‘This is probably the healthiest the band has been’: Toad The Wet Sprocket plays Friday in Beaver Creek

Thirty-seven years after Santa Barbara high school friends formed Toad The Wet Sprocket, the band is in the best shape it’s been — even after initially unsuccessful records, break ups and bounce backs.

“This is probably the healthiest the band has been, and now we know what we want — that’s the difference. We’re communicating better than we ever have, and people are stepping up and doing the work. Everyone is using their strengths,” said bassist and founding member Dean Dinning.  

Dinning acknowledges that when the band debuted in 1986, the young members were all “immature and lacked self-confidence, but a lot of that has gone away. We know what we each brings to the band — the unique contributions — and that we’re all valued,” he said.

The band’s first two albums, “Bread & Circus,” in 1989, and “Pale,” in 1990, fell pretty flat, but in 1991, the platinum-certified “Fear” launched the band’s success.

“When we started, we didn’t have huge expectations, but what we did sounded good, and we were having fun and enjoyed hanging out. Todd (Nichols) and Glen (Phillips) got very good at songwriting and took a step up,” he said, explaining how they signed a four-album deal with Columbia Records while they were still in college. It took until the third album for singles ‘All I Want’ and ‘Walk on the Ocean’ to become major hits. I don’t even know if that kind of patience exists today in the record industry.”

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Despite their success with 1994’s platinum-selling album “Dulcinea,” by 1998, the band split, as personal differences drove them into what Dinning now describes as a “break, not a break up.”

“The music didn’t go away. People still cared,” he said, talking about how, after Counting Crows asked the band to open for their shows and friends kept calling saying, “C’mon, what are you guys doing?” they reunited. In 2013, they released “New Constellation,” their first album in 16 years. Funded by fans, it was one of the most successful music Kickstarter campaigns ever.

“We’ve just gotten better and better with new perspectives and production and writing and business skills,” he said. “Our lyrics matured fairly early on in the fourth record with more philosophy and more depth and less teenage angst. It set the standard for what we look for.”

Throughout the decades, the musicians have continued to remain true to their roots while still evolving their sound.  

Their latest album, “Starting Now,” released in 2021, is a compilation, “a greatest hits package with some songs revamped and new material we’ve done since 2021,” he said. “We wanted to create a master recording of songs in a way we were proud of. Part of it was a business decision because we wanted to own all of the songs, which is unusual. We wanted to be a one-stop shop to get the recordings and the rights of versions of songs to use for film and TV. … This one, you listen to it, and it really feels like that’s the arc of the career. It feels big. It’s really something to listen to it from start to finish. That’s the band right there.”

The artists’ approach shows as a shared experience between the audience and the band, and when it really clicks, Dinning describes it as “overwhelming.”

“People are so distracted with phones and screens, for people to have a reason to put their phones away and be present, these days, I feel like you’re giving them time — an opportunity to be present,” he said, talking about how he stays attuned to how everything is landing and plans sets to tell stories and take audiences on journeys. “We welcome the audience in — we are not performing at them. We focus on dynamics, flow and emotion and moments. You want to create a great catalogue. The songs are already doing a lot of the heavy lifting because the songs have made an emotional connection.”