Since emerging from the haloed ghetto known as Contemporary Christian Music in the late 1980s, Sam Phillips has recorded six albums of consistently sharp-edged music while navigating the boundaries of numerous radio genres — without ever managing to find her way across those boundaries into real mainstream success. Encouraged to expand her sights beyond CCM by future producer, songwriting partner and husband T Bone Burnett, Phillips launched her secular career with albums that dabbled in the thematic as well as the musical obsessions the two of them shared, from roots rock to psychedelic pop. More recently, after a less-than-successful flirtation with electronica and dissonance, Phillips has stripped down her sound and released two acclaimed albums of acoustic cabaret-pop.
Full disclosure: I’ve been in the tank for Phillips since the first night of her first tour as a secular artist, an opening slot at the Birchmere in Alexandria, Va., in December 1988. My wife and I got to the club a little early, just as Phillips and the evening’s headliner, Luka Bloom, were heading out to dinner. Soon Sam had invited us to join them, and we were off to RT’s restaurant down the street to introduce Sam to the wonders of turtle soup. (She liked it; my wife, not so much.)
Later, back at the gig, Sam had what could have become a very rough night, breaking two strings on the only guitar she had brought onstage. By the time Bloom brought out one of his own, Sam had valiantly and good-humoredly picked her way through the tricky (and bass-note-heavy) instrumentation of her early semi-hit “Flame” (download) on the four remaining strings. It was one of those moments that earn an artist the undying loyalty of everyone present, and I can’t help thinking of that night every time I hear her sing. Heck, I thought of it even while watching her vamp her way through the sultry silence of her Big Hollywood Moment a decade ago, playing villainous Jeremy Irons’ mute girlfriend in Die Hard With A Vengeance. Fortunately, she’s never quit her day job.
Martinis And Bikinis (1994) When Martinis And Bikinis arrived it made the biggest splash of Phillips’ career, earning unanimous critical raves as well as a Grammy nomination, and even poking its way onto the Billboard 200 album chart (the only time she has managed that feat). More important, the album consolidated all the themes she had pursued since The Turning, in particular her relentless search for “truth” in a life that, particularly through her conservative-Christian upbringing and her journey through the CCM circuit, had surrounded her with “meaning.”
To drive the point home, she closes the album with a cover of John Lennon’s “Gimme Some Truth” that trades Lennon’s vocal snarl for an weary tone of resignation; to borrow from another rock god, she clearly still hasn’t found what she’s looking for. The Lennon tune fits here not just because of its themes, but because, generally speaking, Martinis And Bikinis takes Phillips and Burnett’s mutual Beatlemania to new heights. “When I Fall” and “Same Rain,” the latter co-written by the two, are veritable primers on Revolver-era guitar licks and harmonies, and the Pepper-y imagery that permeated earlier albums reaches full flower power here on tracks like “Strawberry Road” and “Same Changes.” You’d swear it was Ringo on drums all the way through.
“Baby I Can’t Please You” serves as a neat bookend for “Gimme Some Truth,” and features a neat lyrical trick: Even as Phillips skewers an unnamed politician through the verses (“You try to tell the world how it should spin, but you live in terror with the hollow m3n”), in the chorus she turns on herself with a mixture of self-loathing and pride familiar to persecuted peoples who’ve been forced to hear themselves derided by their oppressors. Finally, in the glorious “I Need Love” she presents a manifesto that sums up everything she’s done since she turned away from the Christian market: “I need love/Not some sentimental prison/I need God/Not the political church/I need fire/To melt the frozen sea inside me.” And from wherever he is now, Lennon smiles.
From: https://popdose.com/the-complete-idiots-guide-to-sam-phillips/
