Tobin Sprout is a singer, songwriter, guitarist, and visual artist whose work is woven into the Guided by Voices songbook during the band’s breakout 1990s run — spanning Propeller, Vampire on Titus, Bee Thousand, Alien Lanes, Tonics & Twisted Chasers, Under the Bushes Under the Stars, and Mag Earwhig!
He joined as Robert Pollard upgraded Guided by Voices from a home-recording project into a working band, and became a regular contributor during the run of records that established its sound and audience.
Within Guided by Voices, Sprout wrote and sang lead on several of the band’s most enduring songs, including “14 Cheerleader Coldfront” (co-written with Pollard), “Awful Bliss,” “Ester’s Day,” “A Good Flying Bird,” “Little Whirl,” “To Remake the Young Flyer,” “Atom Eyes,” and “It’s Like Soul Man.”
Exuding introspective, quiet power that counterweighted Pollard’s blusterier, more stadium-sized material, he equipped GBV with a second songwriting voice and lead vocal presence during its most pivotal years.
In the 2010s, he returned to GBV during the reunion of what Pollard called their “so-called classic lineup,” contributing gems like “Spiderfighter” (Let’s Go Eat the Factory), “The Corners are Glowing” (The Bears for Lunch), “Jupiter Spin” (Motivational Jumpsuit), and “Ticket to Hide” (Cool Planet).
Here he is on the single cover for Motivational Jumpsuit’s “Vote For Me Dummy”:
Outside of the band, Sprout has maintained a fruitful solo career since the mid-1990s, releasing a steady body of records — including his most recent, 2020’s Empty Horses — largely recorded in his Leland, Michigan, home studio.
Sprout is also an active visual artist — along with his wife Laura Sprout, who has provided her collages for his album covers. He’s also the author and illustrator of children’s books, and continues to work across music and visual art today.
Read on for our full interview, and click here to visit Sprout’s website.
How’s it going, Tobin? How’s Leland? How’s family?
Oh, it’s great. I’m just hanging out in the studio. We’re in the single digits, but we’re kind of used to it. We’re just kind of hunkered in here for the winter. It’s kind of the best time I have to work, because there’s just nothing to do except work. So, I’m pretty happy about the solitude up here.
What’s on the agenda as far as exhibitions?
Laura and I show in a gallery here. I used to show in Chicago and some other places, but I’ve kind of brought it all back home. There’s a couple of really nice galleries that I show in, and they’re local, so we just work towards doing shows.
We did a show last year, and we’re getting some work together for the summertime. We’re showing at this gallery in Omena called the V Gallery. It’s local, but it’s got kind of an edge to it, which is nice. So, it seems to work out really nice for both of us.
We’re not gonna do a show this year, but I’ve been getting into different styles of painting and trying to keep it exciting for myself. I did a lot of photorealistic stuff, and then I got away from that into more representational [territory].
I loosened it up a little bit, and I’m working toward a painterly look. Instead of being so tight, it’s a little more loose. I kind of let the paint do what it wants to do, which is exciting to me. As long as I keep excited about doing something, that’s the whole thing. If I’m not excited about it, I don’t want to get up in my studio.
So I find all these avenues to keep it exciting, and then still be able to show in the gallery and sell pieces.
Are you pretty intuition-driven in how you develop your style?
My goal is almost too abstract, but I just can’t get myself to just throw paint on the canvas yet. But I’m kind of working towards that. It’s one of those things where you just want to make it for yourself, instead of worrying about whether you’re going to make a living at it too. It’s a balance where you keep yourself excited about it, but you still have to appeal to other people too.
You’re playing in a new band lately, yeah?
Bevil Web. We put out an EP last year, and now we’re working towards an album. That kind of has to do with the weather, because [guitarist] Tommy [Schichtel]‘s studio Goon Lagoon is down in Grand Rapids, so we kind of wait for good weekends. Because if you’re familiar with the 131, it can be terrible during the wintertime.
It’s pretty much Tommy, who was in my band before with [bassist and drummer] Steve and Gary [Vermillion]. It just kind of broke up to the point where we weren’t doing anything.
And then, all of a sudden, Tommy’s got these other bands that he works with. One is a surf band [the Concussions], and then he’s got a pop band [the Fuzzrites]. So we started recording with two members of those bands — Tommy's brother, Christopher Schichtel, on bass, and Michael Houseman on drums. And then that eventually became Bevil Web.
We’re not really looking to play out, but when it happens, I don’t mind playing out. It’s kind of fun to get out there and play again. It was probably this time last year that we did an East Coast [run with the Moles] that went really well — until, on the way back, we hit some really nasty weather in Pennsylvania.
We did the last show in New York City [at Union Pool in Williamsburg] and it was raining. We thought, The weather’s not too bad. We left the club and headed out around one-thirty, two o’clock, and started heading toward Pennsylvania.
We got into the mountains in Pennsylvania and hit black ice — just a white-out. It was just white-knuckling for 20 or 30 miles. It was horrible. At one point, the snow let up, and there was a cow in front of us. It was bizarre. And then we finally pulled over and found some place to stay, but it was just a nightmare.
And after we’d been through this whole tour with the Moles and stuff — we thought, This is going great, especially during this time of year. The shows went really well. And then, to hit this nasty weather on the way back — but we made it back.
Thoughts on GBV’s modern era?
He just keeps going — keeps putting these albums out — and it’s amazing stuff. I haven’t had a chance to listen to everything, but what I’ve heard is — yeah, it’s Bob. He just keeps going.
You’re still chummy with the GBV family?
Yeah, yeah. I haven’t talked to him in a long time. I talk to Mitch [Mitchell] here and there. Bob and I are, as far as I know, still on good relations. I haven’t talked to him in a long, long time.
What a find you posted on Facebook recently: your unused artwork for the back cover of Back to Saturn X, which later became Propeller.
I found these boxes full of old memorabilia. There’s old magazines with maybe a blurb, something that you did in it, so I’m trying to just narrow it down and get rid of the vault that’s in there. There’s just so much artwork, and so many things I just thought were junk, because they were just laying around.
After all these years, you start finding this stuff, and I can’t believe I did all that work on that piece, on that lettering, and it all matches. My daughter’s in graphic design, and there’s some sort of process where you can actually make a font out of that lettering.
I was looking at it, and each letter does have its own style. I didn’t realize I had done that. I just thought it was kind of scribbled. The funny part is, I don’t remember working on it that much.
There’s a couple of sections where I’d cut pieces out of it. So, I don’t know whether those were drawings on the inner sleeve of Bee Thousand — where there were a lot of little pieces of artwork, and I cut out some of those for that. I wish I knew what was there.
Do you have a typography background?
Graphic design, yeah. We had to design it with pen and ink; we didn’t have computers yet. So, I kind of had a background in it, and a lot of it was done in that New Zealand style that was out then; I was maybe playing off of that a little bit.
But I don’t know why it didn’t end up being used. I think it might have been past the time that we had to put the album together. It ended up what Propeller ended up being. Everybody did different stuff for the covers, so it might just been, Here’s something, and it didn’t get used, so it got thrown in the box.
There’s a lot of other stuff in there. I’m going through to see if I can find some other stuff that’s from that time, and throw it out there and see what people think.
Crazy how what might have been junk is irreplaceable.
Yeah, yeah. I remember Bob had a lot of collage pieces that he put together for album covers that just didn’t end up being used, and I don’t even know what happened to them. I remember one of them was called Eden After Dark. I don’t think that ever became anything, but it was a pretty cool cover.
And they were really detailed, too. You’d see the cover, and then on the back, he’d make up titles and band names and all kinds of stuff.
What do you remember about making Propeller?
It was gonna be the last album. Bob was saying, “This is it; we’re finished.” And then Propeller kind of took off. You’ve probably heard the stories — Matt Sweeney got a hold of it, and a few other people, and it took on a life of its own, and I just sort of rode this wave. I could kind of feel something was happening.
And I rode it until [1997’s] Mag Earwhig!, where I still had a lot of material on that album — I sang backing vocals on “Can’t Hear the Revolution” and sang and played on “Jane of the Waking Universe.” It was kind of this crossover album. Under the Bushes [a year prior] was kind of where the band was breaking up, but there’s still a lot of flow from the older band onto that album.
I didn’t realize you reissued two old solo EPs — 1998’s Waxnails and 2002’s Sentimental Stations — back in 2024.
Yeah, those were two that never came out on vinyl, so I found the masters and put each on one side, and used my wife’s artwork for the cover. I’m thinking of maybe re-releasing some other stuff, but it’s just a matter of putting it all together, which is a chore in itself — trying to find the masters, redoing the artwork, finding the old artwork.
Laura’s stuff is awesome. Where does she source it from?
She gets tons of these magazines from antique stores. Some people up here were renovating an old house, and when they stripped the walls down, there were tons of magazines that they’d used for insulation. So, these things went back to the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s. And they’re almost pristine, because they’ve been in these walls for all those years.
So, she got a bunch of that, and then she gets old encyclopedias. If you go down to her studio, it’s full of books and magazines and stacks of stuff all over the place. I think a lot of those pieces are probably from the ‘50s and ‘60s. She also uses pen and ink and whatever else she wants to do to them.
I see the Pollard DNA in both of your work.
Yeah, yeah, a lot of that collage work. And the humor — I think Bob has a lot of humor in his work, and Laura has a lot of humor in her work, too, which people don’t pick up on. I’ll look at her work and be fascinated by it, because I always find something new in there. Half the time, I don’t think she realizes she’s doing it, it, but it’s pretty amazing work.
Did she do [2017’s] The Universe and Me, too?
She did do that one. There was this piece she had done, from her great aunt or something, and The Universe and Me was the title.
I just thought it was interesting, because it just this picture of her standing on this dock, and there was something funny about it. That ended up being the title, and I thought the colors went with the feel the album had to it. I could probably come up with album covers all day long using her work.
The Universe and Me came out when I had just moved to New York, and Empty Horses hit during the pandemic, so it has that association. Tell me about making that one.
I had done the song “Antietam” and put that out before the reunion picked up. I always wanted to finish it, because I thought I had this idea for it, and I never got around to it until the reunion tour was over, and it just sort of came together organically.
I wanted to do something in the realm of Roky Erickson’s later stuff — [2010’s] True Love Cast Out All Evil [with Okkervil River]. I was just looking at the cover, and it sort of inspired me for that album. For “On Golden Rivers,” I just kind of imagined if he wrote a song about Civil War stuff. “Father, bless the troops” — that’s where I was inspired for that.
Fire [Records] was about to put the album out, and we were going to do South by Southwest. We had three showcases we were going to do, and then we had a whole tour set up. South by Southwest was the first one to cancel for Covid; I don’t know if you remember how all that went down.
So, the album kind of didn’t get out there, which was a bummer. A lot of people were releasing stuff then, and then everything just shut down. But, yeah, I’m glad you like that album.
Are you a Civil War head? A history head in general?
I’m into reading history, mostly American history. My grandfather was a Civil War buff, so that probably rubbed off on me a little bit. He took us to Shiloh and Gettysburg when I was a kid, and he constantly had these Civil War books laying around when I went over there, so that’s where a lot of my interest came from.
Are you a gamer?
I am. You?
I used to play Medal of Honor and some of those Battlefield games. They were all on PC. The graphics weren’t real crazy; they were kind of simple. But I used to play those with my son. He’s been talking about Red Dead Redemption 2. You ever play that one?
Oh, yeah, all the way through. I actually just restarted it the other day. One of the most beautiful games I’ve played.
That’s what he was telling me. I haven’t gotten into it yet, but he was saying, “You’ve gotta get this.” I guess you have to get 2; 2 is a lot better than one.
It came out in 2018, but looks better than a lot of more recent stuff.
I think I have to get an Xbox first. I’m still trying to figure all this stuff out. If you get an Xbox, you can get some kind of thing where you can download games — but do I really want to go that way and spend my time gaming?
You could be doing something productive. But there’s something about playing those games that’s inspiring, too.
Are you thinking of a follow-up to Empty Horses in the near future?
Maybe. I don’t know. Actually, you know what I was thinking of doing is, we put a video out right around the same time we put the album out. We had a live thing that was recorded, and I can’t remember if it came out, or if it was played once. But we played the whole album live, and I’ve got a copy of that, and I think the live sounds better than the album.
So, if I could find that, it’s one of those things I’ve been thinking of doing. I’ve got to find the actual master of that. I was thinking of putting a live Horses out and maybe adding some bonus tracks or something from that era.
But, yeah, I’m glad you brought that up. That’s something I’ve been wanting to do, and I kind of forgot about doing that. We recorded it live in my studio, so it sounds really good. Ferris [Hening], a friend of ours, videotaped the whole thing, and I think Fire released it back to me, so I might have the rights to it. I might have to look into that.
How do you achieve desired sounds in your studio?
I’ve spent a lot of time working with microphones and different preamps, and I’ve narrowed it down. I think the biggest thing is just learning to sing through a mic to get sounds you want. Having your own studio, I think, allows you to do that. Working with another studio, you never really get the time to experiment with your angle towards the mic.
I’ve got a really nice set of compressors — some of the best ones I’ve found. Tommy and I record a lot of stuff just in the room. You can definitely tell the difference. Trying to get that empty, bigger room sound is hard to do; even in my studio, I have trouble getting there.
I try to [capture] everything using really nice amplifiers — older amplifiers, small amplifiers, old tube amps, old Fenders, if you can find them within reason. Even the Silvertone amps; I’ve got some Premiers from the ‘50s.
I try to stay out of the box as much as I can, so I’ll record through amps and use a decent mic to get the sound that I want. If you try to mix it in the box — or get the sound in the box — I think that’s where you start getting a digital flatness. I try to go to tape as much as I can, but it’s so labor-intensive that it’s much easier to go through Logic than it is to go to tape half the time.
But I try to get a nice mic and get a good guitar sound, then put the guitar sound into Logic, so the sound I’m getting on Logic was analog to begin with. And then, same with the vocals — I used to go with a dry vocal, but I try to get it to sound as far as I can without adding any kind of effects in the box. Mixing is another thing. It sort of mixes itself a lot of times.
Another thing I try to do more and more, which I wish I had done before, is use actual, real, live drummers, instead of me playing. I’ll play drums — I can keep a decent beat here and there — but I don’t call myself a drummer. It’s nice when you’ve got somebody that really knows how to play the drums and is tasteful about rolls and breaks. That can really make a difference in the song.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Airport 5 lately — your side project with Pollard. Were those written in person or through the mail from Michigan to Ohio, which was the case for Go Back Snowball, Cosmos, Mars Classroom, and more?
Yeah, a lot of times, I’ll have hundreds of songs that never go anywhere. I’ll have all the music, but I can never come up with a lyric or anything. Nothing ever hits me vocally, and if they do, they’re not something I really want to use.
So, I stripped the vocals out of those and sent mixes of just the music to Bob, and he would go through them and throw Bob Pollard onto them, and they were Airport 5.
The Airport 5 albums were both put together the same way. I had a block of songs that I wrote, recorded, and mixed (the music) in my studio here in Leland. Then I’d sent a stereo mix to Bob and he would put melodies and lyrics on them at Cro-Mag Studio.
He and Cro-Mag engineer John Shough would mix the vocals into the music mix and the album was pretty much ready. Love both those A5 albums. We followed that same formula on some other songs like “Noble Insect” [from 2013’s English Little League].
Going back to the ‘90s, did those co-writes happen in person? What was that process like?
Well, those would have been on four tracks. “A Salty Salute,” the first song on Alien Lanes, I just had on four-track. It was just the bass guitar and drums. Those drums are live, too, which I’m playing.
It was the same process, except Bob was there, and I think I played whatever I had on there, and he just set up a mic. Kind of the same with “Hot Freaks,” where I had this music, and without going through the mail, Bob was there — so he just threw a vocal on top of it.
I’m sure your archives are crazy. Do you still have gear from those days?
Yeah, I’ve got a microphone. I’ve got headphones that I can’t believe we used. I’ve still got the four-track, and I’ve gotten it out a couple times to try to get it to work, but it’s got some issues where it won’t record.
I was even going to get that out and just do a couple of songs on it, but you’ve got to find parts. I don’t know where to look for parts, but it’d be nice to get that rolling.
I’ve got the Electro-Harmonix Memory Man foot pedal. We ran the vocal mic into the Memory Man and then to the four-track. Mostly for the echo effect. You can see the “Hot Freak” setting written on it.
That was basically what we had — three or four cheap RadioShack microphones, and then just a cheap pair of headphones. It’s amazing that we got what we did with what we had, but back then, that’s all you had. It was pre-digital stuff, so everybody was working on either reel-to-reels or just cassette four-tracks.
Was Alien Lanes recorded on that?
Yeah, there’s a lot of four-track on there. And then [bassist] Greg [Demos] had an eight-track cassette player that some of those were on. But, yeah, a lot of times we set up the four-track or eight-track in Bob’s living room, or my basement, or over at [drummer] Kevin [Fennell]’s.
We’d just set up and have a couple of microphones, get the basic drums and maybe one guitar, then mix and bounce it down until we got to the vocal.
Even on some of the vocals, like on “Exit Flagger,” you can kind of hear where Bob starts singing: I had to punch in right there to do the lead. I was trying to do the leads at the same time as Bob’s vocal. So, as soon as Bob’s vocal was over, I had to flip it over and not erase anything at the same time, and get that lead in there too.
I wish I still recorded in that way, because things have gotten so easy. It just seems like you can keep stacking and stacking and stacking. You were limited to four tracks. You could bounce down, but after the first bounce, you couldn’t bounce more than that, because then, it would get pretty muddy.
But, yeah — I’m kind of missing those days.
What a dude. I love Tobin Sprout more every time I read about, listen to, or see him.
Tobin is a hero. He also did in credible art for an issue of Cincinnati Review some years back. Like sock sandworms. Also, he taught me how To Remake the Young Flyer. Thanks you, again.