Pop Debut Album Garners Praise : Singer-Songwriter Sam Phillips Embarking on Her Maiden Tour

First things first: Singer-songwriter Sam Phillips was born Leslie Phillips and, she insists, it wasn’t until producer T-Bone Burnett heard someone using her longtime nickname that she had any idea Sam Phillips was already a hallowed name in rock history as the man who discovered Elvis Presley.

“I didn’t realize it, and T-Bone had to explain to me who he was,” admits Phillips, who will be performing at the Birchmere here this week, her first appearance in a nightclub. Ever.

Obviously, it is a good time for people to discover this Sam Phillips too (or Sam Phillips 2, if you like). Her pop debut, aptly titled “The Indescribable Wow,” is likely to end up on a lot of critics’ year-end best lists: It is a superbly crafted, melodically compelling and lyrically challenging collection of what Phillips, 26, has called “acid pop,” a brilliant showcase for a voice as distinctive as any unveiled in this, the year of great new women’s voices.

Ironically, “Wow” is not the first Phillips album to attract the critics’ attention. Two years ago “The Turning,” a gospel album released under the name Leslie Phillips, also made the annual wrap-ups. As Leslie, Phillips had already made something of a name for herself in the contemporary Christian music scene. Born in Los Angeles, she had started writing songs at 14, thinking that the “born-again” movement offered the best medium to deal with the spiritual issues that concerned her. She participated in the “folk Mass-type things that were popular then,” as well as a few badly produced recording projects.

“The Turning,” Phillips’ last gospel album and her first collaboration with Burnett, was in some ways a break with the establishment. Although it was suffused with spiritual questions, the album had a very subtle, supple pop tinge, enough to be dismissed in the gospel market.

“It’s a very human Christian album, talking about our flaws, the things that are wrong with us,” Phillips explains, “so it wasn’t really well received in the Christian community. One problem with the ‘born-again’ movement is that it’s about obsessions, and true Christianity is about mercy, and you can’t be obsessed with mercy because it’s so inconsistent and so unpredictable, whereas the ‘born-again’ people are very predictable and narrow-minded. I wanted to separate myself from them because I don’t believe they have a whole lot to do with true Christianity.”

Commercially, Phillips says, “The Turning” was directed at “a smaller group. It was narrow in terms of what it was talking about, addressing a lot of Christian people. I wanted to make a clear definition between that and what I’m doing now--writing pop songs. I think it was real important to draw a line between the two.” Hence Leslie to Sam, and Sam to Virgin Records, one of the most adventurous pop labels around.

“This is really the album I’ve always wanted to make, those pure pop songs,” Phillips says. “I wanted to write about falling in love and breaking off another relationship. I went into my personal life a lot more, whereas ‘The Turning’ was about spiritual issues.”

In Burnett, Phillips found someone who not only shared spiritual concerns (it was Burnett who fueled Bob Dylan’s Christian explorations), but someone with similar musical tastes--the Beatles, Byrds, Kinks, pop with an emphasis on melody.

“Music today seems to be a lot more about feel than melody,” Phillips notes. “But I was raised on the musicals of Rodgers and Hart, Irving Berlin, the music of the Beatles, so that combination of good melodic songwriting has always influenced me, and I hope it comes back.”

It is certainly back in force on “The Indescribable Wow” (the title taken not from one of the album’s 11 songs but from a sermon title spotted on a church marquee by a studio engineer during the recording sessions). An engaging blend of pop and folk, the album has yet to garner much air play, possibly because Phillips has no supporting video and is about to embark on her maiden tour, just a few warm-up dates with a guitarist that may presage a larger, band-supported tour next year. “I’ve never played a club in my life, so it’s going to be a new experience,” she confesses.

She also may be somewhat lost in the spotlight shining on newcomers such as Tracy Chapman, Edie Brickell, Toni Childs and Julia Fordham (a fellow Virgin artist), though it is actually the distinctions that unite these women. In any case, Phillips says she has “never had women as role models. For me the pinnacle of show business is Fred Astaire and the Beatles. And I’m not really a good feminist either, because I think the greatest feminist would be Marilyn Monroe--she was sort of the sacrificial lamb of the movement, and a lot of the insecurities, fears and self-doubts she had I can really identify with strongly.”

That may explain why Phillips’ lyrics, though sometimes masked by the upbeat pop sensibilities of the music, are often somber and introspective, yet another step away from the rigidity of her roots in the ‘born-again’ movement.

“Anybody claiming to have all the answers, there’s something wrong,” she says. “The more honest and true you can be in a song the better off you are, and we all have questions that we can’t answer. In ‘Letters to a Young Poet,’ (Rainer Maria) Rilke wrote about loving the questions in life, and that’s what I’m trying to do in my songwriting. Why am I so self-destructive? Why do people hurt me? Why do I hurt them? Why are men so hard to figure out? All those questions that you have to live with and learn from and be brave enough to let go unanswered.”