THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, July 25, 1994 TAG: 9407230039
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E8 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY RICKEY WRIGHT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 59 lines
``I THINK melodies are really beautiful,'' said Sam Phillips. ``Songs are back.''
Phillips should know. The singer/songwriter, who brings her tour to Norfolk's Jewish Mother II Tuesday night, has proven one of the most striking of the new breed of folk-rockers. But Phillips' great tunes have often been overlooked in the rush to peer at her lyrics, which roil with unanswered questions about love and morality.
``Sometimes I try to leave them open-ended,'' she said of her intriguing lyrics, ``not to close them down by making them about one thing. Sometimes it's important in the personal ones not to load up your songs with detail to the point where the listener can't take anything from them.''
Before reverting to her family nickname of Sam and embarking on her rock career with 1988's stunning ``Indescribable Wow,'' Leslie Phillips was well-known in contemporary Christian music circles. She has since said that her departure from that end of the industry was a moral necessity.
Now Phillips' albums, produced by husband T Bone Burnett, resound with layers of instrumentation and vocal harmonies that make them akin both to the Beatles' shimmering mid- to late-'60s work and the magic realist fiction she loves. But the records, including the current ``Martinis and Bikinis,'' are grounded in reality.
``Baby I Can't Please You,'' the first single, is a song about an intolerant lover who, in Phillips' interpretation, also stands for the religious right.
``I don't put too much store in the videos and the pictures, because I think they take away your own pictures,'' she said. ``But we just did a video on `Baby I Can't Please You,' and we played up that side of it. I think most people would have missed the fundamentalist angle.''
Another visual, the cover of ``Martinis and Bikinis,'' is a laugh riot that speaks to the underlying themes of the disc. Phillips is depicted as, among other things, a ditzy housewife with an ironing board on fire and a woman with a half-dozen suitors, both male and female, hidden under her bed.
``We were just having fun. The photographer, Geof Kern, there was something in his book, a French play poster with all these feet under a bed, and I said, `Can we do this?' I didn't want to have a picture of me literally in a bikini. I thought, `I'll leave that to Gidge.' '' ILLUSTRATION: CONCERT FACTS
Who: Sam Phillips with Marvin
When: 9:30 p.m. Tuesday
Where: Jewish Mother II in Norfolk
Tickets: $5
Tell me more: 451-0890
Folk-rocker Sam Phillips comes to the Jewish Mother II in Norfolk on
Tuesday night.
by CNB