Up until 24 hours ago, I had no clue what a “tornillo” was. When I initially read the email announcing the arrival of Glen Phillips’ Tornillo album, I was assuming he named the album after a tiny fruit/vegetable (no, that’s a tomatillo) or a tasty Mexican treat (too many options to name here). As it turns out, Tornillo (thanks Wikipedia) has several definitions: it can be a natural disaster, it’s a type of tree, and it’s also the name of a town in Texas.
I have no idea which definition Glen Phillips had in mind when he named his album, but does it really matter what the title is if the music’s good? Although Glen is best known as the frontman for Toad the Wet Sprocket, he’s released several solo albums that were quite good, and he also worked on a country-flavored project called Works Progress Administration with a group of musicians including Nickel Creek’s Sean and Sara Watkins that saw release about two years ago. I was fortunate enough to see him in a teeny, tiny club in Boston around the time of the album’s release. The show was loose and relaxed…and excellent. And Glen wore shoes, which I understand is a rarity.
Tornillo isn’t actually a new album-Glen recorded it in 2003, and that project evolved into 2005’s excellent Winter Pays for Summer. Several tracks repeat (“Courage”, “Thankful” and “Duck & Cover”, to name a few), but I’m looking forward to hearing the tracks I’m not familiar with.
You can grab Tornillo from Glen’s Bandcamp page for only seven bucks! What a bargain!!!
Rumor has it that there’s a new Toad song coming as well, the band’s first studio recording in a decade. Looking forward to it!!
1 comment
Elijah says:
Dec 13, 2010
Glen recorded this album at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, he never finished the album, and never titled it, but the fans have always simply called it “Tornillo” or “The Tornillo Sessions so I’m guessing he figured that name was a good enough title
in the middle of making it Toad got back together for their 2003 tour and briefly flirted with the idea of making a new record of their own, when that didn’t happen, Glen scrapped these David (pronounced Da-Veed) Garza produced recordings and made a new slicker, darker rock record with John Fields producing and Steven Miller Mixing. that album, which was self titled, was also not released as such, when Glen signed to Universal it was retooled and several tracks were re-recorded along with a handful of new songs, and that is what we know as “Winter Pays For Summer”, the original self titled 12 track record contained all 6 John Fields produced tracks from Glen’s 2006 EP “Unlucky Seven” along with a few WPFS tracks and a song called “I Still Love You” which later saw release on the WPFS follow up “Mr Lemons”. Universal had Glen ad “Finally Fading” ,”True”, “Cleareyed”, “Released” a new version of “Courage” to the album in place of some of the darker stuff