John R. Miles (8:05)

I am absolutely thrilled today to welcome Glenn Phillips to be part of Passion Struck. And Glenn doesn't know it, but when I was a DJ at the Naval Academy, it was around 1989. And that's when I first discovered Toad's music and immediately was captured with how introspective your music was. And I've been a fan ever since that time. So for me, getting to be here with you is truly one of the most profound honors I've had. So, Glenn, welcome so much to the Passion Stark podcast.

Glenn Phillips (8:38)

Thank you.

John R. Miles (8:39)

And today we're talking behind the scenes here at the Sound in Clearwater. And if anyone has ever been to this venue, it's about a year old, but it's beautiful. And you have had a really interesting year in 2024. Can you talk about some of the creative highs and lows that have come across this year?

Glenn Phillips (8:57)

Has it been an interesting. It's been a busy year. I've just done a lot of shows. It'll be about 100 show year for me, between solo stuff and Toad. And we've been on the road, we're doing, I think about 12 weeks total. So 60 shows with Toad, 40 solo. It hasn't felt massively creative. It's just felt like a lot of work. But it's been. But I love playing the shows. And we did a summer tour with Barenaked Ladies in Vertical Horizon. We're doing a fall tour right now, opening for Barenaked Ladies. It's been good. I'm probably at the exhausted back end of a long year of being away and just had my first. I got remarried about a year ago. Yeah, first year of marriage in a while and kids moving in and out, all my adult kids doing things, and stepson turning 16. It's been a lot of life. Probably less writing than I would have liked, so less of the creative part. Doing some acoustic recording, getting ready for an acoustic Toad record, but older material. But I feel like some years, you. For me, I store up experience and then some years it all vomits out into songs and recordings.

John R. Miles (10:15)

Well, I want to ask about what you just talked about, because I guess myself, not being in a band, but being in a industry where you have to be creative all the time. For me, it's hard not to be creative, to always be on the performance side. Do you find that difficult at times yourself, or that you're craving that creative side?

Glenn Phillips (10:39)

Yeah, I like all the modes. And even for performance, I mean, Toad has much more of a show that is somewhat. We're making slight adjustments in it, but it tends to be a lot the same every night. Whereas my solo stuff, I never make a real set list. I just write down 40 songs and play whatever in whatever order. I get to flow more with it, and I get to play songs from all the different projects I do. There's a lot more creative freedom in that. But, I mean, singing is a creative act. Making music and playing music is a creative act. And even if we're doing the same set. One of my wife's favorite quotes. I forget if it's Mary Oliver, but it's if you want to see something different, walk the same path every day. Right.

John R. Miles (11:28)

I mean, there's so much truth to that.

Glenn Phillips (11:29)

It's mindfulness, right? It's just sit tight, close your eyes and see what's there. Right. There is also an element of playing the set that everything feels different every night. And music's about subtleties of interaction and emotion that. So there's always something to notice in there. And I think that's a place where I'm trained to notice and you know what I mean? We train our awareness. It's not like we become uniformly aware in all situations. And you can be. I don't know. Yeah. Keenly aware of the music and completely clueless on interpersonal relationships or vice versa. Yeah. I like switching the modes. I've recently come under a deep suspicion that I'm adhd. And I think mode switching is useful for me because I can go really deep into something and then when it loses its glow, I'm off to something else.

John R. Miles (12:29)

I tend to think that ADHD is us evolving to the times that we're now faced in because I think so many people are. More people are getting diagnosed with it.

Glenn Phillips (12:39)

Or it's an illness caused by the availability of distraction and mode switching. I mean, I think I remember for myself, you used to just, if you were in a line, have to stand in the line. You couldn't look at the news or catch up on email or play a game. You just had to stand and the capacity for just being. When I have found myself in the middle of a forest without Internet connectivity or devices, I tend to start with an initial panic and then find myself becoming very peaceful. But I also know that since I was a kid, I've been someone who hyper focuses on things that are shiny and then can't concentrate at all on things that aren't shiny and tends to switch modes. For me, solo touring in particular is really good for me because every day I have to drive to the. Have to eat, have to drive to the venue, have to get ready, have to eat again, have to deal with people, have to play, have to sell the merch, have to settle the show, have to Go to sleep and then have to do it again the next day. And there's none of that time to get existentially confused the way I do at home, where my job is to write the best song I've ever written every day. That's all that's ever expected of me. And so that's like a daunting way to wake up in the morning. And there's tons of ways of distracting myself from writing it all because I go into this, stakes are too high, can't start doing anything mode.

John R. Miles (14:10)

Well, I find at first, when I started this podcast, I was trying to write what I hope for would be popular podcast instead of listening to my heart and writing deeper podcasts that I knew were going to help people but might not be as popular. And I think it's songwriting to me is the same. It's easy to potentially write a pop song. In fact, you. You probably get sick of doing that. To me, it's more fun to write something that's original and more intentional. Do you feel that way?

John R. Miles (14:47)

Yeah.

Glenn Phillips (14:48)

I mean, I've gone to Nashville and any number of times, gone, gotta get in the professional songwriting thing so I can stop touring so much. And I always get in room with the Nashville guys and they go, I'm so sick of writing crap. I just wanna write a real song with you. It's like, I wann I want to write crap. I don't want to write crap, but I'd love to write something popular again, but I don't seem to be able to do it. And I think the fact that I could do it at all back in the day was more a fluke of timing than anything else because I've always, I don't know, been a little maudlin or heavy, keep finding if I try to do things that aren't true to me, I'm terrible at them. And the stuff that inspires me is the stuff I'm chewing on and trying to figure out. And so for me, songwriting is where I get to explore my dark places or write a note from my future, better self to my current self with some useful advice and perspective. And I think in the last, I don't know, 10 years, like, I have shifted a lot as a writer in terms of purposefulness as well, and trying to think, what am I serving? And what message does this put out is me just making whatever art I want to make enough, or should it have relevance to people? Should it? And I even find that the art I want to make and the kind of art I want to make changes from time to time. Because if you're trying to change people's lives or make something really impactful as an artist, that can be an impossibly large task to achieve. So I find that when I come back to what are the questions I'm chewing on? So if it's purposefulness, mortality, how to deal with the agonies of loving people, the constant longing and imperfection of being an imperfect human who hurts those they love and. Or grief. I've been fascinated with grief for the last decade. So there. There's so many subjects, so many things to write about, that if it's relevant for me, I know somebody else is going through something similar. I feel like I'm a better writer than I used to be, but I'm. I haven't been mainstream for a while. But it's also freeing to just have your audience and know that your audience is there for the thing that you know how to do and that you care about, and that's what they're responding to. And trying to cater to a broad audience can work, but if you find yourself thinking you have to give up some bit of truth or actual relevance or true interest in order to be broad, it's. I don't know. Then you got to ask if it's worth it to you. And I think for some people, it is. So.

John R. Miles (17:22)

Well, I think something. I mean, a lot of. Not just something, a lot of what you just said holds so much truth, because I have found this on my own journey with this podcast. When I was trying to be broad, I was doing episodes that didn't have as much substance. And I'm 150 episodes in now that I've had to write. And people are always asking, how do you come up with ideas? Well, it's what you're describing. There's always ideas because you're going through different life stages all the time.

Glenn Phillips (17:54)

And if you're curious, I mean, I feel lucky to have been raised by a really curious father. And our dinner table conversations were religion and politics. I mean, dad was a physicist, mom was a chemist, and dad was. Mom took me to reform temple, but I had a bar mitzvah. But my dad was taking me to the Zen priory for meditation courses and giving me I Drew Shaw books. And so I was. And he was the most curious person I've ever met. And he could talk to anybody and be interested in them. And, I mean, there's always. If you're paying attention, there's always something to be interested in. And my challenges in life are Less being interested and more. I can get so overwhelmed, I start to shut down and protect myself and distract myself all the time. And so when I get in those modes, I become less curious, I become less interested. But I know where the gold is. And I mean, the gold is in every moment. And there's always something to pay attention to, which is why I miss standing in lines without my fucking phone. But I'm still addicted enough to it that I do that. I listen to a hell of a lot of podcasts, but that's. But. And that idea, it's. And I love taking in information because, once again, my curiosity. But there's also, you know, the stuff that I miss in my times where I'm being less creative is because I'm taking in too much and not being enough and not having sufficient silence, sufficient introspection.

John R. Miles (19:34)

Right.

Glenn Phillips (19:34)

There's the Rilke quote of the highest offering that anyone can give to another is to protect one another's solitude.

John R. Miles (19:43)

Absolutely. Because more of us need to tap into it. Because that's how you find your true self.

John R. Miles (19:49)

Yeah.

John R. Miles (19:49)

And we're so distracted, we don't take the time to do it, which is why so many people are lost. Well, I wanted to go back towards the beginning, but I'm going to ask you it this way. I have a friend here in. You mentioned Nashville. I have a friend who moved From Nashville to St. Pete a couple years ago. His name is Todd. He was the lead guitarist for Days of the New. And in my conversations with him, he tells me that he peaked when he was in his early 20s. And I think it's something that you've shared publicly as well, that you feel like in many ways you hit your professional peak in between 23 and 27.

Glenn Phillips (20:30)

Yeah, I hit my professional peak. I like to think I haven't hit my creative peak yet. I'm really proud of my songwriting now. I'm more proud. I think I'm a better songwriter every year. Been having some writer's block currently, but that's because I'm so distracted in touring so much. But. But. And big life shifts as well. I think I need recovery periods after those happen. But I. It took me a long time to reconcile public perception and being a successful recording artist within the recording industry, which was something that I honestly always felt weird about. I didn't think I felt in there. I felt like I was actually too sensitive for that kind of public exposure. Early on, I'd had a. I tell this story a lot, but I had a theater teacher who, in high school it was his first year teaching, and he said the reason he was there is he loved the theater more than anything. But he didn't want to spend his life competing and going to auditions and doing that thing that actors do. He just wanted to be in the theater. So he taught. And at 15, I think I was. I said I got it. And I. My plan was to be a high school teacher and do social sciences or. I loved the idea of that. I loved having good teachers. I had great teachers when I was a kid. I thought that was a really great way to spend a life and would keep me in the arts. But let me not get my heart broken in those ways that happen when you do it for a living. And then my high school band got signed when I was 18, and even then figured it would last two years. And instead, here I am 35 years later. It was an unexpected turn of events that this would be my life. But it also was psychologically devastating to me to have that much public scrutiny and to have that unmeatable level. As a band, you're always supposed to be bigger. And there's this feeling like if you're not bigger every year, you're failing. And what's been funny with Toad and I know some of it's that things are cyclical. And like our fans, kids are an age where they're into 90s music now, and so they're coming to shows. So we're having this upswing. But the upswing is coincidentally, come at a point where I decided to say. I decided to align myself with an attitude that says I'm already successful, that says the place I am is exactly where I'm supposed to be. We have an audience that instead of wishing it was something else or we had some recognition. I've started to really appreciate where we are and where I am and that I can make a living making art and performing. And I have a lot of choice. I feel I can have an impact on people's lives that's positive, that help people through hard times. And I started recognizing that where I was actually a completely valid and successful place to be, even though by terms of notoriety within the music business, it's nothing. And. And then the band started doing better and my career started going better and not, like, wildly, but I found it amusing that when I didn't feel like I had, like, it's always. For decades, it's been like, if I can just get to the next level, then I'll have enough and it'll be okay. Just one level up and Then I can get a band when I go out solo. Or then I can buy a house again or do whatever in California. It's nearly impossible. But it's like this. These I don't know if I get here, then I can start my life. And when I started trying to really internalize an idea that it was something different, things got better. And it's not a magic. I don't believe in the secret. I don't think you can quantum trick the world into giving you what you want. But I think you can trick yourself into thinking you have what you want and then you can just be happy and do what you want.

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John R. Miles (25:54)

Well, a couple things that you said really resonated. We were talking about Seth Godin before we came in here, and Seth written number one New York Times bestsellers. And I said, well, how do you view success? He said to me, I always view my success internally by what is rewarding me at that moment. He goes, externally, you get validated by how many books do you sell in your latest copy of the book. But he goes, that's not what drives me internally. And I think that's how you have to separate it. And another thing that you brought up that I think was really profound is that I myself, not at 23, but in my mid-30s was a C level in a Fortune 50 company. And I had spent so much time and energy trying to reach that point. And I got there and it was as if all I wanted was more and more and more. And I reached a point in my early 40s where I'm just like, how much is enough?

Glenn Phillips (27:00)

And how much is enough is a really hard question to answer in late stage capitalism as well. I mean, and there's an honest answer to that because when boomers get upset of Gen Xers for I bought a house for its wages have stagnated and housing prices have not. And the cost of living is crazy and we have no medical security. There's not a good social net. So I think it's also fair to point out that things have become less fair. And the idea of doing honest work for decent pay and feeling secure is much more difficult. And to have any sense of security in this economy with what the vast majority of people have the potential to earn is really difficult. But then I look at, I don't know, I spent a while, a few months during the first of many midlife crises. This is my much earlier one, but I was in East Berlin for a while, in Friedrichsheim for a few months. And it was the first time my first wife broke up. And so I was. It all came to pass when we were like traveling with the family. She went back and I was alone in former East Berlin. And it was a wonderful time to just feel dark. It was a great place for angst, right? But there are also so many people there. There's this whole circus community there. And you would walk around and. And see these street jugglers at intersections. And there were people's circus, it was called, which is a place called the Loud Temple. That used to be. It was an East German train station that got squatted and turned into an arts complex. And there was a people's circus. There were pottery, there was pottery, dance classes for kids. I mean, just this amazing squatters art complex and as close to the ground as you can get. And I remember having conversations and I would say, so what do you do? And people would give me this disgusted look, like, oh, you mean my job? Like, I have four jobs, but I'm a clown, I'm a juggler, I'm an artist, I'm a dancer, I'm a writer, I'm like. And they would talk like the way they earned their money was in no way related to who they were as an individual. And the idea that you would even assume that they were in some rarefied company. It was an insult, actually. And who am I? What am I? I am my community. I am the art I make. I am the thing I practice that brings me joy, that I do for no pay. And it was kind of a revelation to me as someone, you know, growing up in Santa Barbara as well, where there's a lot of people who you ask what they do and they tell you their job, which is also a reflection of what they are. And the assumption is, oh, you managed to make your dream work as this unified front. And I think most people in the world, they do a thing to pay the rent, and they have enough room left in their life that isn't spent clicking on a device or looking at a screen, a tv, where. I don't know. I love that. The combination of something we would call close to poverty with enough generalized security that they could be artists and dreamers and writers and clowns and jugglers and dancers, and that was who they truly knew they were, and they didn't feel that was in conflict.

John R. Miles (30:30)

I love that. And I personally hate that question, what do you do? Because earlier I would have said, I'm a vice president of this. I mean, we answer typically with the title, but we're so much more than that. We're a father, we're a husband, we're this, we're that. And who we are isn't defined.

Glenn Phillips (30:49)

Yeah, I could say I'm a professional driver. I drive my guitar from town to town, and then I get to play it.

John R. Miles (30:58)

Well, I have. I wanted to ask you about one of your older songs, if I may, because it has always been one of my favorite ones that you've written, and I always felt it had a very profound meaning behind it. But I never have heard you publicly talk about it. The song is crowing. And last time I heard you play, when you were here in Clearwater, it was the first time I've heard you perform it in concert. So I was pleasantly surprised to hear it. But to me, the lyrics are just very deep. And I was wondering, where did that song birth itself?

Glenn Phillips (31:35)

It was not one relationship in particular, but kind of a cast of generalized characters of, I think, hurt people seeking hurt people and hurting each other while trying to figure out how to heal. And just watching that dynamic play out over and over in so many relationships, I think there's this almost a gear slotting of wounding sometimes. And then sometimes it doesn't fit just perfect. So you're grinding and you're. Because everyone's a little damaged where most people. Everyone's at least a little damaged. And that idea, crowing for repair. I didn't even know that that phrase came out of nowhere. I mean, crowing's probably out of Peter Pan, the people who are. But it's such a profound shroud of their damage.

John R. Miles (32:30)

Such a profound phrase, though. I mean, when I really started listening to the song and the lyrics, I mean, it's not a word you hear very often crowing and to say that you're. I mean, the person is just crying out for repair. And I think that's how a lot of people feel and they don't know where to start.

Glenn Phillips (32:51)

We often start by puppeting ourselves and the people we love into reenacting the hardest injuries we suffered and seeing if anything changes. And very often doing that in a way which makes it the other person's responsibility to do it. Right. Even though they don't know they're being puppeteered. Right. So they fail. So then you do it again and again. And I mean, it's amazing. I don't think man is a rational beast. I think man is a rationalizing beast. And we're very narrative. We think that we are. I don't know, we think we're rational players. And it's astonishing how often we aren't. I mean, I find Sam Harris really fascinating in that regard because he can be really brilliant and I also know his controversies. But he is also capable of being like, remarkably blind to the biases he carries about those he is close to. That if you have dinner with somebody and you have a good time and you get into deep things, you can whitewash their fascism and. Or just not fully contend with it. And I think it's possible to say, I love some very difficult people and I love some people who have opinions and views that I have a lot of contention with. And I can agree that I have a lot of contention with those views, but I don't think because I'm close to them that I don't know that it absolves them of those or it. Like, we are so uneven when it comes to our emotional and our relational stuff. I'm watching it in my family as my family changes and ages and that post divorce dynamics and remarriage dynamics. Like all these things that are. They're really complex and where nobody's a bad actor, everybody is kind and good and loving, and yet still there's so many emotions that come out. Things that are. We can think we're acting so rationally and kindly, but there's so much that can tip the scales of where we choose to forgive and where we choose to blame, or where we choose to find fault or where we choose to find the gems. And all of it is blameless unless people are being actively abusive. Right. Or malevolent. But I think short of malevolence, which is why I find it hard to give, for instance, Jordan Peterson. But short of outright malevolence and punching down to the weak, I think we're all trying to find our way home. Right? We're all helping each other on our way home. I'm trying to think how to say this. Well, and I'm sorry, I'm not being entirely coherent. It's such a difficult process to, even with our own reactions, be able to slow down enough to wonder, to be curious about where we're being rational and where we are rationalizing and where we're being emotional and especially in places. And my ex wife, actually my first wife, told me to years ago to examine very closely places where I feel righteous indignation and that the places, the people who make me the most angry, the things that make me feel the most keenly aggravated, are places where I probably need to look at myself first. And that practice has helped me a lot in compassion to people in difficult situations and to see where I'm getting angry at something that I'm actually really mad at myself for not being better at, or a place where I feel weak or incompetent or not as moral or together. It's like my own weaknesses are the things that I will find the most aggravating in others. I don't know. That was a lot of word salad.

John R. Miles (36:49)

Well, I mean. Well, I mean, what you're saying, I mean, it is the absolute truth. We tend to look at the faults in others where we see the biggest faults in ourselves but don't want to admit it.

Glenn Phillips (37:02)

And I would say the podcast sphere, to me, and I found it a very fascinating and frustrating place to look, is, you know, the fundamental attribution error.

John R. Miles (37:14)

Yeah.

Glenn Phillips (37:15)

And it is the greatest field of fundamental attribution error ever. And a fundamental attribution error being that when I do a bad thing or somebody I love does a bad thing, it is because we are complex people and it was a complex situation. And that when you do a bad thing, it's because you're evil and bad. And that basic thing of. I don't know, I mean, right, just. Jesus, you count the speck in someone else's eye and ignore the log in your own. And we are, man, this is the time for that. In a way that I think no other time has ever been. And the podcast sphere is like ground zero.

John R. Miles (37:57)

Well, I mean, there's no one holding a lot of people accountable.

Glenn Phillips (38:00)

I mean, you can have academics who've never published a paper claiming that they have revolutionized the entire world of physics and that the only reason they haven't won a Nobel Prize. I don't know who I'm talking about here. The only reason they haven't won a Nobel is because of professional jealousy. I mean, it's astonishing that a guy like Eric Weinstein can be platformed so highly when he has, you know, and I think maybe it's that I am the son of a physicist who understands, and I will say not a published physicist. He had patents, but he wasn't an academic for most of his career. He was in business. But it's. It is astonishing that people whose life is entirely made out of podcasts can bash the standards of academia when, trust me, academia, they cut each other down well enough. If a theory has no legs, you will find out.

John R. Miles (38:52)

Oh, my God. I just.

Glenn Phillips (38:53)

And if a theory has legs, you will find out.

John R. Miles (38:56)

I know this so well. I recently did this.

Glenn Phillips (38:58)

Sorry, I'm bashing all the paths.

John R. Miles (39:00)

I recently did this solo episode and I was featuring a behavioral science topic, but basically it was on the compiling of choices, multitasking, multi stacking of choices. And I happened to focus on this younger behavioral scientist who's at University of Chicago. Also copied Katie Milkman, one of. Pardon me, one of the most well known. And I wrote this article where I was trying to pump up this younger associate professor and they immediately said we had nothing to do with discovering this. It was this person 15 years ago who discovered it. You need to be. Make sure you're giving proper attribution to actually did the work to do it. I know what you mean about those who are in it.

Glenn Phillips (39:49)

Academia gets bashed. I mean the thing, once again that I know I was good at practical mathematics, like through geometry, I did well. And then I got into pre calc and my mind, I couldn't concentrate at all because nothing meant anything anymore. And my father, I remember, kept saying, you gotta get through calculus because it's beautiful, it's music that you can't hear until you know the language. And there's. He would try to explain concepts of higher physics to me and he would just get this. The greatest sadness because all he could do was tell a story that was vaguely like it, but he couldn't actually explain it to me because the language was Math. And unless you're speaking math, you don't know physics. You can have a beautiful layman's fascination with it. But even like when I tried to read the Elegant Universe, I put that book down for one day and I came back and he's trying to explain it in simple math. That someone explained simple math. But his simple math was far beyond my capacity to understand. It's meaningless to me. And I can appreciate it, and I can appreciate the beautiful metaphors of the parts of physics that I can understand. But the idea that there are. It's like to appreciate that people have great expertise and that those people stand on the shoulders of the people who built that they stand on everyone who came before it, and that the attributions for those things are really important. And the new discoveries right now, especially in something like physics, higher mathematics, are very difficult to make because the questions are so large. It requires massive teams on any paper.

John R. Miles (41:30)

And the scrutiny is so high.

Glenn Phillips (41:32)

And the scrutiny is so high. And I think it's easy to look at that from outside and see, well, those are a bunch of people who think they're really smart and understand things I don't. So screw them. Instead of respecting, actually the incredible work and dedication and scrutiny that it takes to do real science and even the uncertainty. I mean, once again, physicists are my favorite in this way because physicists are the happiest to be wrong. I think of any scientists, physicists are waiting and anticipating for the standard model to fail. They all want the standard model. They're all waiting because that'll be the biggest thing ever. Right is when everything they know is wrong. And I don't. Maybe other disciplines are also like this, but I feel like physics is the most primed for that. But we're in a really interesting era of institutional distrust and distrust of expertise. And I said before we started this thing that Ruth Bader Gainsburg quote of putting down your umbrella in the middle of a rainstorm because you're dry isn't smart. And I think getting rid of expertise in a world that works pretty well with technology, that works pretty well with public health, that, although imperfect, has extended our lifespan and quality of life. Where I'm 53 and I feel like a little achier, but generally very healthy compared to where I was in my 30s and I don't feel old. And you look at 53 and like the movies from the 70s, it was a lot older than our 54, and it was a lot older. And to take all these miracles for granted is very Unwise and to take the expertise that got that. And I understand it is frightening that there are things that not all of us can know. But I also do things that a lot of people can't do. My mom's tone deaf. My wife is tone deaf. I can sing pretty well. Yeah, I've worked hard at it too. I can play guitar. I can write a song. And not just write a song that has a structure, but hopefully with some songs, write a song that gets in someone's heart and helps them to allow themselves to feel something they need to feel. And we have different expertise. And it's a beautiful thing about living in complex society is that we can have different expertise if it's just being a great clown. After work, another long and rambling, oh, no, it's perfect.

John R. Miles (44:06)

Glenn, I wanted to take you back to another life moment because for those who are listening to this interview, I think oftentimes they look at performers like you. And I mean, you made. We talked about that aspect of you feeling like you peaked when you were earlier in your career. I actually think your solo career, if you look at the disc, at the songs you've created, I mean, it's a really momentous body of work that you've done even outside of Toad. But it almost didn't come to fruition. In 2008, you had a pretty horrific accident that almost fraught your entire career and livelihood to a dead stop. If I understand it correctly, you crashed through a cocktail table and ended up severing your left arm.

Glenn Phillips (45:02)

Severed the ulnar nerve and the left arm. So that means this is like the heel of the hand through the pinky. And one half of my ring finger is still pins and needles all the time. And I don't have. So I can clench my fingers, but I don't have lateral movement or muscles in my pinky and middle finger, ring finger. Yeah, I was the table. I never sit on a glass table, even if it has what looks like a 3 inch metal rim on the outside, which I thought was holding the weight of my butt. And yeah, I was sitting there waiting for my friend Sean to get off the phone. I was supposed to go on tour with Jonathan Brooke the next day and I fell back and immediately just felt like a zippery electric feeling up my arm and knew I'd sliced a major nerve. And yeah, went to the hospital, had surgery a week or so later to try to repair the nerve. But it's all the way up here and the doctor was wonderfully unreassuring. He said if I was significantly younger. He would say it would almost all come back and that if I were older, he would tell me it wouldn't come back at all. And I asked about pt, and he said, just play guitar. That's what you do. Just try to play guitar. And I think four months later, I went on tour. My friend Jonathan Kingham, who is playing with us tonight, came on tour with me and also Sean Watkins, whose house I was at from Nickel Creek. He came on tour with me at all at another tour. So I toured only with accompanists for a while. And I think it was nine months before I played my first solo show. And it was incredibly difficult for about five years. He was five or so I kept. This is all 16 years ago. Or 2008, I think.

John R. Miles (46:58)

2008.

Glenn Phillips (46:59)

Yeah. I had my pinky constantly away from the neck, stretching away from the neck, because unless I consciously pulled it away, it would. I had no proprioception, so no sense of where it was in space. So it would flop against the strings.

John R. Miles (47:15)

Which is not great for a guitar. Yeah.

Glenn Phillips (47:17)

And so I learned I had to recapo a bunch of songs for shapes that I could hold. There's still some basic shapes, like barcoring, like an A chord. I can't do it properly still. I can't play heavy guitars because I get more paralyzed on cold days. I get more paralyzed and it feels like it's inflated with ice water. I'm always working around it, but I'd been asking the universe. I was like. I wanted to play more with other people and I wanted a challenge. I was feeling bored with myself, and I'd been working. I just started really working at guitar instead of being good enough. I was playing more solo at the time. And so I was wanting to up my game. And. And so this. It was completely back to square one.

John R. Miles (48:06)

Once you realized, like, how severe it was. And I can empathize with you because I. I've had a number of traumatic brain injuries. A couple from combat. And I. The. My two fingers and my right hand are constantly tingling.

Glenn Phillips (48:23)

Yeah.

John R. Miles (48:23)

And it's due for me because I've got compression in my upper spinal cord that. That's causing it.

Glenn Phillips (48:30)

But so ulnar as well.

John R. Miles (48:31)

Yes. And it drives me crazy. Yeah. But when you realize the severity and you probably started realizing the potential ramifications, I mean, do you remember what the emotion was like?

Glenn Phillips (48:45)

I mean, part of it was because at that time, Toad wasn't touring a lot, and we weren't doing very well at that time. So part of it Was I have three kids and my expenses for that tour, I'd already paid for my hotel rooms and my like. And I. That quarter's income was gone immediately. So there was, like, very straightforward, immediate financial consequence. And I knew it would be a long road. I thought of myself more as a songwriter and singer than a guitarist, but I knew that would change if I couldn't play guitar anymore. It would really change how I had to tour and how I had to work. But I do better. Once again, the way my brain works is in a vacuum of worry. I go absolute doomsday. And when faced with an actual challenge, I tend to be a lot better. I don't know why that is. Like, when real happens, I know how to show up. My thing is, I lose it in a vacuum. When I have time to worry, I go crazy.

John R. Miles (49:53)

Yeah.

Glenn Phillips (49:53)

And so there were very immediate concerns just in terms of getting surgery. And then knew that I enjoy opiates enough that if I'd ever had a refill on, they gave me a bottle of Percocet immediately after the surgery. And so I had somewhere between 18 months to two years of excruciating nerve pain. And I didn't take any meds. And so for me, that was a period of rough. Yeah. So that was a period of just throughout a day. My. My first wife shared. Her joke was like, why couldn't it ever be handgasms? If you're getting random nerve messages, it's never, I'm being tickled with feathers. I'm being. It was never nice. It's always burning and cutting sensations. And I would just have to stop in my tracks and breathe and reset my system. And I didn't want to get addicted and I didn't want to be checked out. And I knew that would be worse than any pain I could have. I did it without. And so for me, in my own way, I'd done vipassana meditation before, and it was a different kind of situational mindfulness, of learning to breathe through pain and learning to experience extreme discomfort and kind of find stillness in the middle of that. And so that was a large part of the practice for me. And I. And then I got back on the road a lot of that because I had to. And I've had a strange response. At this point, I feel like I get to tour and I feel very lucky and happy. There have been points in my life where I was. After the band broke up, I couldn't get a record deal. Toad wasn't playing. I had three kids and I had to go on tour. And there were times where I probably literally should have been institutionalized instead of being touring where my mental health was not good. And I remember getting letters from that time of people saying, you clearly don't want to be here. It's a waste of my money. It's a waste of your time for you to be on the road. It was apparent to people what bad shape I was in, and I lost a lot of audience to that.

John R. Miles (52:15)

That's really tough.

Glenn Phillips (52:16)

Yeah. And feeling entitled, feeling disappointed, feeling angry, that. And so I had some seriously bitter years. So I feel like I got a lot of. I learned resilience out of this and even dime store philosophically, that even our perception of our own body is an illusion. And it's something about nerve damage to me is like a constant reminder that I am not necessarily my body. My perception of my body is a. It's based on a whole lot of nerves and a whole lot of neurons, and we build an amazing map for our bodies in space that's mostly accurate, and that changes over time. But having this, like, little node of inaccuracy. Right. A part of my body that feels twice as big as it is. They feel puffy and strange, and it's. And I know that's just like wiring in my mind, trying to make sense of a blank spot there. I mean, I love reading Oliver Sacks books and. Oh, God, what is his name? Brief Tour of Human Consciousness and Phantoms in the Brain. Ramadocrine. I think David Eagleman has some book called Livewire on neuroplasticity. I got really into popular neurology books just because they were helping me also understand my own mind, my own perception of my body. And the fact that most of my perception of my body is fairly accurate is amazing. Right. But, yeah.

John R. Miles (53:46)

Well, I just wanted to go just a little bit deeper into this because I think it's something that's really important. And I really appreciate you being so vulnerable about sharing this, because people need to hear it for someone out there. You know, I was telling you recently, because of the hurricanes, we lost everything. I know a lot of people in the area that you're performing in tonight are feeling a lot of emotional fatigue from the hurricanes, but someone may be feeling these emotions that you were going through where you wanted your career to be at a different place than it was. You wanted your life maybe to be at a different place than it was. You were facing hardships. And a lot of times you can feel like you're so stuck. You don't know how to get out of it. What to you is the starting point? Like, how did you manage to go from that point to being in the better place that you are now?

Glenn Phillips (54:48)

It's a lot of things. I think people are resilient. And, I mean, I know people who've lost everything multiple times. Right. With the fires in Santa Barbara, the landslides. We lost 24 people in the landslides a few years.

John R. Miles (55:01)

That's terrible.

Glenn Phillips (55:02)

One of my wife's students and his father. It tore the community up. I have friends who've had their houses burned down. And not everybody makes it. I mean, part of it is to understand life, you have to understand death. Right. This is a limited time offering with no guarantee of anything on the other side. Nobody's. There are various beliefs about people who've come back to tell us about it, but I don't know what happens next, and I don't know. I love life, and I've seen so much resilience and heart and capacity in people around me who've lost more than I have. And I think in studying grief and grief work, I've learned a lot from that world. People like Frances Weller. And there's this element of understanding that grief is love plus loss. Right. Grief. There's a guy, Martin Praktel, who had a talk called Grief and Praise, wrote a book. It's a little flowery, but it's called the Smell of Rain on Dust. That's about grieving. And he talks about how in the Mayan language, grief and praise are the same word because everything changes. That grief is praising what you love and have lost. Praise is grieving what you love and will lose. And that understanding that you don't grieve what you don't love, that.

John R. Miles (56:36)

That's profound.

Glenn Phillips (56:37)

Yeah, well. And David White talks about it even with anger. He says anger when removed. He has a book called Consolations. He's a great poet, and he talks about anger, when removed from its initial flush of violence, tells us what we most care about and are most passionately willing to protect. And so grief, anger, loss, these things inform us what we love. And the good thing about love is that's a spring that always fills up. And so even if you lose the closest person, which people do, people have people do every day, if you lose your child, if you like, there are wounds that don't ever heal and don't ever have to heal, but they don't actually also have to limit our capacity to continue to love and grow and deepen into the other things we Love. And since my divorce, I have had to reconcile the loss of the home that I had when my kids were growing up, community we had around us when they were young, the beauty they brought into my life, a sense of purposeness that I still have not found anything to replace. But I also know that I love that sense of purpose. I love having that home. That is an invitation. I love caring for others and creating environments where people can care for each other. And in some ways, I've done things that are analogous to that are in terms of just setting an environment. The live streams I did during COVID which were initially just. I wanted to do something to pass the time. And I ended up doing three charity live streams a week. And I think we raised. We ended up raising a total over the period of time, like 250, 250,000 for different charities, just going and playing songs. And I would find a charity, vet it out, put up a donation button, and just play three shows a week. And out of the chat in that they call themselves the Squirrels. This group of people found each other, started supporting each other through deaths in their families, people dying of COVID their own illnesses. And this community of people that kind of started online and has continued in real life of people taking care of each other, I love it that those things can spontaneously be generated and think is Joanna Macy, like, in writing about active hope, writes about optimism. Being passive. Right. Everything's gonna be fine. Don't need to do anything. Pessimism, being passive, Everything's shit. I don't have to do anything. Hope saying, you don't know the outcome, but you know the work towards the outcome you want, so you do the work. And hope is that element, I think, when people have lost everything, of being able to look through your pain. And once again, this comes with time. When the pain is too acute, all you can do is stand and breathe and survive. Right. That was my first two years. Yeah.

John R. Miles (59:39)

Yeah. You really go through that cycle.

Glenn Phillips (59:40)

Yeah. When it's too acute, when don't try to offer wisdom to somebody whose husband just died. Don't offer your kids, don't just love them and be there, listen to them. That's all you can do. And there is a time where that initial pain is calmed down enough that you can reconnect with the love that fueled your grief and your anger and your loss. Right. And when you can reconnect with that, you can start hoping again. And when you start hoping again, you can do the things that bring you closer to what you truly love. And you can't replace a person. You can't just put another thing in there. But I think you can value loving enough that can fuel new relationships, new purpose, new generosity, new compassion. And that being curious about compassion, being curious about love, that will lead you to great things and things that are going to fill you up. And I think it takes courage to not shut down. It takes courage to go through that and it takes practice. And I was lucky in a way that I had a difficult practice that was handed to me and I went post divorced. I had periods of other kind of strange practices that took up a lot of my time and industry for a while and may have been somewhat destabilizing. But I think there is something about facing difficulty and discomfort willingly. That's the funny thing even about vipassana meditation.

John R. Miles (61:20)

Yeah.

Glenn Phillips (61:21)

Is if you're doing a vipassana course, it hurts. Like I did a Gwenka course, like, I don't know, 30 years ago or something. And I went from never meditating to in this retreat. And they kept saying, this is not a retreat, this is surgery you're sitting for. I think it was 10 or 11 hours a day for an hour at a time. And I had never sat still in my life. You can tell Ike I'm a. This is another reason I think I'm add But I. I'm a twitchy person who can't sit still. And I had to sit still for 11 hours. And the physical agony of that was overwhelming. And I kept thinking there was something wrong and you weren't supposed to talk. And I would ask the teacher, I'm having so much pain. And they're like, sit with it. And at some point it's because the Buddhist thing is, sit with this and it will pass. And eventually it did. And there was a point where I stopped fighting the agony in my back and I started becoming curious about other things. And the agony in my back. It's not always the case, but in this case, it shifted and I could pay attention to other things than the agony. And I still have pins and needles. And it's weird to me. I don't know if it's the humidity or whatever, but it's not feeling good today.

John R. Miles (62:44)

That's how mine is. It acts up at certain times.

Glenn Phillips (62:47)

And yet I mostly pay attention to other things. And if I pay only attention to this and it's. I get to walk around with that reminder. And there's things that I let bug me. I let housing prices in California, especially trying to stay in Santa Barbara, which is. I don't think.

John R. Miles (63:05)

Ridiculous.

Glenn Phillips (63:06)

Yeah.

John R. Miles (63:06)

And I was there two years ago. We were just visiting. We drove from LA all the way up to Napa, and I. Santa Barbara is gorgeous. Yeah. We. We happened to go by a couple of realtor offices, and it just blew us away. Yeah.

Glenn Phillips (63:22)

Well. And so now if I hear somebody talking about remodeling their house, I have a weird PTSD kind of. I have a physical reaction that I have to hide when I hear people talking about their remodel. And that's my problem. Everybody's got their load to carry. And I'm doing. Literally, after this, I go straight to Costa Rica. I'm help. I'm doing song leading for a grief retreat.

John R. Miles (63:46)

Oh, wow.

Glenn Phillips (63:48)

Fifteen to 20 people, most of whom are there for bereavement. And it's people who feel ready to examine their grief. And the first two days are tons of tears. People telling their stories, people diving into the pain of it. And the amazing thing about grief work, when done together, is that it helps, number one, for people to connect to other people who've had a similar pain. Because grief feels so singular and like no one can understand. You just lost your house. Who the hell could possibly understand that? Except the 10,000 other people, you said, who lost their house. Yeah.

John R. Miles (64:28)

I mean, you see these things on social media, whether it's the landslides you talked about or fires or floods, and until it happens to you, you can't really comprehend the devastation.

Glenn Phillips (64:41)

And there's the person just up the hill from you who's fine, and how do you not be pissed off?

John R. Miles (64:45)

Yeah, my neighbor crossed.

Glenn Phillips (64:47)

How do you not hate them for that luck of being slightly uphill and. But finding community, finding people, and be able to just talk about not just the thing that happened, but the fear it brings up. And to reconnect not only with the fact that everyone is in some kind of grief that is part of the human condition. One of the songs I don't tend to. I'm not singing toad songs at these things. There are a lot of songs into community singing tradition. I do a community choir leading thing at home. There was something I learned during my hippie rumspringe. But the. There's a song that it's just Be kind, Everyone carries a heavy load. Good message to take through life. Right. And just singing that over and over. These songs are simple. They're like church songs, but they're a little more universal. Be kind Everyone carries a heavy load. And it's singing songs like these together and people getting to think, well, my husband died, but Their kid died and you were abused. I'm not actually alone. We're all going to lose all the people we love or they're going to lose us. That's the fact of human life. And there's. Instead of tightening around the pain, the art in grief work is expanding around the love to the point where you can contain the pain, you can contain the sadness, you can contain that acute grief, and you can also contain the love that sources it. And that love is much larger than the pain. And it can be so frightening to walk through that veil of the pain because it feels like that's all there is. It feels like it will eat you and destroy you. And to enter willingly into it, you get to the other side of it. And there's something about doing it in community, reconnecting with other people makes it a lot easier. Makes it a lot easier. And you remember that you can do it because all the people who go to these workshops, they go home and they're going to crash again. And when they crash again, they will remember that there is something on the other side, and they'll remember they have a whole community of people that they were with that they can talk to, that they can connect with, that they can keep communicating with, who can help them through the next time. And that there's a shared experience of doing that. And, I mean, I think that's one of the things that drives people to do things like dancing the sun dance or other forms of sacrificial prayer, or the Catholic or ayahuasca, or like things that are difficult and painful, but also provide a. Like a spiritual container in which you can together remember that it's possible to come back to something. Yeah, it's. Grief work is a fascinating thing, and I feel lucky that it was my entire life. Like, post divorce, I think I didn't like divorce literature. It was all kind of relational. I started reading more. I got into David White, Mary Oliver, but I was also reading the book Die Wise. What is his name? He's a Canadian death specialist. I started reading a lot about death and grief because I felt grief was the actual material for what I was going through. And I don't. I feel like I. For at least a decade, that was the core of my identity was grief.

John R. Miles (68:34)

Wow.

Glenn Phillips (68:34)

But. And it's still in there, but it's less acute. And life does go on until it doesn't. And I fell in love. I got to a point where I actually wanted to get married again, where I had enough trust in the future and in my Future and in happiness and love that I could do something as audacious as that, believe me.

John R. Miles (68:56)

So you and I, as I was studying up on you, I think we got divorced almost at the same time. We're the exact same age, and I got divorced in 2016. I'd been married 22 years. Our kids are relatively the same age. Mine, I have a son who's 26, a daughter who's 20, and that was such a painful period of time. And I know it was for you. And your album that you put out during that time was actually comforting to me because you were someone who I had followed for a long time, and you were going through the same pain I was feeling. So it was actually comforting to hear you being vulnerable because I was feeling what you were feeling.

Glenn Phillips (69:38)

It was interesting. It was. I listened to a lot of breakup albums. It took me a while to write that and a while to put it out. And there are a couple songs about breaking up, maybe leaving Old Town. Like a few of them are directly. It's mostly about grief.

John R. Miles (70:01)

And when you're going through something like that, it is grief because it's profound loss. I mean, your relationship with the kids change. You've lost this partner for me, 22 years for you, I think it was 25.

Glenn Phillips (70:10)

And lost home.

John R. Miles (70:12)

Yeah, the home, too.

Glenn Phillips (70:13)

The home. And it's. That's profound. And an entire identity of self. And it's those songs. And by trying to make it more universal, though, I mean, that's the thing about that album. I think it's the best thing I've ever made, personally. I'm really proud of that record. And on the song Grief or Praise, it's. Once again, people don't. I'm not on the charts. I don't get a lot of Spotify play. It's not like earning any money. I've had letters from people who are playing that. Well, loved Ones Die or people who are in hospice work who use that with their clients or therapists who are playing. And it's. It's important to me that those songs are useful tools to people who are going through things. I went to, through and.

John R. Miles (71:08)

And I'll make sure I put it in the show notes so that the audience, if they haven't listened to it, can. Can listen to that album.

Glenn Phillips (71:14)

It's quite a record. But I didn't want to do a record that was. How could you leave me? You're breaking my heart. And even that song, Grief and Praise, was the last song I wrote. I'd finished recording. We Were finishing tracking for the record. So we'd done basic tracks on everything. And I'd read that Martin Prechtel book. And the concept of grief and praise I had wanted to put in there. I had this image in my head of the well of sorrow being fed by the spring of hope. I wanted that. And I hadn't spoken directly on the album to my children. And I hadn't spoken directly to my first wife either. And I didn't want a middle finger. I wanted something that was like, this is bigger than us. We're not bad people. Dan Savage will say an ended relationship is not necessarily a failed relationship.

John R. Miles (72:14)

And sometimes you each just move beyond where you were.

John R. Miles (72:19)

Yeah.

Glenn Phillips (72:19)

And got together young and just a lot of history. And just. I knew there were these, like, five things that I wanted to put in a song that I had no idea how to tie them together. And literally wrote that entire song the night before I recorded it.

John R. Miles (72:34)

Wow.

Glenn Phillips (72:34)

We'd done everything. Woke up the next morning. I had not played the song all the way through. We completed the recording. And that's, for me, the most important song on the record. Sometimes that happens.

John R. Miles (72:50)

Glenn, I think they're about ready to probably kick us out because I know you've got to do a sound check.

Glenn Phillips (72:56)

Oh, yeah. Where are we?

John R. Miles (72:57)

Sinbad, thank you so much for joining us today. You gave such incredible responses and made this so approachable for any listener to really look into your inner soul. Thank you for being vulnerable.

Glenn Phillips (73:10)

It's my job.

John R. Miles (73:12)

Thank you.

Glenn Phillips (73:12)

Thank you.

John R. Miles (73:13)

Such an honor to have you.

Glenn Phillips (73:14)

Thank you.

John R. Miles (73:15)

I just have to say, wow. What a powerful and heartfelt conversation with Glenn Phillips. Sitting down face to face with him at Baycare Sound in Clearwater hours before he took the stage, was a true honor. Glenn's reflections on resilience vulnerability in the Art of Starting over spoke deeply to the core values of passion struck. One of the biggest takeaways from our discussion was his insight on how embracing vulnerability and navigating life's challenges can fuel creativity and deeper human connection. Glenn's story is a testament to the power of resilience and the beauty of finding purpose even through life's toughest transitions. As you reflect on today's episode, consider one area in your own life where resilience and vulnerability can help you grow. Whether it's overcoming personal setbacks, deepening connections with others, or finding renewed purpose, Glenn's journey shows us that growth often comes from the places we least expect. If you found today's episode valuable, please take a moment to leave us a five star rating and review. Your feedback fuels our mission to bring you these transformative conversations and it helps others discover the show. And if you know someone who would be inspired by Glenn's journey, sharing this episode with them is the greatest compliment that you can give. For those looking to bring the principles of Passion Struck into your organization, I'd love to explore the possibility of a speaking engagement. My keynotes are tailored to ignite intentional change, inspire growth, and make a lasting impact on teams and individuals. Learn more@johnrmiles.com speaking you can find links to everything we discussed today in the show notes@passionstruck.com and you can watch our full conversation on YouTube by heading over to John R. Miles or Passionstruck Clips. Be sure to check out our sponsors and deals@passionstruck.com deals to support those who make the show possible. Stay connected and up to date on future episodes by following me on social media. Just search for John R. Miles on your favorite platform forum. Next up on Passion Struck, I'll be joined by Adrian Brambilla, whose journey from backup dancer to multimillionaire entrepreneur is as fascinating as it is inspiring. Adrian brings valuable insights on financial independence, resilience and thinking differently about wealth, purpose and creating a life of freedom. You won't want to miss it.

State Farm Representative (75:18)

Those people that are born rich and then they become adults, they actually have really terrible money habits. And that's why short sleeves to short sleeves in three generations, because they're not taught how to earn. Like, do you have the way of thinking I need to earn, I need to be vigilant about my money. It doesn't just come I have to work for it, I have to manage it. And this is what we talk about in our book of we know we use some language that can be offensive because we talk about poor we say poor people and we say rich people, but we're actually not talking about money at all. We're talking about a way of thinking.

John R. Miles (75:47)

Thank you as always for your time and attention. Remember, the fee for the show is simple. If today's conversation moved you, please share it with someone who could benefit. And as always, apply what you learn here to live what you listen. Until next time, live life Passion Struck.

John R. Miles (76:14)

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Glenn Phillips (76:16)

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SiriusXM Representative (76:29)

Meet the next generation of podcast stars with SiriusXM's Listen Next program presented by State Farm. As part of their mission to help voices be heard, State Farm teamed up with SiriusXM to uplift diverse and emerging creators. Tune in to Stars and Stars with Issa as host Issa Nakazawa dives into birth charts of her celeb guests. This is just the start of a new wave of podcasting. Visit statefarm.com to find out how we can help. Prepare for your future. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.