Singer/songwriter Sam Phillips is far-sighted. Artistically, this trait translates into music that conveys a penetrating concern for the fuzzy future. Optically, it means she "can't see up close, I can only see things that are distant," a condition for which her art compensates, helping her ascertain "what to leave out or include."
"Martinis And Bikinis" (due March 8), the third in a loose trilogy of witty/wise Virgin albums by the East Hollywood-born Phillips, furthers the uniquely humane vision of this poet of impairment.
"Music gives shape to something that you can't express," says Phillips, "and I feel that's always been a key to what I've done."
Phillips' two previous records, "The Indescribable Wow" (1988) and "Cruel Inventions" (1991), won strong praise for their ability to explicate the inexplicable. The trepidant spell of tracks like "Holding On To The Earth" and "Raised On Promises" (both featured in the acclaimed film "Ruby In Paradise") was lent pluck by the caustic, lovely surety of Phillips' vocals, her pitch hovering halfway between a bent clarinet and a contrabassoon.
New songs by Phillips like "Same Rain," "Baby I Can't Please You," "Strawberry Road," and the fiercely beautiful "I Need Love" still use the familiar to help name the unknown, the artist employing chamber-music elements (harpsichords, string quartets), plangent Beatles/Yardbirds tokens (treble guitars, backwards-tape sequencing, sitars), and other testimonial touches to depict the personal gaps we must conquer in search of sufficiency.
"I'm a big reader of poetry and writing that has a profound side," says Phillips, "from Thomas Merton, Yeats, and Pablo Neruda to C. S. Lewis, who talks about this inconsolable longing that we all have, this feeling we try to describe as nostalgia or romance. That's what 'Strawberry Road' is about, and it takes its name from an old Iroquois Indian story that says the road to Heaven is paved with strawberries." Her throaty speaking tone teeters into a girlish giggle. "I don't like music that's either too into the head or too into the spirit - it should always have some sensual pull to it. 'Martinis And Bikinis' is just a pseudonym - the real title of the new album is 'I Need Love." It's the plainest song on the record, and I love it for being so plain. It's an orphan, or something like that."
And so, in a purely emotional sense, was Phillips, the second of three children of transplanted Texan William Phillips and the former Peggy Smith, who met and fell in love at Los Angeles High School. Peggy became a medical secretary, and a disillusioned spouse as many of the qualities (athlete, painter) that attracted her to her husband quickly atrophied. Bill Phillips was an accountant by trade and a movie buff by inclination, sharing his film fixation with his daughter (christened Leslie but nicknamed Sam). "We would see these old movies, and he would take me to different places and say, 'This is where they filmed "Gone With The Wind."' Movies were his family. It seemed magical to me when I was young."
But by her teens, her dad's behavior felt claustrophobic. "I began playing music at 14 or 15 as a cathartic thing, because I was having trouble with my parents - who are finally about to break up after letting it drag on too long and the family was sort of cracked and lying on its side. One of the first songs that I wrote was called 'The Silence,' because my dad would go for weeks, months, sometimes years without speaking! He had an older brother who died when he was very young, and it really made his mother and father bitter, and they completely cut him off instead of embracing him, so my dad had damage that helped create the environment I was raised in: strange, unpleasant and very fragmented.
"So I put this into song," she adds, "and he saw it on my piano and was shaken, because nobody had ever put that mirror up to him before. It started the process of the whole family looking at what was really going on. To me, that was a big moment."
And even though the precociousness of her prose also put her communications-starved mother on edge, Phillips pressed forward with the new outlet as the family moved from Hollywood to suburban Glendale. "I played my brother Bob's guitar, started investigating beyond top 40 music. We had a library in Glendale where you can check out records, and I found people like Randy Newman who wrote songs off the beaten path."
Phillips' talent and rejection of her chilly Protestant rearing led her to "the counterculture Christian movement in Southern California; it was a reaction at that time to the hippie movement," and also precipitated a recording contract with A&M's gospel cross-over label, Word Records. Her considerable reputation as contemporary Christian star Leslie Phillips concluded with "The Turning," a post-orthodox folk epiphany produced by Fort Worth, Texas, troubadour T Bone Burnette, late of Bob Dylan's mid-'70s Rolling Thunder Revue troupe.
The singer's studio mentor guided her to Virgin Records and secular rock'n'roll ("I wanted to explore spirituality, not dispense God propaganda"). Sam's decision to drop her ill-fitting identity as Leslie was a sincere impulse, done without knowledge of the legendary namesake who founded Sun Records in Memphis. (She later met and liked his son when Burnette worked on the soundtrack to the Jerry Lee Lewis/Myra Gale Brown biopic "Great Balls Of Fire.") Burnette and Phillips became a couple and wed, and he has produced her ever since, bringing out the brighter and bolder side of her Lone Star bloodlines.
"It's funny I ended up marrying a Texan," she says, "because my dad really wanted to get out of Amarillo as a boy because of its bleakness, and also the racial bigotry he saw black kids experience that turned his stomach. Nevertheless, I know there are some great characters in the Phillips' past Texas/Oklahoma ancestry like a great-grandfater who was on the Chautauqua theatrical circuit and an outlaw who made a sheriff dance on a bar at gunpoint!"
As important as the catalyst for any long journey is the quality of one's return. If the mark of truly accomplished artists is the full-circle acceptance of who they discover themselves to be, then Sam Phillips and the stunning trilogy she has completed with "Martinis And Bikinis" must be considered exceptional in every sense. As she bravely declares on "I Need Love": "I need love/Not some sentimental prison/I need God/Not the political church/I need fire/To melt the frozen sea inside me."
Generations onward, when others reflect on the hollows of our faithless age, the work of Phillips, like that of the poets she holds dear, will show that many still sought to improvise virtue after much common evidence of it had evaporated.
"I want to try to make a connection with all the strangers out there," says Phillips, "to be generous in that way and vulnerable, too. Music should be utilitarian but also inspire, helping you see things you can't, or to speak of what words can't say. Thomas Merton said that poetry is to point beyond all objects - into the silence."