I want to measure how much I do not know
and this is how I arrive
casually, I knock, they open, I enter and see
yesterday's portraits on the walls,
the dining-room of the woman and the man,
the chairs, the beds, the salt-cellars,
only then do I understand
that there they do not know me.
- Pablo Neruda, "The Unknown One"
When he speaks of Leslie Phillips as opposed to Sam Phillips, for whom, it seems, this man has no need, he does so deliberately, sadly. He feels betrayed by Sam: once, as Leslie, she was Christian pop music's reigning female icon, for a brief moment more so even then Amy Grant. Now she's one of the evangelical Christians' most outspoken critics.
When she made the leap to so-called secular music in 1988 with The Indescribable Wow, she began bad-mouthing fundamentalist Christianity and alienating her longtime fansfolks she felt had abandoned her the moment she began asking questions about such issues as faith and God and spirituality on her 1987 album The Turning.
The same churches and coffeehouses that once welcomed her turned her away when the album was released; her old fans, such as the man in the record store, want little to do with her. They simply couldn't embrace an artist who has doubts about the faith, who raises questions they would prefer were mouthed in private and not on the public stage. So they stopped buying her records, excommunicating her from their record stores and churches and coffeehouses.
"When I wrote the song 'The Turning," Phillips says, "I was generalizing and saying that when bad things happen to you in life it's good to not let them turn you or make you bitter. Then my life started changing radically, and a lot of my close friends turned on me and I had to deal with that. I had to really live that song, and I was a lot more difficult to live than to write.
"I definitely went through my period of being angry and really, really mad at those [Christian] people. I let go of a lot of that. I was very, very hurt and disillusioned by a lot of that, as well. I think I've let go of that more. It'll probably take me a long time to let go of that.
"I just wish that I could have found more of a home to make music, to explore spiritual issues in my songs. I wish I could have found more people to understand what I was trying to do. I wish the church would have been a place I could have done that, but it wasn't so. I wish the church would have been a lot more loving and open and kindthe way it's supposed to be, rather than the way it is. It's disillusioning to find that out. It's painful."
Sam Phillips apologizes for the static that threatens to drown out this conversation; she's on the car phone, she explains, on the way to a gig, and with T Bone Burnett behind the wheel, Sam is doing her best to handle the directions and the cellular. Pffffft. "Hello? You there?" The connection's clear for the most part, but sometimes it sort of drifts off to the point where it becomes like static ooze.
Phillips herself can be a little like that: she's a very precise woman, a songwriter who appreciates the finer details of her craftwhether a Iyric or melody comes first, how one defines the other. She also respects words, using them sparingly and precisely and eloquently; in the time it takes most songwriters to make the incision, Phillips has already spread out the viscera on the operating table.
But every now and then, she will fade outor, more accurately, withdraw into her own private world that is her art. She will, on occasion, seem to see past the rational, everyday, mundane world and speak of things like "the rational mind" and of her search for"love and perspective."
There is no easy answer to who this woman is. Like her songs, which are very precise and sparing in their use of language, Phillips speaks directly but offers myriad interpretations. She's the lapsed Christian; the songwriter who writes catchy, Beatle-esque songs; the former disco doll; the singer with the beautiful and fragile voice; the insecure performer; the accidental poet.
Phillips, 32, began writing songs 18 years ago as a catharsis, to escape those times when her mother and father would go for weeks without speaking to each other; her first song was titled 'Walls of Silence," and she has not stopped writing since then.
"Songwriting probably saved my life way back when," she says, "because I was able to make some sense of some of the pain I was going through and have that way of expressing myself."
In 1980, she signed with the Dallas-based Word label, a place where she felt she'd be able to write about the fundamental spiritualism she had studied since she began writing songs. Earlier this year, she released Martinis and Bikinis, which features "Baby I Can't Please You," directed at the fundamentalists who weren't pleased when she stopped singing to --and forthem. Of course, most people think the song is about a woman who can't please her man, which amuses Phillips to no end.
As a Iyricist, Phillips is much like the late Chilean poet Pablo Nerudaa man who wrote very simple, very eloquent works because he wanted to make them accessible to the common people. He saw this as "the poet's obligation," and his burden. Phillips similarly doesn't mask her intentions, doesn't hide them underneath flowery, ambiguous language: "I need love," she sings, "not some sentimental prison / I need God / not the political church / I need fire / to melt the frozen sea inside me."
"I'm just limited in my abilities," is how Phillips explains her lyrical straightforwardness. "I'm not really capable of being too clever. And I just gravitate toward the simpler, some of the bigger concepts."
It's also appropriate that one of Phillips' favorite writers is Walker Percy, who also didn't trust fundamentalist Christians and whose entire body of work adds up to the world's longest question; even his "last self-help book," Lost in the Cosmos, offered no answers, just kept on throwing questions at the readers until it concluded: "Do you love me? Do you know how to love? Are you loved? Do you hate?" On her 1991 album Cruel Inventions, Phillips dedicated the song "Hole in Time" to Percy; on Martinis and Bikinis, she makes reference to his book Signposts in a Strange Land, which she describes as being about "being saved from the answers by the questions."
"I really appreciate his perspective more than anything," Phillips says. "and that's the one thing aside from love that I really crave in life the most, some kind of perspective outside the normal human perspective."
But which is the most difficult to attain - love or perspective?
"Love," she says, laughing, a bit unsure. "That's really the biggest gesture you can make."
Sam Phillips, with TBone Burnett, opens for the Counting Crows June 18 at the Bronco Bowl.