JACKI LYDEN, Host: At what point in your life, Sam, did it become clear to you that this was your means of expression?
SAM PHILLIPS, Musician: I guess when I was about 17. I started singing more. You know, I started dancing when I was three and for a long time thought that I would be a dancer and actually learned a lot more about music I think through dance than I did through actual piano or guitar lessons or singing. But I'll always write songs no matter whether I make records or not.
LYDEN: No dancing but Sam Phillips will sing for us coming up on Weekend Edition. Stay tuned.
JACKI LYDEN, Host: This is Weekend Edition. I'm Jacki Lyden. Joining us in Studio 4-A are singer/songwriter Sam Phillips and the composer, producer and guitarist T. Bone Burnett and percussionist Josh LaBelle. Welcome to everyone this morning.
SAM PHILLIPS, Singer/Songwriter: Thank you.
LYDEN: Sam Phillips has a new CD called Martinis and Bikinis on Virgin Records. That's intriguingly titled, Sam.
Ms. PHILLIPS: Thank you, that's- It's named- Actually my neighbor in Brentwood, California, inspired that name because he has a boat that's parked in his driveway, and he is a sort of a Hugh Hefner character. I just imagined a lot of martinis and bikinis on his boat.
LYDEN: To me, it had a little Jimmy Buffet twinge to it somewhere.
Ms. PHILLIPS: Oh, I'm so sorry about that. I apologize for that.
LYDEN: Sam, would like to start us off with something from the album?
Ms. PHILLIPS: Yeah, I think we'll play 'I Need Love.'
[performance of 'I Need Love']
LYDEN: Sam Phillips in our studio with T. Bone Burnett. Thank you. That song is really affecting.
Ms. PHILLIPS: Thank you.
LYDEN: I can't help but think that it raises so many questions about where you've come from. You started off as a Christian singer. You had a different name then, your own name - Leslie Phillips. And this seems to speak to that experience a bit to me. Does it to you?
Ms. PHILLIPS: Yeah, well, I mean the song is about love, you know, and I think probably the closest thing that I know to religion is to ask the question 'What does love require?' But I think, yeah, I learned a lot about fundamentalism, which I think is the tendency of people to reduce spirituality to a set of rules and judgments and small-mindedness, and I don't really like to talk about it that much. I don't like to, you know, because the right wing and fundamentalism in this country is really ugly to me. So-
LYDEN: So you're calling this something more about faith outside of a four-walls experience; it's something broader.
Ms. PHILLIPS: Absolutely, which I think love is, isn't it. It think it's a lot bigger than any of that stuff.
LYDEN: The record, if, were it correct at all, seems to be a certain little bit of homage to the Beatles. Does that hold true for you?
Ms. PHILLIPS: Well, I think maybe, like the Beatles, you know, I grew up listening to a lot of old songwriting, you know, Rogers and Hart and Gershwin and a lot of the beautiful melodies. I really love melodies, and I write melodies and write songs as opposed to, you know, other things. And I don't like to use a lot of synthesizers. So I think probably that's- Yeah, there is a lot of common ground there.
LYDEN: And the production that you've put in here, T. Bone Burnett. Would you say you were drawing on the Beatles a little bit here?
T. BONE BURNETT, Guitarist/Producer: Shamelessly. Remember when Woody Allen did Zelig? And he crumpled up the tape, I mean the film to make it look like it had been shot in the '20s or something? I think that's more of what we did. We-It's the impression of the way things were at some time, you know. The drum, for instance, the drums are all recorded on one track and run through a limiter so they're just all completely squashed together. It's just more of an impression of a period of time or something.
[recorded instrumental excerpt from a Phillips song]
Ms. PHILLIPS: I remember when you used to have to listen to music on a little transistor radio or through a really tiny speaker in the car, and to make music exciting enough to come across through very crude equipment I think is sort of a lost art, and that's part of what I was trying to do in writing and in recording the music.
[recorded excerpt from a Phillips song]
LYDEN: I have to ask you - what's it like to work together as a husband and wife producer? I guess you met when T. Bone produced one of your records.
Ms. PHILLIPS: Well, I like him very much because he's very tall, and he can reach those cans of soup on the top shelf that I can't reach and the dairy creamer at the studio. It's very handy, actually. No. Well, basically, we started working together. We started making records together, and we had so much fun doing it that we got married.
LYDEN: T. Bone, is it difficult to produce one's wife? You've produced so many people.
Mr. BURNETT: Actually, I don't know about 'one's wife,' but my wife is incredibly easy to produce. We, you know- Her vocals- I mean, we go in and we-The way we've worked on the first four records we've done is I put down a guitar part and then she sings it, and then, you know, 90 percent of the record is done at that point because, you know- And she does it in one take, and Sam's vocals are done all as a piece like Hank Williams used to do.
LYDEN: Let's hear another song.
Ms. PHILLIPS: OK. This is called 'Baby, I Can't Please You.'
[performance of 'Baby, I Can't Please You']
LYDEN: Hypnotic. We're listening to Sam Phillips singing in our studio with T. Bone Burnett on guitar. Your voice - I heard somewhere you thought it was sort of delicate?
Ms. PHILLIPS: I don't know. I read a review once that said it sounded like a mule, which I thought was pretty good. I like that. I can hear that.
LYDEN: Your speaking voice isn't bad. Mule is great, you know. Good kick. To me it's like the slide on an electric guitar, your voice.
Ms. PHILLIPS: That's nice. Thank you. That's very nice.
LYDEN: I read somewhere that one of your first songs was called 'Walls of Silence' and that you wrote it about your father, that he did not speak to you for long periods of time.
Ms. PHILLIPS: Yeah, that's true. In fact, songwriting for me was really cathartic when I first started. I was 14 and trying to make sense of my family, of the world. I hadn't really thought about, you know, doing it for money or anything or making records. It was just an outlet for me, a release for me.
LYDEN: There is a lot of wonderful stuff happening in this album. Has it evolved for you as you've been on tour these last couple of months? Is it hard to perform the same material again and again, or does it change?
Ms. PHILLIPS: Well, we've had or have had different configurations of bands. T. Bone and Josh were playing, just the three of us, and then we had guitar, bass and drums. For a while, we had electric guitar, acoustic guitar and percussion. And now we're touring with a four-piece electric band - two guitars, bass and drums. So, I don't really like to go to shows where I hear people trying to do the album perfectly. I think that's really boring, and so- And I don't like to do it that way either. I like to, you know, experiment and do different arrangements and do the songs different ways so it makes it a lot more interesting for me and hopefully for the people who come to see us.
LYDEN: May we hear one last cut?
Ms. PHILLIPS: Absolutely. Let's play 'Strawberry Road.'
[performance of 'Strawberry Road']
LYDEN: Beautiful song.
Ms. PHILLIPS: Thank you. That was from an Iroquois Indian story that said the road to heaven was paved with strawberries. I thought that was such a pretty image.
LYDEN: Hope we get to find out.
Ms. PHILLIPS: I hope so, too.
LYDEN: 'Strawberry Road' played by Sam Phillips, who wrote it, with T. Bone Burnett and Josh LaBelle in our studio. Martinis and Bikinis, her album, is on Virgin Records. Thank you very much for coming in.
Ms. PHILLIPS: Thank you.
LYDEN: This is NPR's Weekend Edition. I'm Jacki Lyden.