Late last year, four years after Santa Barbara alterna-rockers Toad the Wet Sprocket had disbanded, singer Glen Phillips decided it might be fun to play some shows with his former band mates. "I called everybody up and we set up a practice to see how it felt," he says. "There was a big chance it wouldn't work at all."

Only two days later, as fate would have it, Phillips' manager got a call from the Counting Crows' management, asking if there was a chance Toad the Wet Sprocket might get back together and open a couple dates on the Crows' tour. Tickets for the two bands' tour opener went on sale the same day Toad played together for the first time in four years.

"We were thrown back together more roughly and quickly than we expected to be," Phillips says. "There was a kind of snowball effect."

Nevertheless, things went well enough that the group, which had a string of hit singles in the early to mid-Nineties -- including "Walk on the Ocean," "All I Want" and "Fall Down" -- is now headlining its own tour in 2003 with opening acts Bleu and Alice Peacock.

"It's very odd with Toad," Phillips says. "We have history that goes so far back. We're seeing what we've actually dealt with and what we haven't."

The foursome first got together in 1986, when Phillips was only fourteen years old. "We wanted to hang out after school and play songs together," he remembers. "When we stopped it was because that passion had kind of drained out of it. It felt like we were all going to our day jobs."

But now the members of Toad are rediscovering their musical innocence: "There was a sense of pleasure in just being there and getting to play songs together that we hadn't had in years," Phillips says. "And the fact that there was so little pressure around it made it that much better. Thus far it's been a good deal."

Still, Phillips doesn't know if the band is ready for a new album -- which would be their first since 1997's Coil. "We don't want to do another album unless it's by far our best album ever," he says. Instead, he's recorded an album with Nickel Creek, is in the middle of a record of his own, and says other members still have their own projects to work on, too. If another album ever works out, great; if not, he'll still be happy to have recaptured a piece of their past by sharing a stage with his old friends.

"Reuniting has given me a greater sense of pride about what we did accomplish," Phillips says. "I'm very proud of what Toad was, and it's been wonderful to see how much people love these songs. The depths to which people care about these songs is really rare."

STEVE BALTIN
(February 4, 2003)