Singer Sam Phillips walked away from the music business five years ago after experiencing the "f-word" that many people in her Los Angeles hometown are terrified to say – failure.
Her 1996 album, Omnipop, had sold only a quarter of what its GRAMMY-nominated predecessor sold. It was almost predestined to fail: dispirited songs lathered with inappropriate production, released by a disintegrating record company that had no time for her.
So she simply quit. "I felt drained artistically and emotionally," Phillips said in a recent interview in a Manhattan conference room. "I felt like my life needed attending to personally and spiritually, so I just stopped. No career is worth the important things."
Artistic impulses are hard to turn off, however. During free moments while raising her daughter, Simone, Phillips wrote the songs that became the basis for a new album, Fan Dance, on Nonesuch Records. The album is stocked with the skewed pop and surreal lyrics she's known for. Production flourishes that had surrounded much of her previous work were stripped away, with the music mostly performed by a core group of Phillips, guitarist Marc Ribot, singer Gillian Welch and percussionist Carla Azar.
Phillips said the disc is "not built like a stadium to present music to the largest audience possible. This record is built more like a bungalow, or a salon, to receive guests – hopefully one at a time."
Too much music today doesn't leave room for a listener, she said. "It's not just because of the layers of production and sounds and the professionalism I feel in the tracks," she said. "I think it comes from an underlying attitude that comes across of people wanting to be geniuses, wanting to be great, wanting to have careers, wanting to be on the radio."
Music sounds best when she can hear the artist getting lost in the work, she said.
As a songwriter, Phillips is something of a fan dancer herself. Witness this passage from the title cut: "When I do the fan dance, I'm all the red in China," she sings. "I'm dialing life up on my telescope. Fringe and mathematics, shaking down the curtain, to find the dragon parade."
Huh?
Phillips has a gift for imagery, less of a gift for speaking clearly. Sometimes that's a plus, since it leaves plenty of room for a listener to draw independent conclusions.
Part of her style comes from a desire to "write about what's hard to put into words," she said.
Phillips sees the album as a commentary on Los Angeles and the world of Hollywood fantasy where "the places I go are never there."
She is well tuned-in to Hollywood through her work and that of her husband, music producer T Bone Burnett. She tried acting (a homicidal maniac in Die Hard With a Vengeance) and composed the score for the WB television network's critical hit, "Gilmore Girls."
In her hotel room the night before an interview, Phillips watched a "True Hollywood Story" documentary about a friend who died of drug abuse, the late actor River Phoenix, and recalled one of his nice gestures. When Phillips was about to play her 1994 album, Martinis and Bikinis, to executives at her record company for the first time, Phoenix asked to come along. After every song, Phoenix cheered wildly.
"He was trying to put pressure on the record company to promote this record, and I will always appreciate that," she said. "It was a very generous thing to do. River was such a great person and I feel so badly about the way he died."
Even though the production on Omnipop may have contributed to that album's downfall, she asked for the same producer again. After all, she lives with him. She's recorded with Burnett ever since 1987's The Turning, the fourth and last album she recorded under her given name, Leslie Phillips, for the Christian music market.
"It's weird to be with the same producer and it's odd to be married to that person as well," she said. "But I respect T Bone's artistic sense so much ... He's constantly growing. He wants to get better. He wants to keep changing and he's never trying to put his imprint on something."
Burnett is flying high now as the mastermind behind the film soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a bluegrass collection that's probably the most stunning success story in music over the past year.
Phillips said Burnett would always insist when they went out to dinner with friends in the music industry that the record would be a smash, but mostly, his companions averted their eyes. They thought he was delusional. Now, Phillips joked, "it's made it miserable at home."
"He's always right," she said. "If there's anything that I disagree with him on, it's 'what did I say about that O Brother soundtrack? Didn't I tell you it was going to be a hit?'"