Regrets, Greatest Hits and Barefoot Playing with Toad the Wet Sprocket’s Glen Phillips

I’ve been trying to nail down Glen Phillips for a Vanyaland 617 Q&A for a bit now. Whether it was on one of his solo runs or with his primary outfit, Toad the Wet Sprocket, there was some things I wanted to ask him about.

During our chat ahead of the Toad show in Boston this week, which you can read here, we covered an array of topics, like how he decides between what songs make his solo albums and what goes to the band, if he’s had any recent accidents playing barefoot live and what his favorite greatest hits albums are, since that’s what Toad the Wet Sprocket are touring behind currently.

One of the moments from our conversation that didn’t make the interview was when I got to fanboy out to Glen about Toad the Wet Sprocket’s Dulcinea, which I’ve mentioned previously on this site as being an important record to me.

Here’s the exchange:

Rarely do I get to speak to someone who’s one of the architects behind my favorite albums of all time, and that’s the case with Dulcinea, which is just been one of my favorite records since it came out. And it kind of carried me through all the different parts of my life. It resonated in college, but then it still resonates to this day. It’s something that you can come back to and find. It’s almost like an onion. You get to peel back the different layers of it and find different things or even apply it to something in today.

Glen Phillips: Thank you. And I feel like Dulcinea too is probably our best record. I mean, it’s the one where I think we were just old enough…lyrically, I feel like I finally knew what I was doing and wasn’t hiding behind being obscure so much. [laughs] And musically we were in really great shape working well together. We had wanted to make a really big record because I loved, at the time, it was things like Peter Gabriel and Tears for Fears and Talk Talk, and we wanted to go in the studio and make, we used 48 tracks. And when we went into Dulcinea, we came back and it was straight single 24 track. We wanted to be lean and tight and we wanted to sound like we sounded live. And so instead of layering a bunch of things, it was much, much more direct. And we spent a lot of time rehearsing and arranging and doing pre-production beforehand. So for me, that’s the record that just sounds the most like us actually.

And there’s something as well about adding less ends up making for a bigger sounding record with a rock record if it’s put together right, if you add too much stuff, it just turns to mush. And I think Dulcinea holds up. It’s probably, I mean, the most undated record we made as well, it doesn’t have, you know, you couldn’t really place the year on it super easily. Everything just is what it is.

Make sure to check out the 617 Q&A, and here’s the third single and lead off track to Dulcinea, “Fly from Heaven.”