Sam Phillips

No, she's not that Sam Phillips. Born Leslie Phillips, the re-christened Sam took her better-known professional name partway through a recording career that had started in Contemporary Christian music, then took a radical pop turn. Liverpool's most famous musical export echoes through "I Need Love," but Phillips, no moptop wannabe, invests the song with an almost desperate plea for the kind of relationship that seems just beyond her grasp. Fab Four influences (circa Help!) emerge again on "Baby I Can't Please You," featuring strings arranged by pop genius/Beach Boy collaborator Van Dyke Parks. And not since the heyday of the British Invasion has a string section melded so seamlessly with an unabashedly rocking tune as it does in "Where the Colors Don't Go" from 1991's Cruel Inventions.

In Next Steps, Sam goes secular, gets artsy, and more.

It's hard to believe that The Indescribable Wow, Sam Phillips' "debut" album sounded as confident as it did . . . but it wasn't really her first album (see Deep Cuts for more on that). On that disc's "She Can't Tell Me," Phillips proves herself as both a gifted pop historian and a true artist, incorporating sounds and textures from the Everly Brothers to the Bee Gees without seeming retro in the slightest. If you ever wondered what Elvis Costello might sound like if he were a girl being backed up by Billy Preston (and, hey, who doesn't?), check out "Taking Pictures" from Phillips' Fan Dance. And on "All Night," Phillips visits the same dark alleyways Tom Waits frequented in Rain Dogs, looking for love in all the wrong places.

In Deep Cuts, we bid Sam adieu (at least for a moment) and say hello to Leslie.

A very Lennon-esque guitar crunches over a swirly vortex of noise in Martinis and Bikinis's "Sign Posts," as Phillips' honey-in-amber voice floats on top like orange juice in a tequila sunrise. And to round it out, we conclude with a couple of tracks from Sam's altar-ego (sic), Leslie Phillips. Back in the '80s, she recorded several very untraditional albums for Christian labels, before her music took her outside those fairly rigid confines. The title track to Dancing With Danger pounds its message with a tom-tom's thump rather than a heavy hand as she rocks out while warning a backsliding wild child that "God is looking at your heart." And the stripped-down "Your Kindness," with only an acoustic guitar for backing, lets the sweetness of her unadorned voice bask in the radiant glow of divine love.

Let's see if we can straighten this out: Sam Phillips was born Leslie Phillips. At first she even recorded as Leslie Phillips, cutting several contemporary Christian albums back in the '80s. And even though she had the nickname Sam since she was a child, it wasn't until she turned her back on Contemporary Christian music that she began to use the name Sam professionally, to distinguish her new direction from her old records. Surprise! The name Sam Phillips was already fairly well known to rock 'n' rollers (he did found Sun Records, after all), but she decided to keep the moniker anyway. Sam's musical taste runs to the eclectic (how could it not, having been married to producer T-Bone Burnett?), but the common thread is an uncanny knack for unforgettable melodic hooks and a voice that would be mesmerizing even if she were reading bingo numbers.