By Wade Coggeshall
INDIANAPOLIS
Tue, May 13 2008
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Just the facts
WHO: Glen Phillips with Jonathan Kingham
WHEN: 8:30 p.m. April 9
WHERE: The Music Mill, 3720 E. 82nd St., Indianapolis
Since formally disbanding in 1998, Toad the Wet Sprocket frontman Glen Phillips has struggled creatively in his solo career.
His first disc, 2000’s “Abulum,” took longer than one may think. Phillips calls the writing process for that and subsequent releases more situational than creative.
“I assumed a lot of things about how things would go for me,” he said. “None of them happened.”
Blame part of it on simple inexperience. Prior to going it alone, ensemble work was the only job experience Phillips had. He was only a high school freshman when Toad started in 1986.
“I really wasted so many years, in a way, trying to get a record instead of making a record,” Phillips said.
It appeared to be more of the same at the outset of his latest recordings. Phillips’ friend John Askew was flying out to spend the week working with him. Phillips intended on having a batch of songs written upon his arrival but didn’t. After the first day proved fruitless, Askew suggested an album theme on private space travel. Phillips says everything flowed from there, resulting in the EP “Secrets of the New Explorers,” another prime example of the artist’s quirky folk-rock.
“I had been on the stuck side for a while,” Phillips said. “Getting to just play and do something essentially so silly was incredibly liberating. It happened very fast.”
In fact Phillips is already working on a new EP, this one based on colorful characters from San Francisco, circa the late 1800s.
“I have this hunger for trivia and strange history and odd science and weird news articles,” Phillips said. “Actually getting to meld that with music is enjoyable. It’s a nice change from writing about how sad I am all the time. Although I still do that some too.”
One thing Phillips no longer does is confuse his solo career with Toad the Wet Sprocket’s. The band still plays together periodically, but for years Phillips couldn’t understand why their fans weren’t as eager to hear his music.
“That didn’t make me very happy,” he said. “Enough time has passed that I realize the Toad audience is there for the songs but also in large part for their memories. That band will take them somewhere I can’t possibly take them.
“I’m no longer trying to convert Toad fans to being fans of my stuff.”
That means Phillips can’t rest on his laurels when competing in an already saturated marketplace. Like many, he’s solo in more ways than one. “Secrets of the New Explorers” is available for download on his website and other e-tailers, rather than being distributed as a physical product by a record company. One reason Phillips is no longer releasing new music in album format is because, once the industry’s de facto standard, it’s becoming a relic in the new media age. While competition may be fierce, at least Phillips and others like him are more in charge of their destinies than ever before.
“Smaller-level artists like myself are finding ways to separate ourselves from these demands that are now irrelevant,” he said.
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Online:
www.glenphillips.com
wade.coggeshall@flyergroup.com
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