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"This is bigger than you, or the part of the truth you trust/ This is the breaking up." —from "No Explanation"

There's always a temptation for people to turn art into autobiography. When a songwriter pens a tune about love lost, we assume it's the songwriter who has lost love, rather than the perspective of someone else close to the writer (or someone fictional). When songwriters allude to a crisis of faith, we figure it's their own faith that has been shaken. When grief is the subject of a song, our natural inclination is to think it's borne out of a very specific period of grief in the artist's own life. And, of course, such assumptions are sometimes correct. Art is always going to be personal on some level, but that doesn't mean there isn't room for imagination in the creative process alongside experience.

Still, there are probably some experiences you just can't write about until you've been through it yourself. As much as there is to be said for writing in character, there's no mistaking the power and sharp edges of Sam Phillips' latest album, Don't Do Anything—an album so candid, so frightening in its honesty, it couldn't have been made from anything but real life. And anyone who heard Phillips' previous album, 2004's masterful A Boot and a Shoe, knows just what her life has been like over the past few years. With its open-vein lyrics about betrayal and heartache, its weary humor and its weathered testaments to faith and hope in the darkest of hours, that album was unmistakably the product of the breakdown of Phillips' marriage to producer T-Bone Burnett. Call it her Blood on the Tracks if you want, but in truth, it's an album so personal that it's hardly an archetypal break-up album. It's an album only Sam Phillips could have made.

So, naturally, the same can be said for Don't Do Anything—essentially, a sequel. Oh, there are some crucial differences here—if anything, it's a wearier, darker collection, and the music is more varied, blending the organic ensemble playing of her past two records with the ominous electric guitars of Cruel Inventions. But it's impossible to hear this record as anything but a follow-up to A Boot and a Shoe, another record that plumbs the depths of heartbreak and pain and comes up with fragile but nevertheless vivid glimmers of grace. Not only is the subject matter the same, but she even uses some of the same metaphors and lyrical motifs. Don't hold it against her; when you're dealing with devastation like this, you're probably not going to figure everything out with just one record.

Obviously, there's a lot of turmoil on this album, stemming not just from her divorce, but from her own feelings of frustration within the music industry, which has never really given her a fair shake. "Imagine no one noticing you," she sings at the beginning of "Flowers Up," and it doesn't sound like anger—it sounds like resignation. Also, keep in mind that Phillips was once part of a different industry—the Christian music biz, where she recorded a string of popular albums under the name Leslie Phillips before growing frustrated with the artistic confines of the industry and heading to a mainstream label. She may have left Christian music, but not Christianity, as this album gloriously demonstrates; for all its honesty about the heartache and brokenness of this world, its convictions about divine grace are just as strong.

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