IT’S NOT ALL IN HER HEAD Sam Phillips
Mar 12, 2010
Subscription to exclusive recordings: $52. Access to intriguing ancillary content: an internet connection. Window into artist's world: priceless.
BY STEVE KLINGE
Sam Phillips is at a transition point, yet again. Now without a record label, she launched her own year-long subscription-based web adventure, The Long Play. It's the fourth phase of her unusual career. As Leslie Phillips, she began in the early ‘80s recording well-received albums of Christian music. Then, with the help of her soon-to-be (and now ex-) husband T Bone Burnett, she turned to baroque and sometimes exuberant "omnipop." Then, beginning with 2001's Fan Dance, she stripped the gloss and most of the electric guitars; they were torch songs dwelling on severe, direct emotions. Fan Dance was the first of a trio of albums for Nonesuch Records, the last of which was 2008's self-produced Don't Need Anything.
In October of 2009, Phillips launched The Long Play. For $52, patrons are promised five EPs, one full-length album, and access to a website that Phillips curates as if it were an artist-in-residence program, with the residence being wherever one's computer provides the portal into Phillips' world. Aside from archiving the music as it becomes available, it includes the Phone Booth (audio and / or video interviews Phillips conducts with folks such as Joe Henry); a Photobooth, Scratchbook and Silent Movies (varieties of Phillips artwork); Was It All In My Head (her musings / bloggings) and the Drumfill of the Week (a ten or twenty second clip). It's a window into the working world of an artist. It's an experiment in allowing access into a creative process. It's a business venture. It's a bargain, for Sam Fans.
Artistically, the three EPs thus far have not been radical departures from her Nonesuch years, although Phillips has used the short-form to experiment. The series began last October with Hypnotists in Paris backed with strings from the Section Quartet. In December came Cold Dark Night, a set of Christmas tunes both traditional and original (with an eerie version of "Away in the Manger"). Then for Valentine's came Magic For Everybody, a set of conflicted love songs.
She's working with a core of longtime collaborators-Jay Bellerose on drums, Eric Gorfain on guitars and violins, Jennifer Condos on bass-and most tracks are done live or with minimal overdubs (some of the holiday EP was recorded live around a single microphone). But guests drop in, too: Joe Henry sings on "Silent Night"; guitarist Greg Leisz helps out on the Magic EP. The subscription budget in some ways dictates the arrangements, and the goal is to be serious but informal. As she sings on "Magic For Everybody," "Don't let perfect make you blind to this beautiful world / Don't erase your crooked line / Take your mistakes and come with me."
As Phillips says, "We're friends and we love to come and record in our little space and either make food or go and have some great food, because we're all into food. So it becomes a club house and a group effort, you know, the Long Play."
In a conversation in early February, just before the release of the third EP, Phillips was engaging and voluble. In contrast to the desperate and often torturous sentiments of her songs, Phillips laughed readily throughout a conversation about the goals and opportunities of the Long Play and that touched on her work on the music for The Gilmore Girls and the use of her song "Reflecting Light" in Crazy Heart, the film with music overseen by her ex-husband T Bone Burnett.
**
BLURT: How have you dealt with the Long Play subscription commitment deadlines? Have they put you under pressure or have they prompted you to be more creative?
PHILLIPS: It's been a little bit of both. It's been kind of hard because instead of handing a recording in to a record company that you're contracted to, you start thinking, well, wait a minute, there's Bruce and there's Jill and you have names and faces and you think, oh, they're expecting another EP-so there's a little more pressure. And of course the schedule is definitely very different for me because I've always taken a very long time between records because I've always wanted to do the best that I could and make it as good as I could. Sometimes you have to go through some trial and error on that.
That comment could trap you, couldn't it? You say you always wanted to do the best that you could and then took a long time, but now you're pressuring yourself to do it more quickly?
Exactly, yes. It may be good, it may be bad, to do it more quickly. I learned that it was a good thing doing The Gilmore Girls TV show. Having music due every week during the season, that was a challenge that was different for me, like completely opposite, doing these tiny instrumental songs, things I had never done as a recording artist. This is a little bit more in the middle. I don't have to do music every week, but I do have five EPs and a record to finish in a year. So far, so good. I like that: I think it does push and challenge me in a good way
What opportunities do you have now that you are operating without a record company?
A record company would never do five EPs and an album in one year because they would never have the set-up time. I don't think Virgin or Nonesuch or any company would have let me contribute to the album cover or do the artwork myself, which I did on the last two EPs. Or being able to do the little Phone Booths [with artists from other record labels] that I've done. And the day after the earthquake happened in Haiti, I put up a notice hoping that my subscribers would be okay with this, but I did take part of our subscription money, the funds, and sent it to the Red Cross. So we're not going to have horns on that song, okay, that's all right [laughs]. We need to be generous at a time when things are tough for everybody, let alone so drastically tough in Haiti. I couldn't have given to the Red Cross out of a record company budget.
But mostly for me, it's the scheduling and, in this time when times are tough, to be able to be generous and to give away a track when I want to, whether the record company agrees with that or not. I have control of that, and that's been fun. We gave away a few tracks last year just to get ready for the Long Play. I'm happy that I can not only give people the five EPs and an album in the end, but also slip in some goodies now and then.
It's almost like the early ‘60s thing when artists were churning out a couple of albums a year.
I don't know if that was a terrible thing... It's a challenge, and I think it's a great one. It forces me as a songwriter-this is part of the selfish reason I wanted to do this project-it forces you to write a lot more. Like I didn't know the theme of this next EP [Magic For Everybody]. I thought for a moment maybe it was going to be a country EP, but it didn't turn out that way; it's a little bit of everything, which is nice, cause it's just whatever songs come into being at the time, that's what's gets put on the EP.
Did producing the last record yourself prompt you to think that you could do this project on your own?
I actually cut one version of the album and then decided to go back and recut half of it. Even in that process I got a lot of confidence in weeding through and assembling an album that I felt strongly about. I think more and more I feel that it's not necessarily about broadcast quality. I think that the actors and movie stars and celebrities that we love are usually flawed. They have big noses or they have weird chins. And that same aesthetic I feel about music: I want to hear the squeaks and the rattles. The hem might be showing and the hair is all messed up. I think that's good. I like that about music: I want to hear more noise, more the person coming through, not so much the machinery and digital gloss and a lot of the things that are on records today.
That ties in with the sense of honesty that you're known for: the songs go along with that unvarnished directness with the content of the songs as well as the performance. How much of that is craft and how much is keeping the first take or live-take origin of the performance?
I try to just do what sounds good. I try not to be locked into a concept, even if I might start off with one. We just go in with the attitude that we're going to try this live and see if we get it. And if we don't, maybe I go back and redo the vocal or redo a track. I just try to make the best version, the most charming version. With a live performance, sometimes you don't get one, and sometimes you get one that you couldn't duplicate. We had that happen on Sunday in the studio when Jay Bellerose first played on a new song I threw at him, and he did a very eccentric part right off the bat, and when we did a few more takes it was clear that he wasn't going to do that again. [laughs] He couldn't have imitated it; it was just odd. You learn to spot those and go with those, if you're brave enough or if that's what you love or what sounds good. So, I guess I just try to make it sound good to my taste. Like adding the salt to something: ‘Salt to taste,' or something like that.
Drumfill to taste?
Exactly: drumfill to taste. [laughs]
I'm curious about the business side of the Long Play. Is the state of the music industry something that you and your musician friends sit around and brainstorm?
No, no, but everybody is talking about it. I just felt it [the Long Play] was a way to just keep going, to keep making music. For me, it is less of a business model than an art and music installation on the web, or an art project on the web. I have fans or listeners who have been listening to me it seems like a very long time, anywhere from the last ten or twenty years. I felt like I would like to do something generous for them, since they've been with me for a long time. And also I was thinking of who I like, writers or directors, of someone like Wes Anderson; I love his films, and I would love to sign up by subscription to be privy to how he works and what he thinks of certain things, his Phone Booths, if you will, him talking to actors. It was my interest in that myself but also just wanting to keep working, to get the music out, because I do strongly believe that in these financial times and with the meltdown of the business, it's important to be generous, it's really important to keep working, to be giving away tracks. I think that's really important because that attitude and that solidarity will get us through this slippery slope that we're on.
How will that get you through if you're giving things away? How will that help you survive economically as a musician?
Well, you know, you can always make a plate of spaghetti and share it. [laughs] It's a morale booster. If we sit down and cry, we're not going to get to the other side, we're not going to go very far. I think everybody feels like, well, nobody has a lot of budget or money, so let's just play music, because that's what we do. One of my old, old friends said one time, if you don't love it enough to do it for free, then you don't love it. How will it help us survive? I don't know.
This is me having faith. There is no concrete business plan, and once the Long Play is over, there's no guarantee what will happen, if anything.
Are you having faith that your subscribers are keeping the songs and not file-sharing and spreading them?
Well, actually, that wouldn't be a terribly bad thing. They have been very generous with me. When we first started the Long Play, we didn't put any music up. We just said, if you want to join it, we have a year for $52, it's basically a dollar a week, and they didn't even listen to any music, and they signed up. And that was great; they just said we're just going to go in for the ride. Whereas on iTunes you can listen to anything before you buy it.
[Ed. note: subsequent to this interview, the Phillips camp announced that her newest EP Magic For Everybody would in fact be made available via iTunes and other online digital retailers as of April 20.]
Do you have a sense of knowing who your subscribers are?
A little. We have a message board on the site, so people communicate through that. They've been great. There are few more outspoken people who I've known through some of the shows and tours. A few of the Long Players know each other. It's definitely a smaller circle, which was what it was meant to be. I didn't want to tax the general public with all this music. It's really for people who like my music and want to hear more, like an author who you'd want to read all of their books. It's that kind of a thing, rather than, I'm going to get two million subscribers or get lots of hits on the website.
So it's work with the audience you have rather than seek to build a broader audience?
Well, yeah, for now. I think that's something that been missing in music. Everyone goes for the big hit and the big audience. I know we have to have a certain amount of listeners to survive, but if you start making songs for the radio and for other people's opinions and trends, instead of sticking with your vision and what you have to say, I'm not comfortable with that. Maybe when you're young, you're trying to figure out how to be successful, but right now, that's really not my aim.
Has the subscriber base met your expectations?
I really had no expectations going in. Actually for doing no press at all, just putting it up and going through my mailing list, I was very pleased. And also, it is a higher price, it's not one single for 99 cents and there's no physical copy either-some people really want a physical copy, still. I think we're doing very well, considering. We'll see, once the word starts getting out. I've just started doing some press on this. It's all been very grassroots. Rather than a business model, maybe I just thought that this is something interesting and good to do because it is outside the box, and maybe it will inspire somebody else to come up with a great model or come up with the great thing that all of us would love to do. When it's so wide open like this, I think it's important to be making music and to be making art and to be pushing things around so that people see different ways of surviving and doing things.
Is this occupying all your time now? Are you doing other film work or anything?
No, I've really dedicated this year to the Long Play. I've signed with a new publishing company [Notable Music], which is a big deal for me because I'm usually very loyal about these things... I do think there are interesting possibilities in the film world. I've been very lucky and had songs in movies and television in the past, and now that's become kind of the only way you can survive as an artist. I hope that will change. I was very proud to be included on the soundtrack to Crazy Heart, which I think is a really beautiful soundtrack, and to be included in the film.
Was that T Bone's choice to include "Reflecting Light" in the film?
The story I got was that Jay Bellerose, my drummer who works with T Bone a lot, and T Bone were in the studio and Scott [Cooper], the director, said, "Does anyone know how to get ahold of Sam Phillips?" Of course, Jay and T Bone look at each other and laugh, and said, yeah, I think so, we can figure that out. I guess he really liked that song, but it ended up that it almost came out of the film. They do these things by committee, and I think somebody said, I think maybe it should be a sexier song there because it's a love scene. T Bone fought very hard, and I think he was right, because it's really a moment about the female character, her moment with this man, it's not just about sex. It's more of a tender moment, I guess. It's definitely out of the [realm of the] rest of the kind of music and soundtrack; it really grabs your attention that this sounds different from what you've been hearing.
Any hints about what the new EP or what else is in store for the Long Play?
The new EP is called Magic For Everybody. There was a twisted Valentine theme in mind, not all the songs are strictly that. Some of the songs are kinda of positive, kind of happy because we're in the doldrums of the beginning of the year, there's all this crazy weather, we're not in spring yet. Sometimes you need a little shot in the arm. It may be my favorite EP so far. And I'm very excited about the new record and very excited to get that going; I'm hoping it will be one of my best.
Will the record be on a label?
I would guess not, but that's not out of the realm of possibility. It will be released broadly, and we hope to do a whole physical package of the Long Play if enough people are interested, maybe even vinyl, to do something really nice for people. But we will do a physical CD and make it available to anybody who wants to buy it, not just the Long Players.
It's an exciting project.
I'm excited as a songwriter to just have this many new songs to put into my body of work. I hope there are no complaints; I hope I can maintain my standards.
blog comments powered by Disqus
More Photos
