Playing guitar and being right there is a fitting description of Fan Dance, Phillips’ first album for Nonesuch, which came out in the summer of 2001. She calls it a private record, “like somebody whispering in your ear and it ended up that way [literally] because I don’t think anyone knows about it.” Despite going largely unnoticed, the album was a watershed moment for Phillips.
“I had a funny feeling Omnipop was the last record like that,” she explains. “It felt to me like the whole thing was ending, that the music business as we know it, recording as we know it, was ending, and that I was ending something in my artistic life. And it took me that long, until Fan Dance, to reinvent, to figure out if there was anything left of me as an artist and what that was.
“I’d even say that after I made Fan Dance was the first time I ever thought of myself as an artist. I don’t know what exactly I thought of myself as, but I got wrestled to the ground and I said, ‘Uncle.’ I am. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing. That’s ‘Ciao’ to fame and fortune. This new record, Fan Dance, going out and singing — none of it is career oriented; it’s just the next step to whatever the next part of my life is.”
As to how that road to the future might wind, Phillips had a literary premonition right before she started writing Fan Dance in the form of Collette’s The Vagabond. In it, the protagonist, RenAe NArA, a music hall performer, struggles between her desire for love and her need of independence.
The story and the setting left an impression to which Phillips can relate. “I had played at a place that, to me, was this little club where dreams would kind of float up to the ceiling and pop, one of those really desperate, sad, broken-dream places,” she says. “And that completely inspired me, perhaps because I was headed there.”
Fan Dance is one half of a kindred pair with Phillips’ new album. A Boot And A Shoe was recorded last year with help from musician friends including Carla Azar, Jim Keltner and Marc Ribot in addition to Burnett, who played bass and again produced. So connected are the records, in fact, that Phillips says she contemplates a special two-CD package where they are sold together.
A Boot And A Shoe is a hushed affair; it’s not quite an angular whisper like its predecessor. Melodically it should resonate with listeners as coming from the woman who made Martinis & Bikinis, which could not be said for Fan Dance. As its title suggests, Fan Dance offers a more fleeting reveal, whereas A Boot And A Shoe leans forward, has something to tell. One musical difference in execution is that the new album’s sound is centered on drums; the beats and fills harken back to Phillips’ Virgin albums and help to carry the songs to the listener. Her distinct voice, simmering and sultry, remains central.
Both albums are short by contemporary standards, clocking in at a little more than half an hour, with several songs running barely three minutes, a few under two. What’s remarkable is how complete they feel — even “I Wanted To Be Alone”, which has only six intertwined lines: “I said I wanted to be alone/Alone with him/He said he wanted to be alone/Alone with her/She said she wanted to be alone/Alone with me.”
So successful is Phillips at striking a sense of deeper meaning, a knowingness behind these words, that it takes listening to the entire song, if not another full listen, to recognize that the lyrics simply repeat and loop into each other.
Short as it is, “I Wanted To Be Alone” is actually more involved than the Fan Dance track “Is That Your Zebra?” — its lyrics are simply the words “What, when, who, how, where, when.”
“I just make it as long as it seems it should be,” Phillips responds to an awkward question about how one knows a song is done and need not be longer than a minute and forty-five seconds or six words. “I actually took two songs off the record this time, because it [felt] a little bit long. Somehow all the transitions seemed a little much to put somebody through, so I dropped a few. It’s a strange record, too, because T Bone was very busy. You know how busy that man is. No Depression knows how busy he is,” she adds with a laugh.
“When I started the record I did a lot of things live with the two drummers and he wasn’t there for most of that. I became infatuated with drums. And for quite a few months we would try overdubs, and I couldn’t stand anything competing with them. Finally I cracked a few months later, having some distance and time, then T Bone re-entered the process and he managed to put something on besides the drums, not very much, but at least we had some bass on there.”
The rest is all Phillips. “I feel like I have to inflict my guitar playing on people now. It’s a heartbeat. It gives it a certain wobble that’s really important.”
Several weeks before our interview, Phillips played her first L.A. gig in nearly ten years at the intimate and artist-friendly Club Largo. Though for most of the show a keyboard player accompanied her and several songs also featured a four-piece string section, one of the distinct impressions cast by the performance was that Phillips is starting over as an artist, and moreover, starting over alone. Her introduction certainly set the stage:
“Welcome to an evening of torch music, capital T. Torch as in tortured. Torch as in carrying a torch for someone, as they used to say, which means loving someone who doesn’t love you, but having hope anyway. And maybe that’s the worst thing you can have. Or maybe if you hope long enough and hard enough, you become so worn out and broken that you’re finally able to see what’s next. Perhaps the world opens to you then. Maybe there’s hope after all. You can think about that if you don’t want to listen.” Later, she introduced a guest in the crowd, the late author Henry Miller, and told him to meet her after the show.
