Over this Thanksgiving millions of people are expected to return to the fictional village of Stars Hollow. They’ll be revisiting the characters of the Gilmore Girls including the town troubadour, Nashville songwriter Grant Lee Phillips.
He appeared numerous times over the course of the show’s seven seasons, either playing his own songs or covering everything from Wham to Merle Haggard to House of Freaks.
Phillips sat down with WPLN earlier this year to talk about his new album The Narrows, his first release as a Nashville resident. He confirmed then that he would be appearing in one of the upcoming episodes but says even he doesn’t know what to expect from the long awaited reunion special out this week on Netflix.
“There’s a lot of excitement around that,” Phillips says. When asked if he could reveal what he would be playing on the show, he replied, “I can. I play…. the guitar. That’s all I can say, I’ve been sequestered otherwise.”
Phillips laughs as he recalls the secrecy around the filming of the new episodes. He says there was “a lot of intrigue,” no photographs and no sharing of scripts.
Beyond his TV time, Phillips has led alt-rock trio Grant Lee Buffalo and issued a number of singer songwriter records, but for many he will always be the disheveled man leaning against a lamppost, strumming a 12 string and singing into an old microphone wedged into a harmonica holder.
“I can show up to a club in Hamburg and there will be a girl there 16 years old, with her (Gilmore Girls) DVD’s and a few of my records,” Phillips says. “And she and her mother will come to my show. That’s amazing right? How else would that happen to a guy like me?”
The Gilmore Girls reunion special, featuring Grant Lee Phillips revising his role as “Grant,” will debut this Friday. In the meantime, you can revisit a compilation of his past appearances on the show and listen to his new record.
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