Glen Phillips

He's been nominated for, I think it's eight-plus Grammys, winning four of those in such a diverse range of categories, including Album of the Year for Adele, "21," where he co-wrote and produced "Someone Like You," Song of the Year with The Chicks, Country Song of the Year with Chris Stapleton, and Song for a Motion Picture with Jon Batiste.

And in addition to those artists, he's also worked with Taylor Swift, he's worked with John Legend, and a whole host of previous guests on this show, including Glenn Phillips from Toad the Wet Sprocket, Sara and Sean Watkins, The Secret Sisters, Kathleen Edwards, and Jim James and My Morning Jacket.

It is such a varied and deep career that Dan has carved out for himself.

Yeah, and this is maybe one of my favorite conversations we've had this year.

And one day Bob was very kind and considerate, and he said-- he, he made a comment like, "You know, you should try directing." Uh, and, and it was kind of an encouragement.

It wasn't like, "You know, you should be a director," but he's like, "You should, you should give it a shot." And, um, a good friend of mine was one of the assistant editors, Ryan Chan, and Ryan and I were fans of, um, a musical band called Toe the Wet Sprocket that had recently broken up, but their lead singer, Glen Phillips, had, uh, a new album coming out, and he was living in Sa-Santa Barbara at the time, as we were we.

And Ryan said, "Hey, how would you like to shoot a, a music video for Glen Phillips and make it like a short film?" And we did that.

And, um, it was, it was a, a big learning experience, but I took everything I'd learned from Bob and from other filmmakers I'd worked with on set, got to drive my own set, got to drive my own pre-production.

Uh, Ryan produced it and edited it.

Uh, uh, and it was both haunting and really very beautiful and, uh, it really was a testament to their love, and also I had just been there myself, and so wrote this song called Cover You in Flowers about what it means to love someone to, to the end.

I just saw Toad the Wet Sprocket and, uh, you know, Glen Phillips, their singer, he does a lot of work around grief and so forth, and before one of the songs, he just said, "You know, remember, if you're not grieving, then you're not loving."

I mean, that is really the truth, and I, I feel like, you know, I do a lot of work around, around grief now, um- Like put on, you know, hundreds of events yearly and large scale convenings all around grief.

And one of the things, I'm actually writing an article about this right now, um, but about how, you know, what our grief teaches us are, are, are the things that we care about most.