Sam Phillips says she needs the fire of love "to melt the frozen sea inside me." In the next breath she tells a lover, "You say love when you mean control."
Tension? Oh, yeah: It's a theme in Phillips' life. Tension is central to Phillips' carefully crafted pop-rock. Her songs swirl with bits of harpsichord, swooping tape loops, strings and crashing guitars, all combining with her dark, pained poetry.
"One of the things that I love most about art is juxtaposition and contradiction," said Phillips, who will sing tonight at the World Theater in St. Paul. "I think that's what life is all about. When you get into matters of the soul - and that's where music comes from - I think it gets more complicated.
"I wouldn't say I was tense," she said. "But a lot of times I probably think too much."
A sense of intense thoughtfulness flows over Phillips' three critically acclaimed albums, including the latest, "Martinis and Bikinis." All were produced by her husband, T-Bone Burnett, who is on tour with her as guitarist.
Yet that air of questioning introspection also is present on the recordings she made in the early '80s as contemporary Christian artist Leslie Phillips, her real name. To a chorus of angry boos and cries of heretic, she left that world in 1987, saying it was too stifling.
"I wanted to explore spirituality, and it wasn't a place to do that," she said. "They didn't want anyone to ask questions. They just wanted to be told what to think."
While some say Phillips' songs are odes to a tortured soul, the 32-year-old prefers to think of them as interpretations of longing, mostly for love. On "Martinis and Bikinis," the song "I Need Love" comes closest to her philosophy, she said.
"Truth is really important, but love is a lot more important," she said.
But the sense of pain in her songs is real, she said, a product of her upbringing. Her parents were not divorced, "but they just acted divorced while they were married," she said.
"I started writing at 14 and it wasn't to be a rock star or to have a career," she said. "I had a really tough home life with my parents. My home was kind of broken and screwed up. So I turned the pain into songs. Were it not for that pain I probably would not be able to write songs.
"I'm not bemoaning that fact. That was just my reality. I don't necessarily agree with the pop psychology about the wounded child. The pain and the things we go through, they make us who we are, for better, for worse. And probably for better and for worse."
Phillips' tough home life was one of the reasons she turned to religion as a teenager. About the same time she started writing songs, she also began studying philosophy and religion. At 18, she signed to Myrrh, a Christian label where she recorded four albums as Leslie Phillips.
"It was an odd beginning in rock 'n' roll," she said. "Most kids are going to clubs to play, and I was singing in prisons and juvenile halls. In another sense, it gave me a lot of discipline and it certainly gave me a lot of material."
Although her Christian albums sold well, Phillips found herself feeling straitjacketed by the increasingly fundamentalist attitude of the industry. In 1987 she recorded her goodbye wave to Christian music, "The Turning," her first album produced by Burnett. Hostility greeted her choice.
"At one point it culminated at a show, a big show with 4,000 or 5,000 people," she recalled. "I sang a cover of Bob Dylan's 'It Ain't Me Babe,' which I thought was really appropriate. But literally, half the audience walked out."
Her first secular album was 1989's "The Indescribable Wow," followed by 1991's "Cruel Inventions." Many critics, while hailing her crystalline pop-rock, compared her to the Beatles, noting the diverse choice of instrumentation and production techniques she and Burnett use.
"I think everyone is influenced by the Beatles," she said. "It's pretty hard not to [be]. They influenced music so much. It's more of a compliment, so I'll take it as that. But I like to think we go a little bit beyond that."