Glen Phillips, Jonathan Kingham
The Music Mill, 3720 E. 82nd St.
Wednesday, April 9, 8:30 p.m., $15, 18+

Life as a solo artist hasn’t always been what Glen Phillips envisioned.

After Toad the Wet Sprocket — a band he led since his freshman year in high school — broke up in 1998, Phillips immediately began work on his own album.

His debut “Abulum” was released in 2001. Subsequent works “Winter Pays For Summer” and “Mr. Lemons,” while critically praised, weren’t inspired efforts, according to Phillips.

“I really wasted so many years, in a way, trying to get a record instead of making a record,” he said.

That changed with his recent EP, “Secrets of the New Explorers.” With another artistic rut looming, Phillips asked friend John Askew what he was currently interested in.

Askew’s answer: private space travel. Phillips’ multihued and quirky folk-rock flowed from that idea.

“I had been on the stuck side for a while,” he said. “Getting to just play and do something essentially so silly was incredibly liberating. It happened very fast.”

In fact, Phillips is already working on a follow-up EP, this one about colorful San Francisco characters from the late 1800s.

“I have this hunger for trivia and strange history and odd science and weird news articles,” Phillips says. “Actually getting to meld that with music is enjoyable. It’s a nice change from writing about how sad I am all the time. Although I still do that some too.”