August 2024
To be a thing unto itself yet appeal to everybody and stay an artist in a class of his own wasn’t easy even back in the late ’60s and early ’70s when individualism reigned supreme, but Shawn Phillips managed it with rare elegance, carving up more than a niche audience and commanding immense respect of fellow musicians. The names of players who accompanied him in the studio are very much familiar to people who are not aware they have ever heard the American singer-songwriter – most of them have, although not on his platters – and the fact of Phillips not making a big deal of his voice’s presence on a certain ensemble’s “Lovely Rita” must speak volumes of Shawn’s perception of the grand scheme of things. Of course, his albums couldn’t compete with “Sgt. Pepper” – only there’s longevity of creativity to factor in, what with the 81-year-old not showing any sign of slowing down. He’s still writing and still touring, and this conversation took place in the middle of the veteran’s lengthy jaunt across Quebec.
– Shawn, you always sign your messages “H, L and C” – meaning “health, love and clarity”…
Yeah, because it’s pretty much rare, but you can’t have any one of those three without the other two.
– …health and love are understandable, but what is clarity, from the perspective of your long career and your age?
Clarity is taking the time to understand something – not only subjectively but also objectively – from your personal point of interest. And personal is subjective and in the state of everything around you that’s objective.
– Talking of subjective, I recently stumbled across Lee Sklar’s podcast that was dedicated to you, where he called you an amazing cat. What would he call you that?
Well, what Lee said was he said that my approach to music is unlike anyone else he knows. And that’s because, first of all, music has to have melody, and if you don’t have a melody, then… You know, there’s a lot of music today that is very, how can I say, monolithic. They’re basically talking, and I don’t really consider that music. I consider that rhythmic chanting. Okay, it started off literally just like that, but a lot of artists have realized that music must have melody, so they have begun to introduce music behind the chant to add that flavor to it. And that’s what I do.
– You actually started as a folk singer, doing covers, before you transitioned to originals. But why – if you could write initially?
If you’re an artist, you have to evolve – you must continuously evolve yourself and your creative work. So I went through what most people do: you go through the music that you heard during your childhood and, being from Texas, that would have been the blues and things like that. But because I traveled with my father [Philip Atlee], who was an author and always wrote on location – he didn’t want somebody telling him, “No, the hotel is on that side of the street”; he wanted to write accurately about where he was and add that to his book – I was influenced by music from all over the world. I lived in Canary Islands, I lived in Tahiti. I lived in Spain for a while, in Mexico, and I got all of these different musical influences. And then, my grandmother would listen to classical music and my grandfather would listen to Hank Williams. So what you ended up with in me is kind of a musical schizophrenic. I just try and take all the different genres of music and encompass them into one – but I have to admit I lean heavily more towards classical. There is a lot of emotional substance in classical music, and that’s just how I take that.
And one of the things that Lee really loved about working with me was that there is never any music in our sessions: the players write down the chords, but there’s never any music. This is what you’ve got to play. You do not tell Lee Sklar or Alphonso Johnson how to play the bass, and you don’t tell Ralph Humphrey, who has passed now, poor Ralph, how to play the drums. I get those people and I will not make a record or do any recording unless all personnel are in the same room at the same time. This nonsense of “I’m going to write a song and send it to you, and you add the bass to it and then send it to the drummer and the drummer adds the drums”… You don’t get any magic that way! When you get highly elocutional musicians all in the same room and allow them the freedom to do what they like to do, you really end up with an amazing piece of music.
– You mentioned your father who, as far as I know, didn’t really initially approve of what you did from the linguistic point of view. Did he warm up to it eventually?
Yeah, he did. You need to understand my father was an author. At one point in my life, very young, around fifteen or so, I had written a song that I was very proud of and I told him the lyrics to this song, but he grabbed me by the front of my shirt and he put me about that far away from his face, and he said, “Listen, punk, I have been writing for more than half a century and I still cannot write a better line than ‘Jesus wept’!” And I’m like, “Oh, thanks for the incentive, man!” And he said, “If you’re going to say a word like ‘bloodbath’, don’t say ‘bloodbath’ – say, ‘The multitudinous seas incarnadine'” [a quote from “Macbeth.” – DME]. And that’s where I started writing lyrics. When you do, one line has to have multiple implications, and that’s what I try to do when I write.
– So your songs start as poems or you write a melody and then write lyrics?
Look, the way I write, I have three criteria: anger, wonder and technique. Anger is, you look at the world around you and if you’re satisfied with what you see, then you’re probably certifiable. Number two, wonder, means to be attentive to every drop of rain on every blade of grass. And number three, technique, is keeping a balance between the anger and the wonder. That’s what I write with. Yes, sometimes I will write a song as a poem, and I may try and find music to put to it; sometimes music and words come simultaneously; but most of the time, I will write some words and then I will find a melody to fit that or I will write a melody and find words to fit that. It’s constantly changing, depending on the piece that I’m trying to create.
– But when you do that, does a melody dictate the phonetics of words or is it vice versa? Or they can initially exist independently from each other, the melody and lyrics?
There’s one song that I’ve written recently, within the last eight years or so, a country song called “C’mon Round”: I wrote it as a country tune, and I recorded it as a country tune on “Continuance” but I never play it in concert because it is the only song that I have ever written where the music removes the power of the words. So that’s a very special one.
– Some of your compositions, like “I Don’t Want To Leave You, I Just Came To Say Good-Bye” or “Parisien Plight II” – are quite long. Is it because you have so much to say and don’t want to fully express yourself?
No, composition has no limits. I mean, listen to some of Al Stewart’s songs: Al goes on a bit! The length of a piece depends on the length it was created. And to fully express myself… If it takes that sometimes, then that’s what you do.
– What about such vocal showcases as “Withered Roses” where lyrics are only a small part of the song?
You need to understand the circumstances under which “Withered Roses” was written. I’m in a small room that has a very tiny bathroom off of the side of it. There’s one bed and one table with one chair and two eight-foot Gothic windows that are looking out over the town of Positano in Italy. And I am basically describing what I see out of those windows. And that’s how suddenly it goes into rhythm and the song starts. That was pretty much the basis for the creation of that song. As for the vocal showcase, now I can’t remember it – I haven’t played it for years! I’d have to re-listen to it to understand what you’re talking about.
– So there’s no chance I’ll hear it at your upcoming concert?
No, no, no, no. You won’t hear it! (Laughs.) No, you have no idea what to expect! I’ve completely changed the format of doing concerts. I don’t do one song – I do six songs in a row! I segue the songs together.
Photo © Arlo Hennings
– You always worked with great musicians and great arrangers, like Paul Buckmaster and Michael Kamen, so did you have a say in actual arrangements?
Absolutely! But the difference is, back to what I said, you don’t tell Lee Sklar how to play the bass and you don’t tell Paul Buckmaster or Michael Kamen how to do an arrangement. And it’s funny you ask that because Paul Buckmaster was my closest friend in the world, He passed on November 7th, 2017, and it broke the trio of Paul Buckmaster, J. Peter Robinson and myself, and that was really a heavy-duty trio. We made some absolutely beautiful music with those guys.
– Yes, Peter and Paul, the two apostles of music. There is a new live album of yours, "Outrageous," is coming out with Peter on. What did you bring to the table to make Robinson interested in working with you for so long? And what did he bring to the table for you to want to retain him?
What I brought to the table was a basic vision, a basic musical vision, and I let him do anything he wanted with it. That was all because Peter’s a genius. And so was Paul Buckmaster: Paul was responsible for Elton John’s success – he did the orchestral arrangement for Elton’s first albums. And Peter is just extraordinarily creative. I guess they were satisfied when they heard the finished product. But most importantly, what they gave me was friendship. And apropos of that, of this, the new one that’s coming out, “Outrageous”… There’s a fella named Alex Wroten, whom I met when he was nine years old – his father Steve was a fan who became a friend – and I have watched this man grow into an extraordinary composer and filmmaker. Ten years ago Alex came to me and said, “I’m beginning to make a feature-length documentary on your history in music, and I have just spent the last year and a half getting interviews and videos, talking to people, all of this stuff. Would you like me to continue?” Well, duh.
And now literally about four or five months ago, my wife, my son and I, we saw the first cut of this documentary: it is six hours long, he has done over one hundred and twenty eight interviews – he’s spoken to people in Italy, France, Germany, Texas, Canada – and we’re going to try and sell this as a limited series to Netflix or one of those guys. Anyway, Alex has a friend named Roger Houdaille [the owner of Think Like A Key label, – DME], and I’ve never met Roger, but these two guys found, without my knowing, all the music that’s on "Live In The Seventies" and they found all the music that was recorded with Pete and I. I had no idea that all of these concerts had been recorded, I was completely and totally unaware of it, and so now these are coming out.
– You didn’t release a live album not for years, for decades. Why?
Because I was making other albums. I was making albums in the studio. I did “one man, one guitar” shows for forty-five years, and it got to the point when it just bored me to death. I mean, I fell asleep trying to sing “Hey Miss Lonely” at a club in Toronto years ago when I had just flown over from England, I fell asleep in the middle of the song. But the thing is, while I was doing those concerts alone with one guitar, I was hearing the music in my head that I could be playing with technology. So two and a half decades ago, I went towards it, and today I am on about the fifth evolution of that search for technology. And today on stage I can come pretty close to playing what I played on the records.
I do this by what they call looping – only when somebody says they’re a looper, that means they record four bars, play it back, record another four bars and play that back, and they get a nice piece of rhythmic music going, but they lose the one thing you need in music, which is melody – but I may as well be in a recording studio when I do a concert because I record the entire song and I do voice and guitar for up to nine minutes, and then I add bass and so on. There are no computers, no Ableton, no prerecording, no pre-sequencing: everything is in absolute real time. If I had orchestral strings on a song on the record, what I’ve done is… I have two Roland guitar synthesizers, but I trashed the audio libraries that were in the unit and uploaded Spitfire Audio libraries from England – I uploaded the professional version of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, so when I play the guitar for strings, you’re hearing the BBC Symphony Orchestra in real time. That’s what I’m doing today, and without exaggeration, some songs actually make more sound than PINK FLOYD or U2 alone in real time. And I love doing that because it’s an incredible experience: concerts are fun for me, it’s not just a job. But they’re very challenging – the pedal I use that records is unforgiving: if you’re not on one, it all goes to shit real quick.
– Would the modern music be the same if you didn’t give guitar lessons to Joni Mitchell and sitar lessons to George Harrison?
No, I wouldn’t say so. Those two guys followed their own path. I did notice one thing about Joni, though: when she played the piano, she would play the chords like she picked the guitar.
– You landed in the UK on your way to India – but did you eventually reach India?
No I did not. I never did. I never did. [Producer] Dennis Preston heard me play at a party, and he asked me if I would like to make an album. He was with Columbia at the time and they put me in the studio. And the day I arrived in the studio, THE WHO were recording “My Generation” and I met all those guys. But you’ve got to understand: Joni, THE WHO, George Harrison, all of these are very famous people, but they weren’t famous then. And you’ve got to understand: there was no concept of making history or anything with us. We were just a bunch of guys getting stoned and playing music. That’s what we were – musicians getting stoned and playing music.
– You were just beginning, when you had players like Rick Wakeman on your records. How did you get all those musicians?
First of all, I was friends with Pete Robinson and Paul Buckmaster, and they knew who the guys were. And a lot of the time when we started recording in the United States, we just wanted to use the guys that we knew were the best, A-list session guys: Lee Sklar, Ralph Humphrey, Steve Gadd – this kind of people. These are the only people that I want to play on my albums.
– Did you ever feel intimidated by those talents playing on your songs?
Of course. Of course! (Laughs.) Are you kidding? You’re in the presence of Lee Sklar, one of the greatest bass players in the world, or Alphonso Johnson. I was gobsmacked! When we recorded – what record was it? – “Beyond Here Be Dragons,” I was absolutely flabbergasted that [producer] Michael Hoenig and Pete [Robinson] had gotten Alphonso Johnson to play bass on one of the songs. And his bass playing on that one song [“Circles”] was so extraordinary, because in the middle it there’s a bass solo, and that doesn’t happen in songs a lot. It was so beautiful that I actually learned how to sing his bass solo when I played the song.
– So you were often surprised by the resulting arrangement?
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What happens is, as you are playing it you will go through a little evolution of the song, and you may make several changes and so forth, but sometimes there are some extraordinary moments. For instance, when I was recording a song called “High Away” for “Rumplestiltskin’s Resolve,” the band was Herbie Hancock’s HEADHUNTERS: Mike Clark on drums, Paul Jackson on bass and Bill Summers on percussion. Paul Jackson at the time was very badly addicted to heroin, and he was pretty stoned during the session. The song had an eight-bar intro, and Paul kept missing his entry to the song – we did six or seven takes, and he kept missing it. So I said, “Paul, man, you got to stay awake. We got to do this.” And at that moment, Bill Summers leaned down to his percussion microphone and said, “Let’s do it one more time. We got this this time.” Okay. So I went (sings), “Ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta…” I started playing that little thing at about two bars before Paul was supposed to enter, Bill Summers leaned down to his percussion microphone again, and before Paul was to come in, he said, “Hey, Paul, wake up, motherfucker! We playing the tune. Bam!” And that was it: Paul entered, and that was the take. I wanted to leave it all on the record, but A&M wouldn’t let me.
– He’s not credited on the record, but Did Eric Clapton play on “Man Hole Covered Wagon”?
Yeah, he did play there. It was a last minute thing: we were recording at Trident in London, and he happened to be in the studio at the time. So “Come on, sit in, man!” And it just kind of got forgotten that he had played on it.
– Because you ended up in England, your music acquired this English flavor as opposed to American, correct?
I don’t know. I still had all the influences that I had gotten as a child, and I kind of stuck with those. I didn’t really listen to anyone else then, and even today I don’t listen to anyone else. If I listen to the radio when I’m driving, I listen to classical music.
– Are you classically trained?
I can’t read or write a note of music, man. When I was living in Positano at one point, I met a man, I think his name was Jim Smith, who was the first violinist for the Royal Symphony Orchestra. He was visiting on vacation, and he heard I was a musician, so he came, we started talking, I took him up to the studio, and played him some things, including some of the classical pieces I had been trying to write. And I lamented to him that I couldn’t read or write music, and he said, “Oh man, for God’s sake! I spent twenty-one years trying to forget everything I learned from the Royal Academy of Music so that I could write an original melody. Don’t worry about it. Don’t even think about having to read or write music. What you’re doing is just innate within you, so just keep it that way!” So that’s it. I go by what channels through me. That’s the only way I can explain it: it just channels through me.
– Do I hear Jewish liturgy in “Wailing Wall”?
No, it was more an attempt at creating something of a cross between Middle Eastern music and what priests sing in the church – this monotonic singing, there’s a name for that, but I can’t remember what it’s called.
– And then you have a piece called “Chorale” in which East meets West.
No, no! That is the wrong title! A&M got it wrong when the tapes were sent to them. The actual title of that piece is “Through Gothic Windows On A Summer Day.” That was an instrumental piece that was actually recorded in that little house with a two-track Studer tape machine that Dick James, the publisher in England, had given me. But in 2006, I met the first violinist of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, who had heard that piece, did a string arrangement for that, sent it to me and said, “Do you like this?” And he asked if I had written anything else of that nature. I said, “Yeah, I’ve got, like, thirty pieces of music,” and I sent him, I think, twelve pieces. He took nine of those, arranged them with a conductor named [Ben] Byung-Hyun Rhee, and we performed them: it was called “Disturbing Horizons: Events In The Life Of A Prince.”
– You never leaned to this genre or that genre – you played folk rock and prog, pop and country, and you called yourself a musical schizophrenic earlier – but do you ever think of your songs in terms of style?
No. Again, I just do what channels through me. Gil Friesen, one of the vice presidents of A&M Records, came to Italy to visit me in my little house in Positano, and we kind of became friends, but later on, when I moved back to the United States in 1981 and I would be at A&M, he’d say, “Hey, I need to talk to you about so forth and so on.” I’d walk into his office, and he would look at me and go, “Shawn, you’ve got to realize this is a business, okay?” And I would simply reply, “Gil, it’s a business for you. All I care about is the music, and that’s it. I just want to create the music that I create. It’s your job to sell that, you know?” And I found that the harder I tried to take direction from someone in the music industry, the worse my writing became. You know, I wrote some absolute crap that I trashed.
– Was it your disregard for business that you could come up with such a long song title as, let me not say it in full, “She Was Waiting…” and then have a piece called “We” which was only two letters?
There’s a story behind “She Was Waiting…” I was in a relationship with a woman named Francesca Annis, who is an actress in England, and in Positano at that time, there was like a clique of foreigners – we were German, French, (points at himself) American, English, and we all stuck together – but there was a young Italian girl named Letizia who had run away from home and come to Positano in the summer. She would go to a friend of ours’ house and they would feed her and let her sleep there; then she’d come to our house and we’d feed her and let her sleep there. And finally we didn’t have any money and we decided that this girl had to go home, so we took what little money we had and we bought her an express train ticket back to Torino where she lived. We put her on the train at 7.45 in the morning, and about 11 o’clock that night, we are all in a place where we used to hang out, called “Bar Internazionale” when he phone rings. Pasquale, the bartender, picks up and says, “Oi, it’s for you!” I pick up the phone, and it’s Letizia, she’s calling from the train station and she’s crying her eyes out, saying “Oh, my mama’s not here, and I don’t know what to do!” And at that precise moment she saw her mother come into the station.
Okay, so (chants the song title) “She Was Waitin’ For Her Mother At The Station In Torino And You Know I Love You Baby But It’s Getting Too Heavy To Laugh”: it’s from a true story, it’s not made up. And if I had put one more word into that title, it would have broken the Guinness World Record, but it was Hoagy Carmichael who wrote the longest song title ever [“I’m A Cranky Old Yank In A Clanky Old Tank On The Streets Of Yokohama With My Honolulu Mama Doin’ Those Beat-o, Beat-o Flat-On-My-Seat-o, Hirohito Blues.” – DME].
– So were you going for the record?
No, I had no idea there was a record. I didn’t give a damn. That was the thing to do.
– But did you realize how it would it look on the record’s sleeve?
Why the hell would I think about that? (Laughs.) When we got to that point you’re talking, to what was going to go on the record cover, then that was the name of the song. Print it out! Or, if you don’t want to print it out, just use the letters. [The song is also known as “SWWFHMATSITAYKILYBBIGTHTL” and “Woman.” – DME]
– I saw this image of you, an A&M Records promo that made it to “Rolling Stone” where you’re dressed in a suit. Did they think it reflected what you were doing?
Well, I saw that suit and I liked it, so I bought it, and that was all there is to it. I was young and – what’s the word I want? – opinionated and egotistical, and I just wanted to look good, so that’s why I got that suit.
– You looked quite respectable in it, and now you’re a respected musician, who received Canadian lifetime Achievement Award. What’s so special about Quebec, by the way, that you play like so many shows there with only an occasional concert in Ontario? You even recorded an entire album, “The Truth If It Kills,” strictly for Quebec.
That album ended up as a mistake. But to tell you the truth, I’ve never had a full understanding of why I became so popular in Quebec. The only thing, or the fact of the matter, is that I actually have sold records more in countries outside the United States, and especially in countries where they don’t speak English. And I think the reason for that is probably because they love the melody, they like the music so much that they will take the time to translate the words, and once you get the music with the words, then the music takes you to the edge of the cliff, but the words make you jump.
– I assume you have quite a few songs – I heard some on your live recordings – that have never been out on records, and you never released your “Trilogy” album in its original form. Is there a chance for something like a box set to collect them all?
There are some pieces of the original “Trilogy” that have never been heard, and that trilogy never came out because of one guy at A&M Records who just said, “No, you can’t release a triple album set!” So they took all the songs and they put them on one record and it was called “Contribution”… There’s a man named Patrick John Scott, who is an arranger and a composer – I don’t know if John is still alive or not – and who did a lot of film work, and one of the things he did was a story I had written about something that had never been written about before. I narrated this, and I said to John, “I want to record this with an orchestral arrangement. Here are my ideas for the melody that I want that will represent The Witch in this story: (sings) Ba-da-da…” There are characters in this poem, and each character has a different melody, so he specifically picked eighty-eight members of the London Symphony Orchestra for the session we recorded, and it’s absolutely extraordinary.
That was part of “Trilogy” – and that piece of music has been sitting in the vault since the day I made it. So maybe after the documentary comes out, that might get released. And some of the other things might get released too, like an experimental piece called “Anonymous Astronomus” that is another poem that I narrate, and the music behind that is me playing my sitar and recording it at one speed, then turning the tape over, so it’s running backwards, and playing it back at another speed and then improvising to that.
– Did your work as an EMT and firefighter enrich your music in any way?
Very little, actually. Very little. A song called “The Man” that is on “No Category” is the one song I’ve written about my EMT and firefighter experience. Look, I had just had a quadruple bypass in 1994, and while I was recovering, I saw on the community bulletin board that they were looking for volunteer firefighters for Pedernales Emergency Services, so I called them and they said, “Okay, yeah, sure, come down!” As I was recovering, I would go to the station and do maintenance on the fire trucks, and they ended up sending me to two firefighting academies, and I certified as firefighter. Then, shortly after that, I certified as an emergency medical technician. And I continued to do that because, during the Nineties, even in the Eighties, disco had taken over and all that stuff, and singer-songwriters weren’t very popular. But I never stopped writing. I never stopped writing or composing. You should hear some of the classical music that I have composed, and we’ll see if we can’t make that happen at some point. I’ve been writing a ballet for five years or more based on a book by Immanuel Velikovsky, called “Worlds in Collision,” and I’d like you to hear some of that because that’s completely classical. It’s got nothing to do with making money. But that experience became an important part of my life, and it was only important because you are helping people in moments that they cannot help themselves – and the other important point is, you’re not allowed to have an ego when you’re with a patient. This is a job you don’t have to smile for.
– Do you have to smile for your musical work?
It depends on the song. If I’m singing one of the songs… Well, there are several songs, actually. One of the newer songs I’ve just written, called “As The Days Go By,” is about the pandemic, and that’s not funny, and you don’t smile. It was an experience that the entire planet went through. Every single one of us went through this, but I was fortunate enough to be with my family, and there were millions of people who were alone at home. And I wrote this song in hope that it might bring them some comfort. Some of the lines in the song are in reference to how those people helped others get through this pandemic. One of the lines, if I can remember it – it’s hard to say a lyric without actually playing it – is (chanting):
“And insistence on the distance is the key to our existence.
Your behavior is the savior of so many lives in danger, you and I.”
Okay, that’s not funny, so you don’t smile. And when I’m singing a song like “Motes Of Dust” and I sing,
“And love is peace and God is war,
You’ve seen it all go down before
And more’s the shame to stand by while it’s happening,”
you don’t smile. But very few songwriters write that kind of lyric, you know? So when I say that you don’t smile, what I’m saying is that what you’re dealing with is dead serious. And the music world is a joke. compared to that: it’s not real.
– But do you feel like you have to smile on stage, even if you don’t want to, like in this Charlie Chaplin song?
No, he’s talking about how to make yourself feel better. And I feel quite good, too: it this day and age, just waking up alive, that’ll make me smile.
