Album of the Day — June 18
Sam Phillips — The Indescribable Wow
Sam Phillips — The Indescribable Wow
18.June.2020
Sam Phillips
The Indescribable Wow
1988
As Leslie Phillips, she was a contemporary Christian recording artist.
As Sam Phillips, she would become a secular recording artist.
While her Christian music label, Myrrh Records, marketed her as “the Christian Cyndi Lauper”(which makes me curious to hear a Christian adaptation of “She-Bop”) her secular label for The Indescribable Wow, did not attempt such a derisory analogy.
Phillips last album for Myrrh was appropriately named The Turning and partnered her with producer T Bone Burnett.
Deciding to go into secular music, she dropped the name Leslie & took the stage name of Sam Phillips and signed a recording contract with Virgin Records.
In 1988, she teamed up with producer T Bone Burnett to record her debut Sam Phillips album, The Indescribable Wow. A charming and delightful sounding album that has some dark undertones to it.
The first track, “I Don’t Want to Fall in Love” provides a solid argument for why Phillips left the Christian music scene. It’s not that the lyrics are risque’ … they’re just mature:
I Don’t Want to Fall in Love
Sentimental circumstance disguised
As fate with wild romance
Fools me into thinking you’re the water
For my thirst
Not knowing what you’re feeling for me
Only makes it worse
I don’t want to fall in love, with the idea of
I don’t want to fall in love, with love
The albums first single is another thing that Sam Phillips doesn’t want, “I Don’t Know How to Say Good-Bye to You”.
The simplicity of the lyrics is heightened by Burnett’s production and channeling a “Wall of Sound” vibe for the song. While you can certainly hear the Cyndi Lauper in her voice, there is an earnestness and honesty that Phillips has that Lauper doesn’t (or didn’t, I don’t follow her career).
The key ingredient to any good pop song is relatability, “I Don’t Know How to Say Good-Bye to You” has that ten-fold. If you’ve ever been on either side of a break-up than you know the sentiment of not wanting to, but having to say good-bye.
Sometimes you don’t want to say good-bye, they do.
Sometimes you want to say good-bye, they don’t.
Sometimes you have to say good-bye … to save each other.
I Don’t Know How to Say Good-Bye to You
I don’t know how to say goodbye to you
I’m not good at things that I don’t want to do
Should I pretend that I don’t care
that you don’t feel what I feel is there
A kiss might insist that we play
the game of lovers
A touch might give away too much
Would my feeling be discovered
Would you be scared if I just stared
And let you look inside me
Or should I smile and walk away
So my eyes won’t betray me
“Flame” finds our narrator dancing too close to the fire of love. Given the first two songs detail a couple of things Sam doesn’t want, you can guess how our narrator shakes out in “Flame.”
Flame
Flame why do I come so close to you
Vain telling me what I shouldn’t do
I saw you smoldering before
I let him burn me to the floor, flame
Flame why do you paralyze my soul
Pain if I hold you or let go
There’s nothing bluer than your heat
You make the night bleed at your feet, flame
Break my fall into this wildfire of love
Stolen from dreams
Flame why do I dance so close to you
Stained with the longing of a fool
When fires rise the shadows fall
Over the edges where we crawl, flame
“Remorse” is one of the more powerful songs. It’s open to several interpretations. I read it as a California noir tragedy.
The setting is the late ‘50’s, somewhere in the San Fernando Valley. A small house and in the kitchen sits a young couple. The kitchen is loaded with Formica and bright, happy colors. The man sits leaning on his elbows as the woman stands, leaning against the counter, looking down at her husband. The heaviness in the air is palpable as the young couple comes to terms with the indiscretion of the man:
He’s so sorry he can’t feel remorse
He tries to keep the helpless ship on course
The blameless sky pales as a storm comes
Taking it by force
He’s so sorry
The truest sign of anger is silence, it’s a signal of both defeat and indifference:
Flashes of justice
after all she’d done for him
For the first time she was quiet
As he touched her moon pale skin
It’s then she reveals that she knew and when she found out she was pregnant she terminated the pregnancy as revenge, setting the man off in a rage:
They found him hours later
He was talking to the gun
Saying Father please forgive her
She has killed her only son
I willingly admit it’s a dark read, but those last two lines turned the story on its head for me. I had to re-evaluate the narrative … and I went noir.
The beauty of The Indescribable Wow lies in a few things:
Sam Phillips almost playful voice can make you overlook the depth and power in the lyrics.
The lyrics themselves are often both beautiful & potent. Phillips eschews typical song structure in favor of something more closely resembling poetry.
In 1988, T Bone Burnett was not quite the producing legend that he is today. There is an attention to detail on this album that adds a layer of texture to the songs themselves. They’re subtle but present. It’s something he would do time and time again for other artists he has worked with. He has a unique ability to capture the essence of the artist.
The poetic nature and structure of Phillips’ album don’t do much to mask her age. She was 26 years old when The Indescribable Wow came out, presumably 24/25 when she wrote it. It’s not that she was a “young” 26, she was right where any of us were at that age.
For most, in our mid-20’s we still think the world either owes us something or revolves around us … we were still finding our footing in life and love, well, most of us had yet to realize the brutal friend that love can sometimes be. By the mid-aughts, there would be a name for it — the quarter-life crisis.
The Indescribable Wow captures that quarter-life crisis quite well.
Reviews of Phillips’s secular debut were sparse but favorable.
Jimmy Gutterman in his Rolling Stone review of The Indescribable Wow from 1988 said: “Phillips is a major talent, with great rewards to offer.”
Jason Ankeny at AllMusic called her “a pop marvel” and that the songs on The Indescribable Wow “conjure the spirit of prime girl-group-era pop, but her mature, pointed lyrics — largely devoted to sophisticated dissections of modern relationships — shrug off such easy comparisons.”
While Sam Phillips has built and sustained a career in the secular music world, broad commercial success has eluded her. However, she has been recognized among her peers and within the industry having twice been nominated for Grammy Awards and picking one up for an album that contained one of her songs:
As Leslie Phillips, she was nominated in 1985 for Best Gospel Vocal Performance, Female for Black and White in a Grey World.
As Sam Phillips, she was nominated in 1994 for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance for “Circle of Fire” from Martinis & Bikinis.
As Sam Phillips, her song “Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us” was covered by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss on Raising Sand — Grammy Award winner for Record of the Year in 2009.
Proving herself to be a diverse artist, Phillips has also done some acting. She landed the part as the mute terrorist Katya in 1995’s Die Hard with a Vengeance & also made a cameo in the 1997 Wim Wenders film The End of Violence, singing part of “Animals on Wheels” from her album Omnipop.
Along the way, she struck up a friendship with screenwriter Amy Sherman-Palladino. So while you may never have heard a Sam Phillips song, if you’ve ever watched Gilmore Girls, Bunheads, or The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, you’ve heard Sam Phillips work.
Her friendship with Amy Sherman-Palladino led her on an unexpected detour into composing music for television. Phillips has created the music for all three of Sherman-Palladino’s shows — Gilmore Girls, Bunheads, and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
Sam Phillips stepped into the studio to record her secular debut after having kicked the can around in the Christian music world. She was no neophyte.
But when she stepped out of the studio the record she released was very different from her previous work (obviously) and very appropriately named — The Indescribable Wow.