Coming on Christmas last year, singer-songwriter Sam Phillips was wandering around Ocean Way studios, in Los Angeles, mulling over the final mixes of Cruel Inventions, the album that would be the follow-up to her 1988 cult hit, The indescribable Wow. Her producer-husband, T-Bone Burnett, was watching David Letterman in the lounge while Phillips listened closely to fresh mixes cranked up to a bristling volume.
For all intents and purposes the project was done, but the long awaited album would have to wait just a bit longer. Virgin Records had wanted Phillips to adda cover song to the package as a commercial safequard. The company had good reason to handle its artist with care: Wow had duly wowed the critics -- winding up on many ten-best lists -- but despite boasting some of the brightest pop hooks in town, the album had failed to connect strongly with the public.
Cruel Inventions was finally released last May, without a cover song. "We couldn't find one that we liked and were comfortable with," Phillips says now. "They just nixed the idea. I'm glad because to do something forced like that doesn't work."
Burnett, an attentive student of musical Americana, was sensitive to the magical buzz of Ocean Way. With unabashed awe, he pointed to the studio where much of Brian Wilson's masterpiece Pet Sounds was put together. He says, "I listened to that album a lot before launching into Sam's album." And like Pet Sounds, Cruel Inventions is full of inventive touches and audio wizardry but never at the expense of iintrospective themes, basic melodic appeal or enticing layers of sound.
It's midsummer, and Phillips had just returned from the U.K., where she was on tour opening for Elvis Costello. In her manager's office, she's rummaging through a pile of promo photos. She selects an image from a contact sheet of "glamour shots" in which she's mugging with a kind of pouty-but-haughty Greta Garbo look. Choosing photos and making videos seems to be a tricky business for her. Phillips is a composite and an enigma, a pop musician going deep.
"This is the problem," Phillips says. "My music is sort of alternative, but it's not quite alternative. Comments I hear from professional people are like, 'Well, it's not dance music, it's not this or that.' Nobody can tell me what it is or where it can fit. The other thing is, even thoughI do like some strange things, I'm a sucker for a pop song."
Clearly, Cruel Inventions is more complex than her previous album. "Somebody said that this album is more mean or more sad or something," Phillips says. "I don't know if that has anything to do with getting married to T-Bone" -- she breaks into a laugh -- "but that's the main thing that happened."
On the album, Phillips and Burnett have managed to make her songs audibly provocative without being merely crafty of..."tricky," she says laughing. "We don't want to trick anyone. We're just trying to make it interesting to listen to."
One of the album's tracks is "Where the Colors Don't Go," the most plainly poppish song and the one most like The Indescribably Wow. Elsewhere on the album, conventional ingredients are transformed into something stranger, more evocative, to suit Phillips' cryptic lyrics. Marc Ribot's alien guitar sounds, Van Dyke Park's savory string arrangements, thick icings of Phillips's harmonies, the antiquated synthesizer known as the Chamberlain and unusual percussion tracks make up Cruel Inventions' palette.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Phillips was a lover of mop-top-era Beatles and then her parents' collection of 78s. In her teens, she graduated to the study of such singer-songwriters as Randy Newman, Joni Mitchell (Blue was "the only record of hers that I liked") and Bruce Cockburn. Writing her own songs was the next step.
"I love clever, because I'm not clever," Phillips asserts. "I admire that in people like Elvis Costello. But I think I'll always gravitate toward melody because the old Forties music was about that. I don't hear a lot of that in music, and I miss it."
Phillips cut two albums for the Christian label Word Records but soon became fed up with that parallel universe. In 1987 she met Burnett, who produced her final album for Word, The Turning. "I'm very negative about the Christian media in general," she says. "I feel that it's exploiting somebody's faith, basically."
Through Burnett she was introduced to Virgin, her first secular home base. She swapped her given name, Leslie, for her nickname, Sam, which unwittingly connected her to the legendary Sun Studios founder, Sam Phillips.
Cruel Inventions may not introduce Phillips to the music marketplace at large, but she maintains the long view nonetheless. "Celebrity is really uninteresting, and it's tiring. If you're well known for something you love, that's great. What could be better than that? But just to be famous for who you go out with or what you wear or because you're the latest thing, that's completely unrewarding. The work is the thing," she adds, "the great thing."