Phillips was born in Glendale, California to parents William and Peggy Phillips.[5] She is the second of three children and has a brother and a sister.[6][7] She was given the nickname Sam, which would later become her stage name.
Phillips started singing at a young age, along with dancing, painting, and playing the piano.[8] Phillips also started studying philosophy and fundamentalism at the age of 14.[9] Phillips began writing songs as a teenager to cope with her parents' divorce.
Several of Phillips' songs became Top 10 singles on Christian radio[10] and Myrrh Records promoted her as "the Christian Cyndi Lauper". Phillips was never comfortable with this image, and it was a bone of contention between her and her label. She began using the name "Sam" professionally in 1988 when she left Myrrh Records and signed with Virgin Records in order to distance herself from her prior persona.[11]
In 1995, Phillips made her film acting debut as the mute terrorist Katya in the Bruce Willis blockbuster Die Hard with a Vengeance. In 1996, Phillips released Omnipop (It's Only a Flesh Wound Lambchop), which featured a song co-written by R.E.M. Phillips made a cameo appearance in the 1997 Wim Wenders film The End of Violence, singing part of the song "Animals on Wheels" from Omnipop. After releasing a contractually obligated "best of" album in 1999, Virgin Records dropped Phillips from its roster.[5]
In 2001, Phillips signed with Nonesuch Records, evolving her musical style to a stripped-down, acoustically based sound on her album called Fan Dance, as well as guest appearances from musical partners Gillian Welch on vocals and David Rawlings on piano, for whom T Bone Burnett had produced several years earlier. Phillips also began writing music for and scoring the television series Gilmore Girls, and appeared in the final episode of season six, performing "Taking Pictures" from her Fan Dance album. In 2004, she released A Boot and a Shoe, another collection of acoustically based songs, similar in style to Fan Dance. In 2006 she was ranked at No. 94 on Paste magazine's list of the top 100 living songwriters.[13]
After the release of A Boot and a Shoe, Phillips and T Bone Burnett, who had been her longtime producer, divorced, although they continued to work together to finish her album.[14][15][16] Her album Don't Do Anything was self-produced and released in 2008.
In October 2009, Phillips launched The Long Play, a music subscription service offering digital releases without a record label.[17] The first subscription only EP, Hypnotists in Paris, was recorded with the Section Quartet and a Christmas collection Cold Dark Night, Magic for Everyone, Old Tin Pan, and Days of the One Night Stands followed, with the full-length album Cameras in the Sky being released in early 2010. In Spring of 2011 she issued Solid State, a public CD release comprising 13 of the best songs from her subscription service.
In 2012, it was announced that she would be reunited with Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino by scoring music for the short-lived American TV show Bunheads.[18]
Phillips described her next album, Pretty Time Bomb (later renamed Push Any Button), as being "a nostalgic sort of dream of being a pop star in the 60s and early 70s. It's a sweet kind of album and I don't know where it came from. I don't know what compelled me to make it. It's probably a bad idea, but every time I listen to what I've done, it makes me really happy. So I figure, that must mean something and I should go ahead and put it out there."[19]
Push Any Button was released on August 13, 2013.[20] Phillips has described Push Any Button as 'an impressionistic version of the AM pop radio playing inside her head'—a way of 'looking at the future through the past. For the vinyl release through her website, Phillips created a limited run of unique handmade collages on repurposed vintage LP sleeves sourced from flea markets. In 2015, a suite of these collage artworks were exhibited at Gertrude Contemporary in Melbourne, Australia in an exhibition called Lost and Profound curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham.
In 2013, Phillips' first live concert album, Sam Phillips: Live @ Largo at The Coronet, was made available digitally through her website,[21] and is also the title of a 2019 documentary directed by Dave Rygalski, who filmed the 2013 performances.[22]
On November 21, 2016, Phillips released an eight-track downloadable EP Human Contact is Never Easy, which included new tracks off her next album World on Sticks.
In September 2018, Phillips released World on Sticks.[4]
Personal life
In 1989, Phillips married producer and musician T-Bone Burnett. They have a daughter, Simone, born on December 30, 1997, who is also a singer-songwriter, has recorded and performed as Simone Istwa and, since 2023, as Dagger Polyester.[23] Phillips and Burnett divorced in 2004; both have since remarried, Phillips to Eric Gorfain.[24][25]
^ abcdZinn, M. R., & Vaughn, V. E. (2014). Sam Phillips. In T. Ratiner (Ed.), Contemporary Musicians (Vol. 78, pp. 132-135). Gale. Retrieved September 23, 2022.
^Artist Biography by Jason Ankeny (January 28, 1962). "Sam Phillips | Biography". AllMusic. Retrieved February 19, 2014.
