Even though his career reaches back into the mid ’80s, no one has ever accused local singer songwriter Glen Phillips of sitting still. Ever since he first took to the stage out front of Toad the Wet Sprocket at the tender age of 16, Phillips’ musical life has been in constant motion. Having released five albums with the aforementioned folk-rock collective and a further three shimmering solo undertakings, when he’s not in the studio, Phillips is crisscrossing the country and taking his emotive armory of material to the general populace. And it’s an armory that just keeps getting more and more potent.
Last year alone, Phillips released three newly recorded undertakings. And he has another up his sleeve. The pending release comes from an ensemble that’s recently been christened the Works Progress Administration and centers on Phillips, Sean and Sara Watkins, and Luke Bulla, and features the likes of Benmont Tench, Greg Leisz, and Pete Thomas. The three releases spawned so far include two collaborative albums under the monikers of Plover and Remote Tree Children and a new solo undertaking themed around space travel. Yes, space travel.
“I’ve been wanting to record and get something out of my own and not take it so seriously,” Phillips explained when quizzed on the origins of his latest solo offering, titled Secrets of the New Explorers. “I spent a few days in the studio with my friend John Askew and then just kept going on with it on my own. I chose this space travel theme to see where it led me. And it’s been great to have a theme to write on instead of my typical navel-gazing, here-is-why-I’m-depressed kind of songs.”
The emotional breadth of Phillips’ latest undertakings is truly impressive. From the cosmic lyrical fantasy of New Explorers (which features what must surely be the world’s first song about radiation sickness) through the introspective beauty of his collaboration with Garrison Starr and Neilsen Hubbard titled Plover, and an adventure in electronica with John Askew that’s been branded Remote Tree Children, Phillips’ muse has not only been well and truly liberated, but seemingly given a musical license to roam at will.
“Since I’ve been a solo artist, I haven’t often been in a state of mind where I was feeling light about what I was doing musically,” he added. “For so many years now, I have felt like I’ve been auditioning for my job or trying to get back an old audience or making some statement. I wasn’t thinking about what would be fun. When I was a kid and doing well, that was my attitude, and it has been hard for me to win that back again. But now I feel like I am finally doing that.”
To lighten the musical air, Phillips had to first address some truths. His long-held self-contained approach might have afforded him an unparallel music freedom, but it also introduced a complexity of pressures relating to the business side of his music. Thoughts of new endeavors inevitably morphed into anxiety about release opportunities. But a subsequent clearing the subjective air has allowed Phillips to refocus his energies solely upon what should come first and foremost: the music.
“I had got so obsessed with the business side of things that I wasn’t enjoying my job anymore,” Phillips confessed. “I was getting really embittered, and that was messing up my life. So I stepped back from all of that and got my personal life back together and then did a whole bunch of projects that were a real labor of love. I worked with people I love and went into these projects with no thoughts of management or labels. Now, at the other end of all that, there’s all this great music.”
The process has presented Phillips with something of a musical sea change. With the music industry itself constantly undergoing reinvention and new avenues of musical distribution continually presenting themselves to independent artists, reaching out to an audience has never been easier. And with a body of work the caliber of what Phillips has recently amassed, that must have surely gone a long way to helping ease the burdens of business.
“Part of it is that,” Phillips explained. “But a big part of it is simply having my head on straight again. I think having success early in life without really working for it gave me a very bizarre model of how the world works. I was 18 and in a band and didn’t really care about much. I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking how lucky that was or what it takes to maintain something like that or even how a future could be built around it. So, when things didn’t come easy anymore, I walked around thinking it was shocking and unexpected—and it was only shocking because I was used to something that was ridiculous.”
With three new recordings already having seen the light of day and the Works Progress Administration album pending, Phillips is now contemplating what to tackle next. It was in 2006 when the last full-length Glen Phillips album—Mr. Lemons—sprang forth, so the time is close for a follow-up. The recent reality check has thus not only helped Phillips explore different sides of his musical personalities, but has also inadvertently helped point the way for his next true solo undertaking.
“It has slowly defined itself in the midst of all these other projects,” Phillips hinted when probed about a solo album. “All of these other undertakings have actually helped me to decide what it is that I want to do next and what it is that I want to put my own name on. It has been a really interesting process to figure out what I sound like. And, in not wanting to limit myself, I found that having different projects was a great way to let all these different parts come out and not have any one of them feel too schizophrenic.”
Brett Leigh Dicks can be contacted through Arts Editor Shelly Cone at scone@santa mariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 23-30, 2009.