Sam Steps Up: Singer-songwriter Phillips produced

Photo by Autumn de Wilde

Good marriages can make for good music. So can bad breakups. Take Sam Phillips, the stylish singer-songwriter, not the legendary Sun Records producer. During her marriage to T Bone Burnett, she released four superfine pop albums, from 1991's The Indescribable Wow to 2001's Fan Dance. During the dissolution of their relationship, she recorded another, 2004's riveting A Boot and a Shoe, again produced by Burnett even though their interpersonal stress seemed to be addressed here and there in such lyrics as "I rode the pain down, got off and looked up / Looked into your eyes / The loss opened windows all around / My dark heart lit up the skies" ("Reflecting Light").

Now Phillips has a new CD, Don't Do Anything (Nonesuch), released last week. It's the first one she's produced on her own. "There wasn't a question about that on this record," she said in a phone call from New York City. "I really thought I knew exactly what I wanted to do—to go in with a band and just get these songs down."

Many of the new record's tracks are more or less acoustic, as was A Boot and A Shoe. But the sound on several others is marked by the almost white-noise drone strumming of Phillips' electric guitar. That came about when she was taking a second pass at the title track in the studio. "It didn't work at all the first way we recorded it," she explains. "I wanted to try it again and picked up an electric guitar, and that sent the drummer off in a different direction, and then we put the string arrangement on it. I felt it all came together, and I kept using the electric guitar—I was craving that kind of rough sound in the middle of everything else."

One song, "Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us," is already well-known thanks to Robert Plant and Alison Krauss recording it on their Grammy-winning CD Raising Sand. "Alison and Robert are two of the best voices around," Phillips comments. "Alison does it in a more sublime way than I do. My version is very earthbound, and I think hers is off somewhere up in the air, as it should be. I'm very proud and shameless about it."

Thematically, Don't Do Anything isn't easy to pin down, which is the way Phillips likes it. "Even though everything is triggered by the personal experience, I don't want to exclude or tax the listener by going on and on confessionally," she says. "I want to make it a little more interesting or a little more broad."

One tune does touch on the broken relationship with her ex (who counts the Krauss-Plant album among his many production credits). On "No Explanations," which opens the CD, Phillips sings, "I thought if he understood he wouldn't treat me this way."

"I warned T Bone that I was taking something straight out of one of my journals," she says. "But I also had a conversation with him about the fact that while I felt that way, and it was a snapshot in time, every time that I sing the chorus—'This is bigger than you and the part of the truth you trust / This is the break in us'—I think more of the United States and what our country's been through than I do what T Bone and I have been through. It seems to resonate on a larger scale for me."

Phillips won't be able to mount a full-scale tour in support of Don't Do Anything until this fall; two of her band members are rather busy for the summer-drummer Jay Bellerose is touring with Krauss and Plant, keyboardist Patrick Warren with Tom Waits. So she and guitarist/mandolinist/violinist Eric Gorfain have been performing acoustic duo versions of some of the new songs in low-key sessions at Borders bookstores, wrapping up tomorrow at Borders Union Square in San Francisco.

"There is a place for these big bookstores," Phillips says, after singing the praises of endangered independents. "I went into one right around Christmastime last year in Los Angeles. It was a little cold outside and there were all kinds of people in there—families and homeless people and Christmas shoppers—and all the seats were taken. People were hanging out, reading books, having coffee, conversing, and I thought, this is funny, it's a store, but it's also providing a place where people can congregate and read books, almost like a library with coffee.

"When Borders made the offer, I met with them and found real people that cared about books and music. So this turns out to be a good way to celebrate the release of the record, by having these little record parties, signing copies if people want me to, and giving them a little live music until the band can get back together in the fall."