A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, Jimmy Swaggart lays down a "scathing analysis that exposes religious rock and roll for what it truly is." Given subsequent revelations about his dalliances with prostitutes, Swaggart's "scathing analysis" is hilarious, and breathtakingly hypocritical, as he rips Christian artists like Amy Grant and Stryper for the "sexuality" in their performances.
"The whole issue of Christian singers and musicians - either male or female - exuding sexuality in either their public remarks, recordings or performances is antithetical to the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ," he writes. "To be frank, it is blasphemous."
Another artist who gets the thumbs down is Leslie Phillips. Quoting a USA Today review (" . . . occasionally revealing her tummy"), Swaggart admonishes the young singer for the "sexual image she projects." When I mention this to the singer in question, she screams with delight. "I thought in a very twisted way I'd arrived when I got written up in that," laughs Phillips, who subsequently dropped Leslie for her nickname, Sam. The narrow-mindedness of people like Swaggart helped drive Phillips away from the Christian scene and into the pop world. Creatively, the move has been a blessing. Phillips's last three albums (The Turning, The Indescribable Wow and the recent Cruel Inventions) have been dazzlers, as imaginative and original as anything in contemporary pop.
The music of Sam Phillips is light and effortless, mind-expanding and inventive, haunting and sensitive. It's music that knows no stylistic borders, music that's minimalistic yet complex, music that's really out there, but accessible.
On Cruel Inventions, Phillips and producer/significant other T-Bone Burnett worked hard to give each song a distinctive sound. Phillips displays a wide range of different voices (her harmonies are spine-tingling), there's a fine balance between acoustic and electric instruments, and lots of sonic experimentation with exotic instruments.
"We were just trying to create something interesting and different to listen to in this world of drum machines and synthesizers, which gets to be so dumb and boring," says the personable Phillips, who will open for Bruce Cockburn at the Orpheum on Friday night. One of the most exotic instruments they used was an ancient synthesizer, the Chamberlain.
"It adds a funny character to things. On Hole in Time, I was trying to find somebody who plays trumpet as bad as Herb Alpert. But the Chamberlain did quite nicely, it was actually the perfect bad trumpet sound." Her lyrics are pretty cool - real offbeat, even psychedelic. Most of her lyrics come from experiences and feelings: "I write more from instinct than I do from intellect, I guess."
A good example on the new album is the moody, beautiful Private Storm, which has a dark undercurrent. "That's about growing up in the catch-phrase typical dysfunctional family," says the 28-year-old Los Angeles native.
It was her family woes that sent her to church in her teens. "My family was changing all the time, it was quite painful. But it also led me to start expressing myself through music, writing. Music really was a cathartic thing for me at first, that's how I started writing."
She started writing her own songs at 14, then began playing Christian folk clubs, where she was discovered by Word Records, a Christian label. "It's a funny thing, because in southern California, there was sort of an underground folk movement within the church. It was actually very attractive to me because it was a place where people expressed their views on spirituality and it was not dogmatic, it was very freeform and not really attached to any organization, any church in particular. I met Word records people through that. "Then as I put out records for them and started touring nationally, I realized Christian music was very much connected with the Bible Belt, the right wing and all that sort of stuff. I didn't want to be connected with that, and it was getting to the point where they were beginning to really mass-market gospel music, make a big profit . . . It turned my stomach, and I just couldn't see it any more, I couldn't believe in that."
She dismisses her first two Word albums as "real stock pop-rock stuff . . . just bad record-making, bad music." The big change came when she met Burnett, who has produced her last three albums and encouraged her to experiment and pursue her own vision.
"He was a lot of fun to work with, because he basically just said, 'This is your record, do whatever you want to do,' " she says. " 'Let's get you on record, on tape, and not worry about anybody listening to it,' basically. It just gave me a lot of freedom to do finally what I wanted to do . . . he was able to help me because he could understand what direction I was going in."