Sam Phillips: Booting down

Sam Phillips eschews digital production again on new album

By Mike Prevatt

In the course of 10 years, folk/pop musician Sam Phillips has made four albums and released five. And yet, countering the singer-songwriter tradition, she's only ventured out on the road with those songs once in that period, in 1994 (the same year she played the Huntridge Theater with the Counting Crows, which she remembers fondly).

It's not that she's lazy or has stage fright. She's been raising her daughter, now 6. And she's been doing soundtrack work for the WB show "The Gilmore Girls." But for her, there are two very good reasons to pack it up and take it out, and both are rooted in her new album, A Boot and a Shoe.

"These last two records that I've done, they are so much more about performing live," says Phillips. "They were recorded live. They are less about production than performance. I think also the kind of music--it's more personal, it's torch music. I'm compelled to go out and play."

Phillips had tinkered in some form with atmospherics, layers and technological trickery on most of her '90s albums, the most acclaimed of which was the 1994, genre-blurring Martinis and Bikinis. But for 2001's Fan Music, she stripped down her sound considerably to highlight craftsmanship and intimacy, as well as eschew the digitalia that, to her, diminished the human and performance aspects of music. She has done likewise for A Boot and a Shoe.

"I think live is more important, now that we have every kind of machinery to record things," says Phillips. "There's just no substitute for live."

Which follows right into the type of music she's been recording and is now performing. She refers to herself as a torch singer, but not the melodramatic sort you envision behind a piano. Rather, she's a subtler version, unafraid to bounce along a la Aimee Mann or Elliott Smith with the melody even if the theme or lyrics of a song wield a bit of gravitas. The role of a torch singer, like her lyrics, carries multiple connotations and perspectives, which widens the entry point for the listener.

"It's not just torch [music], or that I'm tortured, or carrying a torch for someone--it's also the passing of the torch," says Phillips. "I find something resonant in the music I'm listening to, like Billie Holliday...the broken-hearted yet hopeful person. There's something in that that's passed down from generation to generation. I feel like I'm doing that as well--holding a torch but carrying and passing a torch, too.

"As an artist, part of what I do is make myself vulnerable," she adds. "Not in a way that takes over, or where my pain takes center stage. I try to do it in a way that's more subtle, so the listener can think about his own life, and I can just be in be the background."

This approach even overlaps with her other gig as a film and television composer. You can imagine her sparer style nowadays having some roots in working on neo-gritty projects such as German auteur Wim Winders' The End of Violence, where she also performs a song onscreen. Tougher to picture is her la-la-la-ing her way into a television series aimed at young girls. But though her work for "The Gilmore Girls" differs to some degree from her solo albums, both endeavors seem to influence each other--and Phillips, too.

"It's a very different process because...there's this whole world I have to make music for," says Phillips. "And it's very short and tiny, you have a few seconds to make some kind of a music strike. It's a challenge. It's so different what I've normally done. And it keeps me writing."