Had she not met Burnett, Sam might never have gone on to receive tremendous critical acclaim after The Indescribable Wow was released in 1987. Burnett gave her a slight push in the right direction by introducing her to the music she missed as a sheltered kid. T Bone played her Jimmy Reed and Hank Williams; she introduced him to such artists as Pablo Neruda. Burnett's no Pygmalion, he says, merely the partner she needed in the studio and in life.
"It has been a very dramatic metamorphosis, and it's still going on," Burnett says of his wife's changes during the past decade. "I don't think she's come out of the chrysalis, but when I met her the process was beginning. She said she was going to quit gospel music. She was sick of it, the people were hypocritical and worse...She hasn't lost the faith. She lost faith in Christians, in fundamentalism. But I consider that a good thing."
Burnett and Phillips agree Omnipop is Phillips' record: She picked the musicians (including drummer Jim Keltner, and former New Bohemians Matt Chamberlain and Brad Houser), wrote every single note and word, and made the decisions about the sound down to the last echo. The new album is her inevitable masterpiece. It's the sum of its predecessors, the mark of a woman who found her voice then climbed on the roof to let everyone in the neighborhood hear it.
"Maybe I'm just a product of my environment," she shrugs. "I think the thing that's been bugging me, that shaped this record, is the way singer-songwriters mercilessly subject you to their, I don't know, their pain. They write these songs about pain and all the gory details, or they just do this mindless stream-of-consciousness stuff that just drives me crazy. There's no craft. Anybody can do it. And I know, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're at the end of our civilization and why write anything that means anything and all that, but on the other hand, I just think there's room for some craft and humor." Even as recently as 1994's Martinis & Bikinis, the Beatles-tinged record that came close to making her a pop star, Phillips was still exorcising her old demons: "I Need Love" and "Baby I Can't Please You," her shoulda-been hit singles, dealt implicitly with the church and fundamentalism ("I need God, not the political church"). Now she's writing about why she loves men, about washing her brain "down the info TV drain," and about begging a lover to "let me be your TV."
She likes to say Omnipop is her side of television's "one-sided conversation," and there are recurring themes of worth and worthlessness in a cold technological age. "You don't have to be talented or do good work or be smart," she sings in "Animals on Wheels." "It's perfect for me." Another song is titled "Zero, Zero, Zero," about using weaknesses as strengths, a subject about which Phillips perhaps knows too much.
But the record is also a sly love song set to a carnal back beat and is filled with a playful sense of humor missing from her earlier albums. Guitars coil around organs and percussion sneaks in and out through the mix; all the instruments come at you at once, and it's left to the listener which way to go with them. It's an elegant and dynamic anomaly in these bland times.
"I just tried to apply a little craft to it," she shrugs. "To me, a song like 'She Loves You' by the Beatles communicates so much. Certainly there's the air of 1963 that's going into the microphone and the feeling of the times, but that song also doesn't say a whole lot. It's a simple teen-age lyric, but I think it communicates so much hope and something way beyond what the lyrics are saying. I think in terms of the music and the lyrics, there's really a lot of space in that record. There's a lot of space for musing and for the listeners' thoughts.
"What I feel today about most singer-songwriters is it's too claustrophobic for me. There's no room for my thoughts, for my life when I listen to a song. I don't feel like I'm connecting with the artist; I feel like I'm being talked at incessantly, which is something my dad would do." She chuckles. "Gosh, maybe we should have brought along my shrink for this."
Tom Willett has remained friends with Burnett and Phillips; he still calls Phillips "Leslie," though she changed her name to "Sam" during the recording of The Turning. Willett himself left Word only recently, helping the Christian-music label nurture its mainstream distribution deal through Epic Records. He's not devout anymore, either, but he's kept the faith--in Phillips, if nothing else.
"Watching her make that slow transition, it was obvious then what she would become," Willett says now from his home in Virginia. "I could almost project the next five albums. She's one of the most literate pop musicians I know. I knew conceptually and lyrically she was going to be a real poet. I remember listening to Cruel Inventions in the studio just after she and T Bone finished making it. I listened nonstop, and my comment at the end was what I feel every time I hear her newest record. I said, 'Congratulations, you've stopped the slide of civilization into the dumper. It's real, honest, and smart, and has so much musical soul...it's the kind of record I want to make, and it's the kind of record I want to buy. It's perfect.'
