Phillips Forgoes Longing for Levity : The Pop Singer, Performing Tonight at Celebrity Theatre, Wants to Loosen Up and Laugh

For her next act, Sam Phillips intends to elicit chuckles.

The music business, says this singer of catchy pop-with-brains, needs to loosen up and laugh a bit.

“There’s so much money involved that people take things so seriously,” said Phillips, who opens for Bruce Cockburn tonight at the Celebrity Theatre, in a recent phone interview. “There needs to be levity.”

Phillips’ promise to look to the humorous side on her next album is unexpected, given her track record of making music that offers lots of tense, probing moments and very few punch lines.

Her 1988 album, “The Indescribable Wow,” wasn’t nearly as wry as its title. Mainly, it found Phillips floundering against an undertow of romantic confusion, although it also allowed her to luxuriate in some sumptuous song settings that betrayed an unabashed fondness for Beatles-style pop-baroque.

“Cruel Inventions,” released last year, offered offbeat sonic inventions and another helping of serious-minded songwriting. Phillips still sounded troubled, but not quite so confused, by issues of romance (by then she’d taken a decisive romantic step of her own, marrying her record producer, T Bone Burnett). Phillips’ striking voice, with its mixture of husky urgency and tremulous fragility, still managed to sound worried and adrift through most of the album.

Looking beyond herself in songs like “Standing Still,” “Cruel Inventions” and “Raised on Promises,” Phillips casts about for values that might anchor a society. To her dismay, she finds only blind drives (especially the one she calls “the wheel of endless greed”) that threaten to keep pushing us along without a rudder.

“There’s just sort of a longing that goes through all the music I do,” the 30-year-old singer said. “It’s not planned, but it just seems to come up. It’s very difficult to put into words, but I guess there is a sort of inconsolable longing in all of us. We can give it names like romanticism and nostalgia, but I don’t know if it is any of them.”

If longing is Phillips’ natural theme, won’t she find tapping a humorous vein something of a stretch?

The singer’s answer is that it’s possible to long for something and to laugh at the same time: “The straits we can get ourselves into when we try to follow those longings are pretty humorous,” Phillips said. “I think laughing at myself is the best I can do.”

There are in fact a couple of chuckles on her latest album, the best one coming in “Now I Can’t Find the Door.” In it, Phillips faces her deepest insecurities about love--and finds them so overwhelming that she cuts suddenly to a seriocomic non sequitur about global economics (far from a throwaway, the lines present a memorable evocation of America’s collective bewilderment at no longer being the unchallenged queen of the international prom: “Germany and Japan make me feel so poor / Like seeing some new movie star in a dress I wore.”

Phillips already seems to have a fairly well-developed sense of humor about her own position in the music business. Her two most recent albums have been for Virgin Records, whose roster includes Paula Abdul and new (and expensive) signees Janet Jackson and the Rolling Stones.

Unlike those stars, Phillips has two cult-appeal albums to her credit, making her something less than a profit center for the label. She joked that the money Virgin spends “putting doughnuts on Miss Abdul’s catering table could keep me on the road for months and months.”

“I don’t feel I’m in the same business as those people,” Phillips said of the Abduls and Jacksons. “With them it’s more about spectacle and videos. Hopefully, I’m in it for the long haul, instead of going for the brass ring.”

“Cruel Inventions” is in some respects a difficult album, despite its consistent melodic appeal. It features fragmentary lyrics and a near-constant array of offbeat production touches that underscore the confusion and apprehension in the songs. It isn’t the kind of album a singer makes if she places commercial acceptance before her own needs for expression.

Phillips says she learned her lesson on that score in the early and mid-1980s, when she emerged on the Christian pop circuit.

Phillips, who grew up in Los Angeles, was 18 when she signed with Word Records, a Gospel music label. “I tried to think about career issues when I was in Gospel music. I got mixed up. Things got a little strange. I learned that to have a little success with (music) you’re not happy about is a horrible feeling. I’d rather be anonymous and do good work.”

On the Gospel circuit, she was known as Leslie Phillips, her given name. The switch to Sam, her family’s nickname for her, came after she switched to secular pop.

Phillips said she was selling more records in the smaller Gospel pond than she has so far on a major mainstream pop label. “I was doing quite well financially” in Christian music, “but I’m a lot happier than if I’d continued there,” she said, adding that she never wanted to straddle both worlds, as Amy Grant has done.

When she started touring on the Christian-pop circuit, she said, “I came in contact with the Bible Belt and the right wing and this sleazy marketing of people’s faith in God. People were fearful, wanting to be told what they already believed over and over again. I wanted a place to be free to do the stuff I wanted to do.”