Glen Phillips

For an artist well known for his unashamed, heartbreakingly personal songwriting style, Glen Phillips’s new EP is a refreshing journey to the outer limits of commercialized space travel. Phillips’s oft-missed sense of humor is evident throughout Secrets, but poignant moments of touching emotion still manage to seep though (“Return to Me,” “A Dream”). “Solar Flare” may very well be the only song ever written about radiation sickness, but it also proves to be the album’s standout tune. Sonically, the EP has Phillips challenging himself with the funk-rock tune “Space Elevator,” which blasts out a challenge to Aerosmith’s “Love in an Elevator.” Secrets finds Phillips expanding his repertoire from the personal sphere to the universe proper with a leap of faith that only true explorers could have the courage to take. Not since Bowie has space travel sounded so cool.