Though you might not recognize the name right away, surely you’ve heard him. You see, Glen Phillips has been behind microphones most his life. As a high school freshman, the guitarist, writer and singer had already started playing with guitarist and future Toad the Wet Sprocket member Todd Nichols.

Soon, bassist Dean Dinning and drummer Randy Guss came on board. Four years later, Phillips hit the road with Toad, the alternative band with a folk rock sound. In the early 1990s, the foursome broke it big, with several hit records and a few songs featured in movies and television shows. By 1998, the group had separated, and Phillips embarked on a solo career. These days, while he still reunites with his old bandmates at times, he is also excited about new ventures, such as the unnamed, eight-person band he’s forming with a few members from Nickel Creek, among others.

On Thursday, Phillips, 37, will go solo, playing an acoustic set at Steve’s Guitars in Carbondale. In this recent interview, he spoke from his Santa Barbara, Calif., home, where he lives with his wife of 15 years and their three daughters. Below are excepts from the conversation.

You started making music when you were really young. So, why music? “I don’t know. It was just something to do. I enjoyed it (Laughing). You know, starting, playing with Toad, I really didn’t think that it was what I was going to do for a career. When we started up, it was just something to do after school.”
“And then the band just kind of started to get its own steam, and we did an album locally, and the next thing we knew, we were on tour.”

And so, when you were starting out, and you guys were so young, did you have any concept that this would be become this big thing, or was it just this totally spontaneous thing for you guys? “Yeah, it was pretty surprising. I mean the weirdest thing about it was that it gave me a really weird idea of how the world worked. I kind of assumed that I could do whatever I wanted to, and (laughing) it would be really easy to be successful. That’s a dangerous thing to run around thinking, I think. But, outside of that, it was, you know, yeah, it was a very strange experience to find ourselves, all of a sudden, getting to make music for a living and getting to go around and having people want to hear it. We certainly didn’t think it would take us as far as it did.”

How did you deal with that fame and success? I mean, did you ever kind of go a little crazy? “No, I didn’t take it really seriously. I liked the access and everything. But I never took it all that seriously. I’ve always been very skeptical of how media works, and I never really believed that fame was worth all that much. So, I don’t know. I feel like I had a really solid home. I knew the people I loved. I knew who I cared about. I knew what was important in life, so it didn’t have that much of an effect on me.”

Describe the difference between your music, how it was in the early ’90s to how it is now. Because I was trying get a sense of the music from both time periods, and I couldn’t really. All the songs sounded different to me. I mean, each one is really unique. “I think that’s been a problem for me as a solo artist. The good thing about Toad is that we had our limitations, about what we could play, the kind of sounds we were all willing to make, I think really helped focus the writing into something that really sounded cohesive. And when I went solo, all of a sudden I had no idea what I sounded like. And I kept writing songs in the same way, but I didn’t know what to do, album to album, song to song, to kind of give them any sense of cohesion. So, it’s been a strange process that way, and the writing is definitely all over the map. Even on this new EP, it’s a pretty wild collection of songs. So, yeah, I get bored if I write a whole bunch of the same songs (laughing). I don’t know. I want different phrasing on everything. I want different lyrical content. I want different chordal progressions, melodic progressions, different stuff going on. I would love to just write simple songs, one after the other. But I haven’t been able to get my brain to shut up long enough for me to do that.”

Now what do you think you’re trying to say with your music? (Long pause) “I have no idea. Well, on the last project it was mostly — oh, I don’t know. I’m still trying to explore it. The big thing in the last few years was just getting my sense of pleasure back at making it. I’d gotten pretty insanely depressed and started disliking my job and was missing my kids. So I was sad when I was home, and I just kind of hit bottom about a year ago and decided that I was actually pretty lucky and that I should make a point of enjoying my life again. So, I’ve been really, consciously, going in that direction. And so, for me music is about high-level play. It’s about getting to explore something and getting to explore it with enough intelligence and vocabulary, and you can find something new in places you didn’t expect to.”

So, when you became so depressed, that was only a year ago? “Oh no, I’d been depressed for about eight years (laughing).”

What brought — I mean, it’s sort of a big question — but do you know what brought that on? “Just a bad set of expectations. I mean, once again, whether or not you take it seriously, it’s an odd thing to go through, to have had this very strange success and then shift gears, with the idea being that I was shifting gears in order to enjoy my life more. I made some bad business decisions and some bad creative decisions, and then, the whole shift of the record industry really started happening intensely. And I found myself just really alone and isolated. And I think I really made myself more isolated in the process of that. But I’d gone from being a successful musician to feeling like I was having to beg people to pay attention to me, or to let me do my job still.”
“So, I got pretty low for a while, and took it all very seriously and very personally. And the fact of the matter is, it’s just life. Things go up and go down, and things change. You can’t really control it. But, I just took it all a little too personally and seriously. It’s thing one to get depressed. Depressing things happen. The thing is, you can start believing in your own mythology (laughing). And start believing your own story. The last year pretty much just shocked me out of it. It’s been pretty cool to just start again and get to have a little gratitude. I find it’s been opening doors for me.”

Your gratitude has? “Yeah, well, just not being a downer (laughing). So, it’s been a really fun year. I decided if I was going to keep doing this as my job, I would need to love it again, and I feel I finally got that part back.”

Now that you’ve kind of come back to yourself as a musician and in your personal life, is there a future that you see that you’re looking forward to or that you hope happens? (Pause) “I have no idea. I would just like to continue doing stuff I like.”
“I’m just going to keep doing things I care about and kind of trusting that people will continue to want to hear what I’m up to. It’s not much more than that. So no, no big plans, more big projects to do and, yeah, that’s about it (laughing).”

So, right now, what’s the most important thing in your life? “Well, the family I think is pretty much it.”

It’s a popular choice. “Yeah, it’s a good one. Well, it’s hard to beat.”

Contact Stina Sieg: 384-9111
ssieg@postindependent.com