incredibly grateful for it, on the other hand it was odd because I kinda’ living out this dream that you’re not really suppose to get to do unless it’s the only thing you want to do with your life (laughter) and I was thinking like, I want to go school. I was going to be a high school teacher! And so, it’s been really wonderful, but it also gave me some, I think, very strange expectations about what life would provide.
(♪ Liars Everywhere ♪)
Glen Phillips: Well, it’s hard. You have to redefine success. I mean, in my own stuff, seriously small potatoes now. The big thing has been trying to find people who’ve had music industry experience who don’t need to run everything through the traditional music industry channels or people who are interested in my music…a lot of people, I mean they’re very happy to work with me currently, but they’re really happy when people start talking Toad and it’s hard for anybody who’d want to turn down that payday and want to get back on the radio and get that moving again and it’s not where my heart is and so, playing a couple a shows a year is okay, but there’s no future in it. I’m loving the music I’m making with other people. I’m excited about that. I’ve had a very hard time finding situations that aren’t trying to push me back in the pop world and that are happy to work with me as a new artist.
(♪ Liars Everywhere ♪)
(♪ Windmills – Live ♪)
Glen Phillips: So it’s interesting and there’s just a way, I mean the music industry is also just completely falling apart is the other thing and so there’s this easy greased way of going about it and I’m saying, people are just kinda’ used to how it used to be where you’d get a very wealthy patron, you know, a record company and they’d pay for things and you’d move along in that and it’s easy for everybody and this is really just small business and it’s very blue collar kind of setup. People don’t want blue collar, they want meetings and well appointed offices (laughter) and so, agh…you know I’ve had to do a lot more myself, but I’m find people who’ve been working on the margins for a longer time and kinda’ been working out of the pop world and have a better understanding of how that kind of old fashioned troubadour way of going about the business so…It’s been good that way, but it’s strange to break away from it. I’m still trying to figure it out.
(♪ Windmills – Live ♪)
Glen Phillips: Success for me is, you know, making enough to keep my family going and doing well enough that I get more days at home because I’ve been on the road six months of the year for too many years and I miss my wife, I miss my kids and I miss my friends and so I want to play few enough shows every year that I’m excited about going out and make more records have more fun doing them. That’s success.
(♪ Windmills – Live ♪)
(♪ Fred Meyer with members of Nickel Creek ♪)
Glen Phillips: I met Jonathan Kingham at a song writing convention and he ended up coming out on the road with me, put together a band with Miles Corban and Sean out of Seattle and we did that tour and I just meet people here and there. I have friends in Nashville, friends in LA who I can who I can play with. Yeah, there’s so many collaborations that I’m really excited about doing. I have a lot of ideas for projects that involve more people. I have a project with Neilson Hubbard coming up and Garrison Star . I’m insanely excited about that. We’re going to do another Mutual Admiration record soon. Chris won’t be involved, but it’s Sean and Sarah . Sean and Sarah came up and played with me in Santa Barbara recently and David Crosby was in the audience and came up and said he had seen me play solo and with the band. As he put it, in situations where it was clear that everybody didn’t have the same energy on stage and it wasn’t just blossoming and expanding and when I got up there with Sean and Sarah it was clear that we were all on the same page. The energy was just moving forward and feeding itself and growing and it just was so fun. It’s cool to finish a show and just feel gitty and amazed. The thing is playing with Sean and Sarah I just walk off and we’ve been playing with Luke Bulla as well as this amazing fiddle player, guitar player and singer and we did this show in Santa Barbara and it was the four of us and Greg Leisz was playing pedal steel, Benmont Tench was playing piano and it was pretty much heaven. You know, just walking off the stage and thinking, Wow that was an amazing concert and I was actually involved (laughter). Hearing all this music coming out around me and looking up and everybody is just smiling and into it. There’s nothing nuttin’ better. Those are the experiences I want to have and I’ve had them, I’ve been having them and they’re wonderful. And that’s more important to me than anything. I’m just going to keep going where it feels good.
(♪ Fred Meyer with members of Nickel Creek ♪)
(♪ I Will Not Take These Things For Granted ♪)
Glen Phillips: The time we were in Europe was really wonderful. It was the longest time I’d spent with my family in a long time. I was singing a little bit. I got to do a couple of tours with Teitur one in Germany and one in Denmark. That was wonderful. Playing shows there was great. A couple of strangers took us in…kinda’ friends of family or one guy from MySpace who offered to put us up in London. Aside from that we would rent places, either stayed with a friend in Berlin, rented a place for a month in Amsterdam. We were doing it really on the cheap ‘cause the amount of time we were out there. Amsterdam was by far the best. Just spending this month on bicycles constantly (laughter) you know, the whole family and going out in the country side. It was great perspective shift. You know we’ve become acculturated. You get used to seeing certain things and thinking that’s how everybody thinks and thinking that’s reality and it’s not (laughter). People everywhere have different attitudes and it was really great to get a dose of different realities and get a little perspective on things that I had taken for granted.
(♪ I Will Not Take These Things For Granted ♪)
(♪ Walk On The Water ♪)
Glen Phillips: I mean Toad didn’t end well. It ended badly, as bands tend to end. Toad grew apart. We were not the same people we were when we were kids. Returning to it before was really painful and returning to it this last time was kinda’ cool. We moved pass the history and everybody got a long fine and all the weirdness wasn’t there, but I also felt very strongly that there wasn’t a future to it for me creatively. As great as it was to get back and feel really proud about what we had accomplished and be able to take in a little more of how the audience enjoyed it. I also realized we got to our we got to our stopping point as something that was going to be really active and that could change. We’ll play here and there. I mean it was nice to get back together and do that.
(♪ Walk On The Water ♪)
(♪ Woodburning ♪)
Glen Phillips: Digital moves in a lot. It’s the question of do we sell discs anymore, no. We just sell ones and zeros in whatever way. Computer recording, I think, is a great thing. It’s a whole bunch of tools that are commonly abused, but that can still be made to make music. A lot of the computer tools they’ve taken a lot of the life out of recording because it used to be you’d kinda’ get it down and now there’s so much fixing it kinda’ screws up performance, I think. And even the fact that you look at the software all the time instead of listening, I think makes a huge difference. But, there’s also software that I’m in love with Live right now. I think Ableton’s Live is just a genius program. It’s playful, it’s intuitive, you know it allows you to really just kinda’ fill a bucket with different kinds of audio and recombine and you aren’t always looking at the waveforms in the same way. It’s a very different attitude towards a recording program and I think it’s very playful. I’ve seen very few other pieces of software that just encourage play in the way that Live does so, I think it’s a great tool. And if you’re just using it to record it’s not so overly powerful that you start to fixing everything. It’s just difficult enough to edit on that I treat like a tape machine. It’s great. But you can also do some really interesting loop oriented stuff with it, but once again most loop oriented stuff holds you into a set couple of bars. You can make one loop on the fly, never stop recording, add another track, play an entire song over that, have that cycle…be incredibly creative with it. And it really gets you out of a linear mindset, but it keeps you in a playing mindset, as opposed, to imposing an artificial perfection mindset on you. It rocks.
(♪ Woodburning ♪)
Glen Phillips: One can find my music at Glen Phillips dot com . Buying direct is always best these days (laughter). You can download it from there or buy it off of Aware Store which is the closest to my store. So Aware Store or Glen Phillips dot com . You can also find stuff at Amazon and or iTunes Store but buy it from me.
Glen Phillips: Be happy, stay clear, enjoy your lives.
(♪ Don’t Need Anything – Live ♪)
"Young success was a strange thing, especially 'cause it was also young success in something I really cared about but had decided that I wasn't ambitious about." - Glen Phillips
Official Website
http://www.myspace.com/glenphillips
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glen_Phillips
Offsite Purchase
Get the Album Secrets of the New Explorers at bandcamp.
Get the Album Unlucky Seven at bandcamp.
Get the Album Mr. Lemons at bandcamp.
Get the Album Abulum at bandcamp.
