Toad the Wet Sprocket - Rings: The Acoustic Tour with special guest Willy Porter

Few bands have earned the kind of devotion Toad the Wet Sprocket inspires. Since forming in Santa Barbara in 1986 — four friends, Glen Phillips, Todd Nichols, and Dean Dinning & Randy Guss, met in a high school theater group and named themselves after a fictional Monty Python band. The band has spent four decades making music that, as Phillips himself puts it, reaches toward the light even when there's shadow in it. Their debut album, Bread & Circus, recorded DIY-style in a tract home for just $600, caught the attention of Columbia Records and launched a career defined by an uncompromising independent spirit. That spirit paid off: Fear (1991) went platinum and spawned top-20 hits "All I Want" and "Walk on the Ocean," followed by a second platinum album, Dulcinea (1994), featuring fan favorites "Fall Down" and "Windmills."
Their music became the soundtrack to a generation — turning up in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dawson's Creek, Empire Records, and the platinum-selling Friends soundtrack — and their fans never left. "It's like a reunion of sorts," says Dean Dinning. "It's almost like having family in the audience every night."
After reuniting in 2006 and releasing New Constellation (2013) and Starting Now (2021), Toad now in 2026, marked their 40th anniversary as a band with something truly special: Rings: The Acoustic Sessions, was released early in 2026 — and followed up with the Rings: The Acoustic Tour this fall, their very first all-acoustic tour. The album and the idea for the tour grew organically from the band's own live shows. Over the years, Toad had woven special acoustic segments into their performances, and the audience response was overwhelming — fans were moved every night by the intimacy and power of hearing these beloved songs in that quieter, more vulnerable form. That connection sparked the creation of Rings: The Acoustic Sessions, and the passion fans showed for it made the decision to build an entire tour around it an easy one.
The critics have taken notice. Ink 19 praised the album, noting that Glen Phillips' vocals sound "as warm and true today as they did 35 years ago," and that the reimagined songs lose none of the originals' vibrant potency. Glide Magazine declared that with Rings: The Acoustic Sessions, Toad the Wet Sprocket "reaffirms the veracity of a longstanding maxim: the proof of a good song is the extent to which it will accommodate a variety of arrangements," adding that the band "at once reasserts the validity of its lifeline and transcends it." Bassist Dean Dinning framed the band's bold approach with a question worth sitting with: "People always think of an acoustic record as stripped down, but what if it wasn't?"
The answer is Rings: The Acoustic Tour — an intimate, once-in-a-lifetime fan event celebrating four decades of songs that have meant everything to the people who love them. "If you're feeling isolated and you need to gather yourself back to remember how much you love your life, music is your friend," says Glen Phillips. "We want people who come to our shows to feel at home for a while."
Rings: The Acoustic Sessions is a beautiful and timeless album reimagining Toad the Wet Sprocket's most beloved songs, revisiting their hits and fan favorites with intimate, acoustic arrangements that highlight their enduring warmth and honesty. Like the rings of a tree marking each season of growth, these songs trace the band's musical journey — and our own — with grace, depth, and hope. The fourteen-track collection takes their most powerful and enduring songs and rebuilds them from the ground up. This is not a nostalgia record. It's a living document of a band still deeply invested in their own catalog. "It was a lot of fun figuring out how the original electric parts would work on the acoustic guitar," says guitarist Todd Nichols. "Sometimes that meant changing up the parts or even playing different solos so everything felt right in these new versions."