Sam Phillips

Item: A Boot and a Shoe
Author: Steve Stockman

A Boot and a Shoe

(2004)

Reviewed by Steve Stockman

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Label Nonesuch RecordsThe Phantom Tollbooth2004

adult alternative art rock folk rock singer-songwriter

Sam Phillips has been releasing quietly beautiful works of poetry and slightly left field melodic quirk for near twenty years since she changed her name from Leslie to Sam, exited the straightjacket of contemporary Christian music and married then songwriter and now super-star producer T-Bone Burnett. Her albums have always been about taking on the powers of the modern age, the shallow surface of fashion and technology, and delving deeper to find what is more meaningful and lasting and what is of more help in being saved from all that is diluting our living and stopping our dreaming. I guess her frustration with the Christian industry was that that same shallow surface spirit was alive and well there too only masquerading as sound and biblical soundbites. They were no deeper, however, and her work since her first album as Sam, 1988's Indescribable Wow, has been about a much deeper salvation.

A Boot and a Shoe is obsessed with the other dimension of life "I want to walk deep" she states in the opening "How To Quit" and follows it in "All Night" with "Don't look at what you can see." The deceptively gentle and lovely "Reflecting Light" is a rallying call, a war cry to take on the way things are even if it means being perceived as a crazy outcast; "Give up the ground under your feet/Hold on to nothing for good/Turn and run at the mean dogs chasing you/Stand alone and misunderstood." These songs are constantly throwing up dilemmas about time and choice and freedom and doubt. "We're not experts/We're believers..." she sings on "Love Changes Everything" and on "Hole In My Pocket" she goes on "I hear my heart breaking into faith/Pieces of soul building up a mountain/Moving seeds of doubt." The final song is her end time apocalypse "when time opens the earth we'll see love/Has been moving all around us making way...help is coming...one day late."

If there is a better player with words than Phillips I would love to be introduced. Her quirk is maybe in need of acquiring but this album in its much gentler, stripped back, and acoustic disposition is as good a place to get the taste. If acquired it will transform your soul's diet -- forever!