Shattered convictions I thought were reflecting you

February 19, 2018 9:03 PM

CCM artist Leslie Phillips had been marketed as "the Christian Cyndi Lauper", and it didn't sit well with her. The producer for her 4th album, T Bone Burnett, helped her morph her sound and put enough, um, ambiguity in the album that Leslie was able to start a new, secular music career as Sam Phillips. But here is that brilliant, acoustic textured, questioning, and yearning [and receommended for non CCM audiences too] Leslie Phillips album from 1987: The Turning [YT playlist, ~40m]. Side A: River Of Love, Love Is Not Lost, The Turning, Libera Me, Carry You

Side B: Beating Heart, Expectations, Down, Answers Don't Come Easy, God Is Watching You

posted by hippybear (16 comments total)

Just a few days ago I was reflecting about Phillips' transition from Leslie to Sam, and the bravery that that required and the hand-wringing that ensued. The Turning was just a great album and I think I must have enjoyed it more than the stuff she put out as Sam, which is solid music as well. Her creative and personal life were soon to become much more dynamic and even tumultuous, so this album occupies a particularly sweet place in my memory.
posted by vverse23 at 10:24 PM on February 19, 2018

I came to Sam Phillips a minute later with The Indescribable Wow, thanks to the local indie record shop which filled my impressionable late-'80s adolescence with all the great gems of period college rock. I meant to circle back on this album for years and years ... and I seem to recall you advocating for it on more than one occasion here, hippybear, which finally persuaded me to do so a while back. Phillips is one of the greats, an underappreciated pop polymath who's managed to have an interesting and eminently worthwhile career just below the radar of most folks.
posted by mykescipark at 11:37 PM on February 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

The only song of her's that I've heard is "Slap-Stick Heart" which is the oddest R.E.M. tune—a song they never finished in the studio but she had delivered to her by someone at her record label and she wrote lyrics to it. Great tune.
posted by koavf at 11:53 PM on February 19, 2018

I like all her strummy-strummy la la work.
posted by rewil at 2:24 AM on February 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'd heard the T Bone Burnett recording of "River Of Love" before; didn't know she had done it too
posted by thelonius at 4:44 AM on February 20, 2018

Huh. As much as I have always really enjoyed Sam Phillips, I had no freaking clue she started out as a Christian artist. Thanks
posted by Thorzdad at 4:47 AM on February 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I grew up on CCM and Leslie Phillips is one of the few artists from this era that I still listen to. Even her less searching songs (like Your Kindness) were unlike what anyone else was doing, and for a kid like me who was deeply devout but had a terrible home life and rejected the happy clappy simplistic perspective of popular Christianity, Phillips was a kindred spirit who was clearly exploring the margins of the Christian world with me.

I still sometimes say—although I have to explain it first now—that if the church made room for more Leslie Phillipses we’d create fewer Sam Phillipses.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 4:53 AM on February 20, 2018 [2 favorites]

I heard Sam Phillips' "I Need Love" on the radio once, around the time its album must have come out, and it stuck so firmly in my memory that I was able to look up the lyrics years later, after Google came along, and find out what it had been.

I had never heard of Leslie Phillips, in my previous life as an evangelical Christian, but the knowledge of that transition somehow immediately feels like it should have been obvious.
posted by crotchety old git at 9:23 AM on February 20, 2018 [3 favorites]

Oh yeah, crotchety old git, "I Need Love" is the hands down winner of Sam Phillips' ouvre. My favorite line is, "I need love -- not a political church."

If you're looking for the Christian Cyndi Lauper (and not a bad artist in her own right, although a little more predictable than Leslie Phillips), there is always Twila Paris.
posted by Modest House at 11:39 AM on February 20, 2018

Cruel Inventions is one of my favorite albums ever. Time for a relisten, starting with track one.
posted by Lexica at 12:05 PM on February 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

That early-80s time when CCM was still figuring itself out was pretty interesting. Sure you had early Amy Grant and Second Chapter of Acts, but you also had some really great bands like The 77s, Vector, and Charlie Peacock who put out records on secular labels and played in bars (I was too young to see them live at their peak). There were weird records Daniel Amos (Doppelgänger, Vox Humana) and awesome records by Steve Taylor (I Want to Be a Clone, Meltdown) who actually understood sarcasm and irony. Christian radio stations would play tracks off U2's Unforgettable Fire. Even Petra flirted with synth-pop and had a song called "Witch Hunt" that criticized the Moral Majority. But then things started to solidify and I lost interest.
posted by technodelic at 1:41 PM on February 20, 2018 [3 favorites]

Another hippybear CCM post. Not generally (now) a fan of CCM, but always a fan of hippybear's CCM posts! Listening to Leslie Phillips for the first time now.
posted by professor plum with a rope at 2:47 PM on February 20, 2018

There was a whole ecosystem in miniature of Christian artists who were associated in some way with T Bone Burnett. For a period of several years in the late '80s, he put his shine on albums by several artists who wanted to escape the gravitational pull of the standard CCM of the day. One of the others who comes to mind -- and who I think warrants his own FPP someday -- was Tonio K, who recorded a couple of excellent albums which received halfway decent promotion and distribution on A&M Records. It turns out that he did some backup vocals on The Turning as well. Just like I said, an ecosystem in miniature.
posted by vverse23 at 4:27 PM on February 20, 2018

That early-80s time when CCM was still figuring itself out was pretty interesting. Sure you had early Amy Grant and Second Chapter of Acts, but you also had some really great bands like The 77s, Vector, and Charlie Peacock who put out records on secular labels and played in bars (I was too young to see them live at their peak).

I actually saw the 77's when they opened up for Julian Cope and the Three O'Clock at either the Warfield or the Fillmore in perhaps 1987? (Julian Cope - who we were mainly there for - was touring Saint Julian at the time). They were pretty good and definitely not what I'd call 'preachy' (I didn't even know they were supposed to be a "Christian" band until years afterward). Can't say I was that impressed by their subsequent releases that I came across though.

And just to prove that Christian music comes in all forms...
posted by gtrwolf at 8:21 PM on February 20, 2018

Not musical I know, but Sam Phillips was also good as the German terrorist Katya in Die Hard With a Vengeance. Imdb only lists two other film/TV appearances afterwards though.
posted by gtrwolf at 8:31 PM on February 20, 2018

This afternoon, avoiding work, I checked out a couple of videos of Leslie/Sam Phillips.

The first (link and it's mercifully short) was of her singing "Strength of My Life", a lovely if cloying CCM hit from her early years, at the Dove Awards (the Christian equivalent of the Grammies) in 1985, her hair feathered to the nines, her frilly pink dress the Platonic ideal of frilly pink dresses. She was a glowing talent even then, but even then there was a gravitas that drilled under the facade of the Christian music industry.

The second (link because it's awesome) is of her in 2009 performing four songs for an NPR Tiny Desk Concert, now well established as her identity as Sam, her performance incredibly self-assured and her songs, as Bob Bolen says, "like perfect, miniature pop dramas".

The Turning was the axis upon which she made her 180 degree turn. It was released on Myrrh Records, her then-current Christian label, with a partnership with A&M (IIRC?) Records for wider distribution. It launched her into a new marriage with Burnett. It enabled her to leave -- forever -- contemporary Christian music, which had been a safe and nurturing fold for her. It remains to this day a great record*.

* One must forgive the prevalence of gated reverb: blame a particular former Genesis drummer.
posted by vverse23 at 9:53 PM on February 21, 2018