"Find the mystical connection/ find the dreams under cynical wreckage/ find the winding conscious stream/ go down" - "Go Down" - Sam Phillips, 1991
"I need love, not some sentimental prison/ I need God, not the political church/ I need fire to melt the frozen sea inside me/ I need love" - "I Need Love" - Phillips, 1994
With "Martinis and Bikinis," singer-songwriter Sam Phillips is three albums and six years into a pilgrimage that has transformed her image from that of sweet, gospel music propagandist to edgy Beatlesesque auteur.
As Leslie Phillips she recorded - and disowned - four Christian albums that racked up big sales, a truckload of gospel music awards and facile comparisons to Amy Grant, the queen of Christian pop who's managed a few excursions into the secular pop- music industry herself.
As reverent and searching as her lyrics were, Phillips was decidedly irreverent when it came to her musical influences, which ran the gamut from the Beatles to spacey jazz and pop musicians she listened to while on the road.
A longtime fan of ironic theists Walker Percy, Soren Kierkegaard and Thomas Merton, Phillips never displayed the ideological purity required by large segments of the Christian music audience to qualify as a good soldier.
Increasingly ill at ease on the Christian folk-rock circuit, Phillips gravitated into former Dylan confidant, Rolling Thunder sideman and Alpha Band leader T Bone Burnett's orbit.
Burnett, an iconoclast with production credits that include Los Lobos, Elvis Costello and dozens of quirky pop acts, was called in to helm Phillips' last album on Myrrh, "The Turning."
Both artists shared a skeptical sensibility about the world and secular and religious orthodoxies as well as a love of pop music that especially marginalized them in Christian music circles.
Their partnership, which eventually led to love and marriage, also resulted in Phillips landing a recording deal with Virgin.
When "The Indescribable Wow" premiered in 1988, Phillips was already using the nickname Burnett gave her - ditching her given name in an effort to put as much distance between her new orientation and her old material.
With a lucid, ingratiating pop style that works its way into the cerebral cortex of an audience by probing and challenging its vanities, Phillips quickly became a critics' darling and cult favorite with 1991's "Cruel Inventions."
She last performed in Pittsburgh two years ago when she opened for Bruce Cockburn and solidified her local following. That performance gave further impetus to the heavy rotation she's always received on WYEP-FM.
Tonight, Phillips returns for a show that will surely be one of the best concerts of the year.