Toad the Wet Sprocket Frontman Glen Phillips Loves a Good Problem

Charlie Desjardins ’26 / Emertainment Monthly Co-President

In the mid-1980s, like so many high schoolers blinded by hormonal adrenaline, ambition, and Michael Stipe, young Santa Barbaran Glen Phillips met a bunch of upperclassmen and joined a band. However, unlike most entrants into this pimply rite of passage, Phillips, along with guitarist/songwriter Todd Nichols, bassist Dean Dinning, and drummer Randy Guss*, stuck it out, and Toad the Wet Sprocket became a defining act of the ‘90s and its pop-rock mainstream. 

If Nirvana was the angsty antidote to a generation of broken teens, Toad was the bookish stoner in the corner, coyly quoting from its diary and launching inquests into humanity’s unknowables. Phillips was the sweet-voiced leader of this strain, often appearing in-concert barefoot and in baggy surfer duds.

“We spotted the ocean / At the head of the trail / Where are we goin’ / So far away?,” he sings on 1991 fan-favorite “Walk on the Ocean.”

Phillips was 20 years old when Toad recorded that song, and 22 when it peaked at #18 on the Billboard Hot 100. 

Now, nearly 40 years after their founding, it’s that endless zeal for discovery that has carried Toad the Wet Sprocket through seven albums, a contentious break-up, and absurd amounts of concerts, all culminating in this year’s Good Intentions tour. I caught up with Glen Phillips, now 57, back in May, and had the privilege of seeing the band at their Deerfield show in August. 

What began as a simple career retrospective became a far deeper exploration of songwriting, relationships, and cheesy MTV videos. Trust me: this man can speak with the best of ‘em.

Charlie Desjardins: I want to talk to you about the Good Intentions tour, named after one of Toad’s most beloved songs. Was there a reason you felt like Good Intentions was a good mission statement for this particular tour, or was it just a catchy title?

Glen Phillips: I mean, it’s a recognizable song. We were trying to come up with a whole buncha titles but, especially getting older, life is a series of unintentional mistakes. The key is to make them slightly less catastrophic and hopefully less often. 

The last few years, we’ve been really trying to up our game, and everybody’s gotten more positive. Relationships have gotten a lot better, the band has been working. Instead of kinda sitting back and going on automatic, we’re trying to really keep it alive. And there’s mistakes along the way. [laughter] It seemed relatable, I’ll say that.

You and your Toad bandmates have been together for close to 40 years. How would you describe the connection with those guys? Does it almost feel spiritual?

GP: I’ll say familial. These are relationships that transcend work relationships, and transcend normal friendships as well. We have this bond that keeps us together through thick and thin, and I think a lot of bands do by this point. It could be said that we’re not as great at communication as we should be, and that we sublimate everything and move on, but we’ve also not said terrible things about each other publicly. 

You know, I met them when I was 14 or 15. I was a freshman, they were seniors, we were in theater together. I was this nerdy geek listening to metal, and Todd had a station wagon, so I threw my bike in back and I’d get him to drive me home. He turned me onto R.E.M. and U2 and Elvis Costello and Husker Du and The Replacements, and we started writing songs together. 

The relationships were formed in high school, so there’s some old habits that are really difficult to overcome. And then the stresses of having early success. We broke up when I was 27, and we were unsigned, so when we got back together it was seriously contentious for years. We just kinda fought through it, and it’s kinda amazing to find ourselves in our 50s now, having the most fun we’ve had in decades. It took a lot of work and a lot of forgiveness on everybody’s part.

We still haven’t done the Metallica group therapy thing, but who knows? [laughter]

That’s probably one thing that no band should have to go through.

GP: No band should film it.

Do you think some bands should just take breaks to avoid burnout, instead of splitting up entirely?

GP: That’s what we should have done in the first place. We probably should’ve had therapy.

Todd is an amazing guitarist. Dean is the best bass player I’ve ever worked with. I regret that we broke up, but we had the path we had. I think everybody in a band should have another project, because if you don’t have a side project, you have nothing to compare the band to. It’s like with any relationship. I know so many couples that broke up and then realized they had all the same problems in their next relationship. [laughter] Sometimes it’s not fixable, and you do need to move on, but it’s that thing of going, “Wow. I’m doing this other project, and all I have now is new problems.” Which is fine. 

A friend of mine told me a while ago that I have the tendency to think of problems as a stopping point, and I needed to think more like a mathematician or a rock climber. For a mathematician or a rock climber, a problem is just a good day. It’s work, and it’s work you love. 

You’ve talked a lot about discovering things in your own subconscious while writing songs. Even after all these years of writing, does that still happen?

GP: Songwriting is my spiritual practice. I think of songs as notes from my future, more-evolved self to my current self. It’s where I’m working through the issues or the concepts that I need to work out and find clarity in. 

My favorite Buddhist teacher these days is Tara Brock, and in every talk she does, she’s operating from a process of humility in her own human experience. She makes it clear that she’s chewing on the same material she’s talking about. It’s very different than a guru having all the answers and telling you how to do it. 

You can have songs that are “do what I do,” but for it to relate to people, and for it to relate to me later on, I have to be inquisitive. On [my solo album] Swallowed By The New, because I was in the process of divorce, grief was the real subject. I think that process translates into songs that are relatable because everybody’s chewing on the same questions, you know? The things I love change. The world that I wanted is not the world that is. 

So your songs are future messages to yourself. To harken back to an earlier Toad song, “All I Want,” I wonder how those messages have changed. What did you want when you first started writing music, and how has that evolved?

GP: Some of it is the same. I was a kinda morbid kid. I always took things really personally and heavily, and I was thinking about what I was actually here for. The chorus to “All I Want” is all unicorns and roses, but the verses are about struggling: “Nothing’s so loud / As hearing when we lie / The truth is not kind / And you’ve said, neither am I.” It’s about trying to find moments of clarity and connecting them with the parts where your emotions overwhelm you. 

Some of those songs have really stayed with me, some will disappear for years and come back, and some I just play because people like them.

What’s an example of a song you “just play?”

GP: “Nanci” [from Dulcinea]. It’s cute, I like the chords. It’s a really simple melody over this oddly chromatic chord pattern. [laughter]

I go back to some of those songs, and I realize I’ve really simplified harmonically. I was trying to stretch out so much harmonically then, and always have something unexpected. Like “Windmills” [from Dulcinea]. I still don’t know what “Windmills” is about, but I love the bridge because it goes in such a weird, unexpected direction. I like it when something’s weird. I think about this with a new artist like Madison Cunningham, who writes a lot in 7 and these great non -4/4 time signatures. I’ll hear her song and think, “She’s probably gonna go to the 6…” And she won’t go to that chord, but it always makes makes me happy!

Every once in a while I’ll go back to learn an old song, and I’ll be like, “That’s weird! Why did I do that? It works, but it’s weird!”

Why do you think you did that? I know Toad was self-conscious about critical acclaim. Was it a play for acceptance, or just your writing style?

GP: I think it’s how you write songs. Part of it is trying not to play the same three chords over and over again. If songwriting is exploration, it’s working lyrically, but it’s also working melodically. Todd is really good with that too — I’ve tried to figure out “Walk On The Ocean” [from Fear]. It’s a strange song. It works when you listen to it, but if we have violinists sit in with us and try to solo over the chorus, they’re always like, “Where am I?” 

I completely agree. I grew up listening to Toad with my mom, but as I get older— these are some weird songs!

GP: I have no idea why. Songs like “Woodburning” [from Dulcinea]; it’s like E-major, G, D, A. I’m lost harmonically, but the melody just makes it work. I really enjoy that about our songs. 

I took a couple of years of theory in college and never came back to it. Dean’s the only literate musician in the band. [laughter]

There’s this sense of melancholy present in a lot of your music, and especially on an album like Dulcinea. Where did that darkness come from?

GP: That’s Todd’s music, and he doesn’t share a lot about his internal life. He’s got a lot of soul though, and I feel like he expresses it musically. That’s where that longing and sadness comes out. 

We did 300 shows for the Fear tour, and we wanted to make a record that sounded like we sounded live. No doubling, minimal overdubs, two guitars. Whereas Fear was us in a studio with 48 tracks—I’d been listening to a ton of Talk Talk and Peter Gabriel and Tears For Fears, and we wanted to make a big, crazy record—Dulcinea was something immediate and vibey and live. That’s probably our most unified record.

Gavin McKillop produced both of those albums, right?

GP: [Gavin] came from an engineering background, and he was very socratic in his production technique. He’d be like, “I get bored by the second verse. Make it different.” So we learned quickly to keep things non-linear so listeners would never feel complacent. 

We kept trying to surprise ourselves, and he was great at pushing us to find solutions. I remember him complaining, after ProTools came around, that he’d get these bands coming in and doing a sloppy take and going out to party and saying, “You fix it! It’s your job.” Well, we were on tape. We had to get it right, and we had to know what we were doing coming in. 

It seems like the musical process truly mattered to Toad. What was your connection to the commercial end of the business? I was just watching the “All I Want” video, and you’re doing all that dancing. Were you ever comfortable with that?

GP: No! We were not a good band at understanding that our image was important. We thought, “R.E.M. doesn’t have an image! They just show up in their street clothes!” And R.E.M. actually cared a lot about how they were perceived. Our videos were usually last-minute, on tour, they’d send us five treatments and we’d go, “This one doesn’t look too embarrassing!” 

“All I Want” was directed by Hans Nilman, who did the cover art for Fear. He had an idea, and he was like, “Move! Move your arms more! Sing!” So we just kinda went with it, even though it wasn’t how we saw ourselves. Our connection was with our fans. We would hang out at the bus until the last person left, we built really personal relationships, we had an email list with 50,000 people or something—

70,000 people.

GP: It was 70,000?

Yeah.

GP: That was where we were concentrated, but we became popular through MTV. We didn’t give enough thought to that. We were one of the first bands through the door when indie/college music became mainstream, so we got a lot of flack for being a major label indie band. 

The indie world was where we came from, so it was always a little painful to have that world reject us.

The cred wars were so overblown.

GP: They were huge! The ‘90s was the era of bands like Pearl Jam and Counting Crowes saying, “We’re not gonna play our single!” We were on major labels, but we were acting like we weren’t. [laughter]

It’s incredible to think you were going through all of this in your 20s. What would you tell yourself as a 20 year old that you’ve gained over the years?

GP: Mostly, don’t take it for granted. You only got one shot, do not miss your chance to blow, this opportunity comes once in a lifetime, yo. [laughter]

To take it more seriously: to appreciate everything that was good in my life that I wasn’t appreciating as much as I could have. I think of that with my first marriage, I think of that with the band. Not taking things for granted. It’s really easy.

We are negatively-valenced animals, and we remember the dangerous stuff because it can hurt us, and we’re trying not to get hurt. It’s very easy to note those things, and it’s actually a practice to stay in gratitude. You need to have your heart broken a few times to really get that message. But I think having practices that remind you of the things that are working—and to be conscious of those things early on—is the best thing you can do for yourself. 

Because otherwise, you learn it the hard way.

*Guss, due to health problems, officially left the band in 2020. He was replaced by touring musician Josh Daubin in 2017, and Carl Thompson in 2023.