Sam Phillips lets the listeners in on her mysterious music
by Michael Pelusi
(Originally published in the June 17-24 2004 issue of the Philadelphia City Paper.)
“The confessional singer-songwriter,” Sam Phillips muses, “that’s not what I am. I’m not a journalist; I’m more of an impressionist.”
Indeed, Phillips’ music is concerned more with evocative imagery and emotions than specific scenarios. The result is a catalog that is beguiling in its mysteries; the songs’ open spaces only draw the listener in further.
Phillips’ new album, A Boot and a Shoe (Nonesuch), is deep with enigmas, clear-eyed and vivid all the same. The album is filled with tantalizing plotlines that seem to dart in, out and around the 13 songs. A Boot and a Shoe opens with the words, “I was broken when you got me,” and closes with the seemingly dire proclamation that “help is coming one day late.” In between, there are moments of weird and frightening desire that leave people feeling like strangers in their own skin. (“Every time you look at me, you’re in disguise.”) There’s the seductive, sly eroticism of “Drawman” and a song called “I Wanted to Be Alone” that makes good on its Greta Garbo allusion.
“It all has to come from personal experience, even if you’re making it up,” Phillips allows, on the phone from her native L.A. “A lot of this is a composite — past, present, future, imagination, real.”
A Boot and a Shoe is actually a sequel of sorts. Its predecessor, 2001’s Fan Dance, shared not just common themes, but a sound as well. Phillips and her accompanying musicians play sparsely, gingerly even, giving breathing room for her melodies — equally informed, it seems, by 1930s cabaret and 1960s folk and pop. Producer T Bone Burnett (Phillips’ husband) and engineer Mike Piersante give both albums a rare clarity. Their microphones seem to pick up fingers brushing guitar strings, palms on percussion. (Burnett, once a recording artist himself, has since the mid-’90s found increasingly lucrative production work. After helming multiplatinum albums by Counting Crows and The Wallflowers, he more than topped himself by masterminding the O Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack.)
When Phillips began making records, she was Leslie Phillips, a Christian singer. By the late ’80s, disillusioned with that world, she changed her name and entered the secular music scene. The albums Phillips made with Burnett producing for Virgin Records from 1988 to 1996 were highlighted by sonic embellishment and noise-tweaking. This aesthetic of old resulted in some of Phillips’ finest work, in particular her acclaimed 1994 disc Martinis & Bikinis. But, she says, “I don’t know, maybe we’ve tried every trick in the book in the studio. I’ve been through a lot of production phases and what has come to mean the most to me is the performance.
“I love a lot of the earlier recordings — all kinds of recordings, rock ‘n’ roll, jazz — where they just don’t have as much because they didn’t have the technology, they didn’t have the money, they didn’t have the time. But you can hear so much.” Reflecting on the increasingly big, bright and loud ways of modern life, Phillips remarks, “There’s that feeling in culture in general of being pushed and being just surrounded, and I don’t like that feeling. I’d rather let people come to me. I don’t want to chase them,” she laughs.
To that end, Phillips is determined to “make room for the listener.” She says, “I want the listener to come in and be able to think their thoughts and have a whole scenario in their own minds that’s completely different from mine. I want the lyric to be open.”
While Boot‘s last song, “One Day Late,” can be read as a quiet warning, Phillips says, “Also it’s what life tends to do to you, to push you a little bit further. When you don’t have hope anymore, maybe that’s when you’re ready for what’s coming next. Maybe you have to lose hope to get to the next step. I think that’s what it’s talking about a little bit more than the slapstick slam-into-the-wall-and-everyone-laughs. Maybe you run into the wall and realize, oh, I have to go the other way.”
Phillips’ songs are open to interpretation; there are distinct pleasures in hearing music that’s left unresolved, as life is. At times, it seems as if Phillips is writing in code — it’s not obvious, for example, what a song title like “Red Silk #5” precisely represents. But it’s not the kind of code that is deciphered with a tidbit from her life that can translate the variables into absolutes. Phillips writes the way Bob Dylan and Richard Thompson once wrote; it’s when the songs are played, and heard, that the code is cracked. The meanings are revealed through the music itself.
Sam Phillips plays Sat., June 19, 7 (sold out) and 10 p.m., $19.50, with Mark Geary, at The Point, 880 W. Lancaster Ave., Bryn Mawr, 610-527-0988.
Michael Pelusi, Content Strategist 