Glen Phillips — Current Clients

During his years as lead singer and main songwriter of Toad the Wet Sprocket, Glen Phillips helped to create the band’s elegant folk/pop sound with honest, introspective lyrics that forged a close bond with their fans. When Toad went on hiatus, he launched a solo career with Abulum, and stayed busy collaborating with other artists on various projects including Mutual Admiration Society, with members of Nickel Creek and Remote Tree Children, an experimental outing with John Morgan Askew.

“Until recently, I’ve seldom allowed myself to stay in one place for very long,” Phillips says, explaining the genesis of his new album, There Is So Much Here. “I was lucky during the Covid lockdown to move in with my girlfriend, now fiancée, and to stay home for the longest stretch I’ve had since the birth of my youngest daughter, 20 years ago. I began noticing the little things. After a life of travel and seeking out peak experiences, I began to appreciate the subtle beauty of sitting still.”

“For about ten years, I’ve been playing a songwriting game with Texas folksinger Matt The Electrician. He sends out a prompt every Friday and we have a week to write a song that includes it. I end up with songs I wouldn’t have written on my own. When my friend John [Morgan Askew] asked me to come up to his studio and make a record, I said, ‘Yes!’ I collected a bunch of the game songs and headed up to Bocce Studios, in Vancouver, WA. John invited drummer Ji Tanzer and bass player/multi-instrumentalist Dave Depper along. When we started recording, I wasn’t sure we were headed, but as the process unfolded, the songs began to fit together into something that made sense.”

Phillips’ previous solo record, Swallowed by the New, was a post-divorce outing about grief, while There Is So Much Here finds Phillips writing love songs again focusing on gratitude, beauty and staying present. “Looking at this batch of songs, I realized I’d turned a corner. I noticed that I was in a state of being that wasn’t all about loss. Things felt doable and hopeful again. There’s no pure happy ending - the world is a mess, the future is uncertain - but I started to internalize poet Mary Oliver’s words: ‘Attention is the beginning of devotion.’ I’m paying better attention. I’m getting more devoted.”

The 11 tracks on the album move between quiet love songs and outright rockers that consider the multi-faceted meanings hidden in our everyday lives. “Stone Throat” is a midtempo rocker that looks at a couple in a new relationship, trying to find the balance between desire and responsibility, or as Phillips sings, “trying to find the balance, between the sacred and the street.” There’s a hint of new wave ska in the rhythm of “I Was a Riot,” a song that casts a compassionate eye on the end of a relationship. “The arrangement nods to Joe Jackson’s Look Sharp,” Phillips says. “Graham Maby is one of the greatest bass players of all time, so we had him in mind when laying down the bass part.” 

The COVID lockdown-inspired “The Sound of Drinking,” is an appreciation of the familiar things in life, like drinking a glass of water on your back porch. Sean Watkins (Nickel Creek) plays soft acoustic guitar and Glen sighs a lyric of gratitude for simple pleasures.

“Call The Moondust” is the most metaphysical song in the set. There’s a dash of secular gospel in Depper’s piano, and ambient effects that suggest the vastness of the cosmos. Phillips delivers an emotional performance over a tense arrangement that hints at the wonders of the universe. “The beauty of life is in its mystery,” Phillips states. “If we think we have an answer, we’re deluding ourselves. My dad was a physicist and was reading about string theory on his death bed. He found God in all those extra folded dimensions, and left this world with a sense of wonder. I hope I can do the same.”

“As I sat still during the lockdown, I began to notice how much is always here – in the space around me, in the sensations of my body, in the sounds and smells and tastes and thoughts that emerge and drift away. It’s not a new concept, but it is a novel experience when you’ve spent your life running from one thing to another.”

Ultimately, as Phillips reflects on the album, he shares: “This is an album about showing up for what is and letting it be enough.”