Now that Phillips’s new album, “Martinis and Bikinis,” is in stores, it’ll be harder to fool strangers on a plane. The singer’s last two releases sold very modestly. (Request magazine said of one, “If all the critics who raved about [it] had paid for their copies, it might have been a respectable hit.”) But “Martinis”-smart, biting and full of immaculately conceived melodies-feels like her breakthrough record. Phillips is in peak form as a songwriter, pitting dark, elliptical lyrics against catchy pop tunes rife with Beatles references: strings, harpsichords, backward tapes and spindly, silvery guitar riffs. Now all Phillips has to do is overcome an aversion to image making. “If you’re a woman in the music business, you’re either the sex girl or you’re really hutch or you’re a waif,” says the singer, 32. “I love subtlety, but that’s not what they market-they market glaring stereotypes.” In person, Phillips is funny and self-deprecating and has an offhand southern California elegance. Told she needs some sort of image, she smiles and stares into her bowl of pasta: “I know, I know. That’s what they tell me.”
Phillips has reason to be wary of images. In the ’80s, she recorded four highly successful Christian pop albums under her given name, Leslie Phillips-albums she’s been disowning ever since. The singer grew up in suburban Glendale, Calif Her mother was a medical secretary; her father was an accountant. And she was a teenager for whom songwriting was a form of family therapy: “Basically, I was crying into the piano. One of the first songs I wrote was called ‘Walls of Silence,’ about the fact that my father would go days, weeks, even months without speaking. It’s a very damaging thing to have happen to a child, and I think my song was the first mirror ever held up to my father. He read the lyrics on my piano, and he was stunned.”
At 14, Phillips began studying philosophy and religion (chiefly fundamentalism). At 18, she signed on with a Christian label called Myrrh. “I wanted to write about spirituality, and I thought the church would be a good place to do that,” she says. “I was very wrong.” Phillips spent much of her 20s making Christian albums, which sold up to 200,000 copies apiece, and touring through churches and coffeehouses. She quit when the walls began closing in: “The audience was demanding propaganda and that wasn’t what I wanted to do. People would say you were a heretic if you asked questions, and didn’t give them the fundamentalist party line.”
Phillips’s last Christian outing came in 1987, with the aptly named “The Turning.” That album was produced by the Texan songwriter T Bone Burnett, who helped the disillusioned singer land a mainstream pop deal with Virgin Records-and then married her. Burnett, 46, has done a masterful job of producing Phillips’s three secular pop albums, all recorded under the singer’s nickname, Sam. (Burnett told her about the man who discovered Elvis; the singer now refers to him as “the real Sam Phillips.”) Phillips’s mainstream albums don’t have the slightest religious aftertaste, but the singer still yearns for vanishing commodities like truth and love. “Same Changes,” from “Martinis and Bikinis,” is essential Sam Phillips, a catchy, galloping guitar tune with brooding lyrics about society’s hype fixation: “The camera angles and the name campaigns / The stare cuts and the latest extremes / The way we sell ourselves, the way we spend our greed / How long it takes to hear our dreams.” You were expecting, maybe, the Go-Go’s?
Phillips isn’t one to go to the latest extremes. Here, for instance, are her final words on the image question: “I just try to wear a nice dress or a nice jacket. You know-something I don’t feel silly in.” Two weeks ago, during Austin’s annual South by Southwest music conference, the singer played a bright, vivid set in the middle of a blocked-off city street. Onstage, Phillips cut an unusual figure: she was wearing a black skirt and a gray sweater with the sleeves pulled sheepishly over her hands. What’s more, she was standing so preternaturally still that she got a big laugh when she finally smiled and told the audience, “I thought some of you might have ideas about choreography, because I don’t have that part down yet.”
Some tunes sent waves of recognition through the crowd, but there was no mistaking that Sam is not yet as famous in her world as Leslie was in hers. The singer is plainly relieved to be reborn, if you’ll pardon the expression. Still, she wonders at the weirdness of it all. “It’s strange to start all over again,” she says. “I feel like a big chunk of my life just disappeared-it’s like I was sleeping through those years.” But all was not lost. “Martinis” ends with an echoey, hypnotic cover of a certain John Lennon tune. “Gimme Some Truth”-that’s what Phillips has been saying all along.
