Grant Lee Phillips has scaled back the arrangements of his songs a great deal on
Virginia Creeper, his third solo outing, and the starkness helps spotlight his remarkable singing voice, which sounds at times like
John Lennon, sometimes like
Michael Stipe, and increasingly a little like
Nebraska-era
Bruce Springsteen. Like
Springsteen,
Phillips centers his songwriting in a kind of mythic America, an approach he used as well in his former band,
Grant Lee Buffalo. But it is an approach that works only if the songs and the characters in them are believable, and
Phillips' carefully considered, ornate lyrics often work against that believability. It's an old artistic dilemma -- finding a way to combine complexity and simplicity in a single stroke, and it took
Springsteen a while to find that balance, too. The starkness of the sound on
Virginia Creeper definitely moves
Phillips closer to that aim, and there are some striking songs here that have a lean, powerful ambiance, most notably "Calamity Jane," which appears to be a song about
Jane Fonda, and the epic "Josephine of the Swamps," a tune with overreaching lyrics that is just so damn good, it pulls you in anyway. Songs like these are the reason
Phillips' fans are going to love this album. The poet Robinson Jeffers once said it was hard to set fire to too much thought. We wouldn't want
Grant Lee Phillips to think less, but sometimes its best to not show it, to strip back some of the artifice and let the listener do the work. It's a balancing act that is within
Phillips' grasp, and
Virginia Creeper moves him closer.