Strength in Vulnerability: A Talk With Glen Phillips
There was a very important moment in time in my life as an artist where I went from wanting to just play rock n’ roll guitar and make generally loud noise on stage (or in my buddy’s parents basement) to needing to write songs that had a deeper and more profound meaning to me. At that point in my life there was one songwriter who’s words spoke to me the most and who’s songs were incredibly important, that songwriter was Glen Phillips.
There is something inherently endearing about Phillips, both as an artist and a human. Watching him perform and weave the stories of his songs between each tune is like a conversation with an old friend. Being able to talk with him for what turned out to be quite some time was like we had known each other forever and were simply catching up. Not only has the songwriter influenced a generation and provided the soundtrack for countless life milestones with his work in Toad the Wet Sprocket, but his solo records has put on full display his penchant for introspective and poignant lyrics and a voice that could melt even the coldest of hearts.
Phillips recently released a brand new record “Swallowed By The New”, a pensive and honest look at the loss and subsequent acceptance we experience as humans. You can read our full take on that album here and head below to read our in depth discussion about community, death and living life fully and of course the new album…
Glen will be at Club Passim tomorrow night (12/13) for two shows an early and a late. Pick up tickets HERE.
RLR: Before we get into the new record and discussing this upcoming show at Passim, something I have always respected you for and noticed is you are a king of collaboration in some fashion. Last time I saw you up in Cambridge, MA at Passim you had Jonathan (Kingham) with you, and then obviously there is the Mutual Admiration Society stuff and the WPA record, which is one of my favorite albums. What is it about performing that way, in a capacity with other artists, that is special for you. What do you gain from those experiences?
Glen: I learn something different from every collaboration. And I think there is some part of knowing yourself. I think there are some people who you could drop them on a desert island, completely alone, and they would make art all day. I don’t know if I’m necessarily that person (laughs), so the company that I’m around is a huge influence and kind of stretches me and its both letting me learn and letting me be creative in a new way. Frankly, its really nicer to be on the road with friends than alone in a car all day. So yeah, I like to keep up some amount of variety.
I mean, its also a way to learn new things. I think its easy to do the same thing, over and over, and I am aware that a little “push start” is a huge help for me. Having other people around me and kind of catching off their momentum. You know, like a skateboarder on the back of a truck or something. Which is about how I feel when I play with Sean and Sara Watkins, I’m definitely the skateboarder on the back of the truck…holding on for dear life. But man, I became a much better musician being around those people and I think a better person too.
RLR: Absolutely. In that same vein, obviously with Sean and Sara and some of the other folks in California and beyond, it seems that community is a very important aspect in really any music “scene” or area. How important is it to you personally establishing those roots and how has it evolved over the course of your career?
Glen: Community is a huge part of it. Its been a big question for me, in general. Living in Santa Barbara for so many years I feel like I have a really deep community in Santa Barbara, but there’s not many people who do what I do there. I know a few professional musicians and who do work in music but you know, as far as “somebody who goes out and sings his songs” type people, I am kind of the only one at my level. I say level in terms of the clubs that I play, the world that I operate in, my reality. Meaning there are people who are probably better writers than I am, but don’t tour. Then there are people, like Kenny Loggins, who tour in bands and have budgets and things like that (laughs).
I just came to Nashville a couple months ago and a lot of my co workers live here and its nice to live in the same town as co workers. I’ve really been missing the deep community I have in Santa Barbara and its the day to day, baseline, of people I have history with. Its interesting to start to see how the deep friendships I make on tour turn into local friendships. Cause its different, when you tour with somebody in a car for a month you go very deep with them. With musicians you don’t usually see them for two years after that, you know? So its strange to figure out how to bring these communities together, its something I have been craving for a long time. I mean I raised my kids in Santa Barbara because I wanted them to have that life. We didn’t want them to be in L.A.
So, for now, Nashville is a first stop. I want to feel like “I live at home” someday. I can’t quite figure out if that’s a mental stance that I’ve just carried or if there is something concrete about it. Meaning, is that feeling of displacement just a lack of presence? Like if I learned how to actually carry “home” with me on the road and not be longing for the road when I’m home, then be longing for home when I’m on the road and never quite being where I am…so I am aware of a part of it that may just be stance and part of it that may be functional and it just may need enough time in one place.
I have been seeking community and its a strange thing. I mean, I am lucky to have a whole lot of people I love and trust and who make me smile when I think of them. And they’re spread out all over the place.
RLR: (somewhere in here we transitioned to talking about community and how it relates to being on the road, but the logistical and financial implications of being an artist)
Glen: Part of community, and being solo or duo singer-songwriters is you can’t make a living in music like you used to.
RLR: It seems it is more out of necessity (touring sol0) right?
Glen: Yeah. I am trying to figure out how I make a living and live at home. I mean, I am smart enough and I can learn new skills but I have a pretty weird set of talents. I can do audio engineering, production, website design, video editing. I am a good tour agent, a good driver. You know, I’m good with a spreadsheet. I have all these weird haphazard talents that you gain while being a touring musician but I don’t even know if I could handle a real day job. But there is definitely a part of me that is really longing to feel at home somewhere. I just got to my apartment in Nashville, I actually felt like I had my first week where I was moved in and just cooking meals. I hadn’t had a kitchen that was my own in two years. Its amazing how profound it is to be able to cook your own food. Its really the basics. Things I took for granted, prepping some food so I can have lunch ready for the next few days. My level of wanting a home is literally that precise, its not an abstract: I want a kitchen. (laughs)
Glen: Well, yeah I mean its two things and back the the previous question, at a pure business level. Like I said, I am kind of fighting, I mean these are the rooms I can play at solo. If I could play a theatre solo, I would. You know, at the level I’m at as an artist, I am on the one hand incredibly grateful that I can go and play shows and make a living. On the other hand…I can’t afford to invest really in the life where I am at home more. There is a bit of frustration to that. I mean if you ask a musician what they would rather do its like, I would rather do all my collaborations, I mean I’d rather be able to hire all these amazing bands and musicians I love and who love my music and go out and make a living doing that thing instead of losing money whenever I try to expand it. WPA was one of the best experiences of my life, both musically and in terms of the people. But it was a financial blood bath. So, I have to meter those risks because I can’t afford to make risks that big very often.
At a creative level, there is a fact that I don’t feel I am done as a writer and I have to fight against a lot of pressure to live in the past. I really have no interest in that kind of nostalgia and so I am also really grateful I get to tour with Toad and bring those songs to people and have that job. But as an artist, my mind is in the here and now. The music I am making, the collaborations I have, the collaborations that I am trying to force myself to risk again. I had a big change in the last year or so in terms of…how can I say it? If I look at my career and I look at it as narcissism or I look at it as a thing that in order to be successful I need it to reach a certain commercial level. If I am thinking I have to have this many people at my shows or sell this many records in order to be legitimate, thats a hard criteria with which to make music for a person like me. I mean, I know people who do. I’m in Nashville where there’s career writers and they are out to win and they are really good at what they do and they are un-conflicted about winning. So, if they are both un-conflicted about winning and they are great, they do really well. I am a person who recognized when I was really young, that I didn’t have the spine or the drive to be that person who had to win. I’m a little fragile. I want to make the art and I want to make a living doing it. When Toad got signed, I thought I was going to be a high school teacher and I would just make music and art when I could and that would be great. Instead I ended up doing this for a living and so, at some point I had a feeling like “I had to be doing this for a purpose that was more than myself” and finally recognize that these songs (Toad songs) are important to people. Even in the nostalgic way, they were there for people’s weddings, their college years, the death of loved ones. It was the soundtrack to these things. It is something that keeps their memories and my new songs can also be more consciously written from a point of view of doing that work for those people. That means that there is a reason to keep doing it. If its not that reason to keep doing it, then its just narcissism and I really to get the message and stop.
RLR: So lets talk a little about the new record for a bit. The new record, the title alone could infer many things. Be it “rebirth” or acceptance or an overwhelm by new experiences or things. I feel there are common themes of sacrifice for reward. One specific line being “no pain, no pleasure/ no work, no leisure”, but also themes of acceptance, overcoming and moving forward. I know a lot of the songs came from a pretty heavy place, so how did you reach the decision to open up so much? Was it difficult to get there? Where did it come from?
Glen: Well I was trying to NOT write a break-up record and found that I didn’t have a choice. I was having writer’s block and then joined a writing group with this guy Matt the Electrician. He would send out a title every week and a bunch of songwriters would write a song and send it back the next Wednesday, which reminds me I have a song I need to write today because it just started again. He kept sending out these titles that were like “Reconstructing the Diary” and like “Criminal Career” , “Leaving Oldtown”. I kind of wrote out of those titles and they started to get me writing about the process I was going through. I knew going through the process of a divorce and all those changes was, for me the stakes were really high. I didn’t feel like there was a middle ground for me. I had to face things straight on and do the hard work or I was going to really go dark and I didn’t know if I would come back. It was like life or death. Then I started doing the work.
The record, although there are these songs…the earliest songs kind of held up and stand on its own I guess. The songs started with this kind of “break up, I’ll try not to be a dick” theme. They moved from there into songs about losing home…”Amnesty” and “Leaving Oldtown”. Songs about feeling displaced. And then they went into songs about showing up, “Easy Ones” , “Grief and Praise”, “Unwritten” and those to me are the heart of the album. The songs are about just showing up all the way, even if hurts and not shutting down.
There is this thing I thought of, I was just on a tour fairly recently and there was this dog in the back of a truck smiling and loving the wind. Jonathan, who I was on the road with, was just like, “man, can you imagine having that sense of smell? It must be terrible”. I think he was thinking of traffic and the smell of cars and I was thinking that dogs love decomposing skunks. They smell so much more than we do. Smelling each other’s butts, but they smell differently than we do. They have all this higher resolution and dynamic range that its not offensive to them, its just more input. So in terms of the “no pain, no pleasure/ no work, no leisure” its this balance. Its not saying you got to suffer in order to get to the good stuff. But they’re part of the dynamic range. There is a Buddhist relationship to suffering to pain to uncomfortable places. The meditation practices, if you have done the Posner or any kind of mindfulness work, its about sitting there even if the sitting there sucks. Like going to a Quaker meeting and just sitting there for an hour. Trying to show up. Sometimes you go into deep places and sometimes your back just hurts. Its about sitting with discomfort and not attaching to it and not pushing it away either. For me, the thing about this dynamic range, its trying to learn how to open up to the full range of sensation without attaching to it or making a story about it.
I got really into this poet, David Whyte, he is a brilliant speaker and writer as well. He talks a lot about vulnerability and you know, heart ache and that our greatest delusion is that its possible to love deeply without heartache. Thats our repeated lie we tell ourselves. If you open your heart and you let all that love in, you are going to let everything else in. That is inevitable. Its the story that everybody goes through. And we have our choice to shut our hearts off and cast blame and go into magical thinking…we also have the ability to be soft, not in a weak way, but just to sit in that discomfort and be grateful for the chance to feel and not let it all injure us. Not shy away from it. So I am trying to hold onto those ideals and doing a really imperfect and sporadic job of it.
You know, its an odd thing. Here I am, I’m from a pop band from the 90s and I should just be like “hey man! Great gig, thanks for showing up!” but the thing thats really interesting to me is these questions and hopefully with a little more humor, its the material I like to hit during shows.
RLR: Haha, yeah a good balance of the downtrodden with some wit.
Glen: Yeah, I know there’s the Buddhist world, and the palliative care world and the recovery world. There’s places people find to talk about these subjects but I think also as a culture work really hard to avoid them and work really hard to avoid mortality. There is another guy I got really into in the planning and making of this album, Stephen Jenkinson, who wrote a book called “Die Wise”. He is a palliative care specialist. He talks a lot about knowing that you will die. Not just kind of admitting that you will probably not be the first person to be immortal, but really knowing it. Not being comfortable with it, not being elated about it. But simply reckoning it in a realistic way. There is a place where people who have had a brush with cancer and they have had their near death experience where every doctor told them they had a month and lived through it. And we all, at this age, know someone who has done that. And those people tend to have a real lust for life, they tend to be firm believers in living every day as if it were their last. Making everything count and showing up. They put a lot of work into it.
There is a guy in LA who comes to Toad shows and solo shows and he has Parkinson’s. He’s amazingly capable. The way he has kept from being in a wheelchair is by boxing everyday. He gets in a ring and gets hit. Going to shows everyday, he sees music every day of the week, he goes out. He sees friends and he gets hit and he hits people because that wakes him up. He knows if he stops moving, if he stops getting shocked in a certain way that’s when the Parkinson’s takes over so he can no longer move his body. So its life or death for him. He is so full of life and so happy. His eyes are pinned wide. He knows his life depends on it. So I guess the question is, how do you do that without getting Parkinson’s or cancer first? How do you get to that state of being awake and being involved and being present? Its really hard to do. These songs are definitely about moving toward that state.
RLR: I could really FEEL the songs on this record. It really let me into your thinking, but also allowed me, or the listener to mirror their own feelings onto the songs. I find that balance incredibly important and enviable in a songwriter. Was that purposeful or was it more of a “this is what you need to write for yourself and put out”? Was there a conscience decision to let people in but also allow them the ability to relate to the songs?
Glen: There was intent to this record. For it to be heard and for it to be understood. I guess honest in ways that were useful to people…novel is the word I wanted to say. It felt like I was going through a process and I was handling it differently than I was seeing other people handling it. I was, better or worse, whatever. There is a certain audacity in thinking your feelings and thoughts are worth anyone else’s time, unless you just think they are universal, right? I fight that, because depression is a kind of egotism. This belief that your pain is somehow bigger and more important than anybody else’s. I’ve spent a lot of time with depression so I have a lot of experiencing in thinking “No one can understand my pain. No one can feel what I’m feeling, my pain is bigger than anyone else’s.” Its not a great way to live, but its a way to live. So there is a certain audacity.
But my job as a songwriter is to go into that territory honestly enough that people, you know authentically enough that is translates. The craft, there is a combination of specificity and ambiguity. Part of that is self serving. My best songs…my worst songs, the songs you never hear are the songs that are too specific. The songs that are about me and the thing I am going through. The songs that are written from my smaller self and I write a fair amount of those. I just need to write them and then nobody ever hears them. There’s even songs on the record, to a degree “Reconstructing the Diary”, there’s this, you know, a little bit whiney. You know “maybe we can get back together. I’m trying to be amicable.” , or “why do we have to break up if we are good friends?”. For some people thats the sweetest song on the record. For some people, they are like “its so tender and sweet”. For me its the least evolved song on the record. I understand where I wrote it from. I understand that it translates to people. But I also feel that song was at the beginning of a very long process for me, when I still wanted back in. When I still wanted to keep what I lost. I like that song, its well written and I think it works well in this body of work. I think I sequenced the album wrong. It shouldn’t have been the last song. If I had to do it over again I think I would have almost done the album sequentially as the songs were written, moving from initial break up…statement of purpose and trying to do it well…into loss of home into hard earned acceptance. But also, its such a little diddy, it sounded right as the last song. But its the wrong last thought to leave people with.
RLR: Leaving us with a thought, what are your thoughts on the state of music and making a mark in the world?
Glen: It’s a weird thing in this industry, especially post election. I’ve talked to young artists or people asking me for advice and I kind of say well, these days, whats your “Ted Talk”. You got to have your music and you got to be at that but you are not going to get played on the radio, probably. People aren’t going to buy your record, probably. You’ve got to figure out what is the thing you are saying that is interesting that nobody else is saying right now or saying in the same way you are. Whether its writing articles, its “what’s your Ted Talk?” What’s the think that you say differently. Along with that is usually the question “what’s your audience?” Who do you want to hear the things you are saying? Who are the people you are trying to reach? And are they reachable and is your message something that they want to hear?
Like if you are trying to get a bunch of climate change denialists to become vegan, then you are probably shooting a little too far. (laughs) If your message is maybe “science is neat” they may hear that, its possible. Who’s your message and what’s your audience and are they even compatible? I’ve been asking that question of myself alot. Like, what’s my subject? Knowing on the road, I am just trying to make people understand that people on the other side…I am trying to make myself understand that even if people are acting out of fear, and what can look like hate, is a distillation of a kind of fear and a kind of ignorance. Having to believe that most people are trying to do what they feel is best and what they feel is loving and still have faith in that. It can be hard to have faith in that and I don’t want to drive away half the people in the audience. So how can I just say “hey, for those in the audience who are not in my political spectrum: I love you, I don’t understand you but I want do. I hope that you want to understand me because I’m frightened, I know you are frightened.” I don’t want to walk out of this just hating, despite all the pressure to do that. That may be all that I can achieve, just being this one liberal they see who they don’t think is crazy. Or maybe they do think I’m crazy, but at least they don’t think I am hateful and evil. They can see one liberal trying to understand them. Maybe that is as far as I ever get. But how do I reach the people who do show up to my shows, what’s worthwhile in this?
