Sam Phillips . . . Toni Childs . . . and Betsy : <i> A periodic look at who’s making news in pop music. </i> : Good Sam

Theme stories on the “emerging new breed of female singer/songwriters” inevitably bring up the influences on today’s Suzanne Vegas and Tracy Chapmans: Such headstrong, socially conscious, folk-influenced women antecedents as Joni Mitchell, Janis Ian and Joan Armatrading.

Not so with Sam Phillips, who quickly distances herself from those stories and those singers with her own three strongest influences: Jesus, John Paul George & Ringo, and Marilyn Monroe.

“Women were never really a big influence on me,” says Phillips, who has a new, highly ‘60s-flavored album, “The Incredible Wow” that she describes as “acid pop,” with a cover that makes her look like a glamorous ‘40s sexpot gone psychedelic.

“I think the pinnacle of show business is the Beatles and Fred Astaire. I never had a woman role model as a singer. I’m not a very good feminist, either, because I think the greatest feminist would be Marilyn Monroe. She was the sacrificial lamb of the movement. A lot of the insecurities or fears or self-doubts she had, I have and identify with.

“I read ‘Letters to a Young Poet’ and it was telling the young poet to love the questions in life. I think Monroe did. I want to try to love the questions in my songwriting--like, why am I so self-destructive? Why do people hurt me? Why do I hurt them? Why are men so darn hard to figure out? All the questions you have to live with and learn from--and be brave enough to let go unanswered.”

Phillips’ new record is an album of not only questions but contractions--with song titles like “What You Don’t Want to Hear,” “I Don’t Want to Fall in Love,” “I Don’t Know How to Say Goodbye,” “I Can’t Stop Crying” and “She Can’t Tell Time.” What Phillips laughingly describes as “a pure doubt album” is an introspective look at the unsure side of romance, leavened by bright, Beatle-esque harmonies and other Fab Four-like touches brought in at the hands of producer/guitarist (and beau) T Bone Burnett.

“Wow” is surprisingly dark, given that until last year, Sam Phillips was Leslie Phillips--one of the biggest female stars in white gospel music, right behind Amy Grant and Sandi Patti. Leaving that field and changing her name means having to start over, but it also means artistic emancipation.

“I first started singing and writing when I was 14 in my church, because I thought that was the place where I could be free to talk about things other than the things everybody else talked about in their songs--spiritual things, deeper things. I found out that the church really wasn’t the place where I had more freedom--it was the opposite. I was swimming upstream in that environment.

“I don’t want to be restricted, and I feel I was in gospel music. And I don’t agree with it; a lot of it is selling God. The so-called ‘born again’ movement in this country has about as little to do with real Christianity as a Xerox of a hundredth-generation print of the Mona Lisa has to do with the real thing.”