Sam Phillips: Fan Dance : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

For her fifth album, Sam Phillips has pulled the plug. In collaboration with husband/producer T Bone Burnett, Phillips spent the last decade crafting electro-pop albums that took odd twists and turns until the song no longer remained the same. Fan Dance, her first album in five years, gets plenty weird as well. Tom Waits' sideman Marc Ribot continues his support of Phillips' elliptical word puzzles with acoustic guitar and the mysterious Optigan, but the songs were cut mostly live with few overdubs, which gives the performances a very serious early-Seventies living room feel. Two solid duets with faux-mountain gal Gillian Welch ("Five Colors," "Love is Everywhere I Go") provide near-conventional song-slinging, while Phillips sounds spiritually fulfilled with the cross-legged and wordless chant of "Is That Your Zebra." At twelve songs in just over thirty minutes, Fan Dance is footloose and fat free.

ROB O'CONNOR
(July 30, 2001)