Sam Phillips - Largo, Los Angeles, CA, 6-6-2019

It's a real shame about Sam Phillips. She's a great musician, yet so few people know about her. A lot of that is due to her own choice. She's stated she isn't interested in being famous, as she had a taste of that in her early days as a Christian music hit maker as "Leslie Phillips," and didn't like it. She hardly ever tours or do much to promote herself. 

But if you're reading this, hopefully you have the taste to check out her music if you haven't already. This is an ideal starting point, in my opinion. It's an excellent sounding bootleg that has songs from all parts of her career (except for her Christian "Leslie Phillips" years, which she has distanced herself from).

As mentioned above, Phillips almost never plays concerts. But when she does, it's usually at the Largo. This is a small club in Los Angeles that is a very special place that musicians love to play more for the fun of it than to make money. Phillips lives in Los Angeles, so it's probably very convenient for her as well. We're very lucky to have this recording, since according to setlist.fm, she's only played three concerts from 2013 to 2020.

Although this essentially is a one-off concert, you wouldn't know it by listening to it. For many years, Phillips has played with a small string section, and they join her here. In 2001, she pretty much reinvented her musical style, switching from Beatlesque pop to a more mellow singer-songwriter style. Ever since then, she turned her back on her earlier style, maybe playing only one song from her pre-2001 years if you were lucky. But for this concert, she finally seems to have warmed up to her older music, playing three early songs. That makes sense, because on her more recent albums she's sometimes gone back to her earlier, more poppy styles. She also does songs from different points in her career, almost making this into a "best of" selection. 

This concert began with a long medley of some of her early songs. I didn't include it because it was an instrumental done only by the string section before Phillips took the stage. It sounded a bit like forgettable Muzak. The concert is stronger without that.

This is a bootleg, and it's an audience recording, not a soundboard. However, sometimes audience recordings can sound as good as soundboards, and this is one of those times. Keep in mind this concert took place in a club of only a couple hundred people, if it was full. It was an appreciative audience that was dead silent during the songs, so there probably wasn't much difference from a soundboard if it was recorded well, which it was. One minor snag was that the banter between songs was a bit quiet and the audience applause at the end of each song was a bit loud, but I've made adjustments to fix that.

This concert is an hour and 18 minutes long.

01 talk (Sam Phillips)
02 I Want to Be You (Sam Phillips)
03 World on Sticks (Sam Phillips)
04 Continuous Limit (Sam Phillips)
05 talk (Sam Phillips)
06 Plastic Is Forever (Sam Phillips)
07 talk (Sam Phillips)
08 How Much Is Enough (Sam Phillips)
09 talk (Sam Phillips)
10 Fighting with Fire (Sam Phillips)
11 talk (Sam Phillips)
12 American Landfill Kings (Sam Phillips)
13 talk (Sam Phillips)
14 Same Rain (Sam Phillips)
15 talk (Sam Phillips)
16 Different Shades of Light (Sam Phillips)
17 I Need Love (Sam Phillips)
18 talk (Sam Phillips)
19 She Remembers Everything (Sam Phillips)
20 Edge of the World (Sam Phillips)
21 Candles and Stars (Sam Phillips)
22 What Happens Next (Sam Phillips)
23 talk (Sam Phillips)
24 Reflecting Light (Sam Phillips)
25 Teilhard (Sam Phillips)
26 talk (Sam Phillips)
27 So Glad You're Here (Sam Phillips)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15249591/SamPhps_2019_LrgoLosAnglesCA__6-6-2019_atse.zip.html

The cover art photo comes from a different concert in Los Angeles in 2019, held at the Grammy Museum.