Leslie Phillips: Black & White in a Grey World (1985)

This album marked a pivotal moment in her career, reflecting both the pressures of the Christian music industry and the beginning of her spiritual and artistic deconstruction.

I’ve written two features about Leslie Phillips’ work since the inception of God’s Music Is My Life. No other artist I’ve written about has generated such largely vitriolic responses, so much so that only one comment remains on the 2021 feature. In this writer’s mind, she remains one of the most important artists to pass through contemporary Christian music. Given the complete redefinition she achieved with 1987’s triumphant The Turning and her own words about the preceding album when she famously left Christian music, 1985’s Black and White in a Grey World is a complicated album to look back on. For her most ardent fans who did not move forward with her post-1987, this is the definitive album.

Phillips had been declared the Queen of Christian Rock by the press, and her work certainly lived up to the title. 1984’s Dancing With Danger was a double punch of rollicking rhythms musically on par with what artists like Cyndi Lauper and Pat Benatar were creating. One critic from the St. Petersburg Times described her as an artist who “sings like Pat Benatar, dances like Sheila E., and presents the gospel like Amy Grant.” The assessment was succinct on one level, but reductive on another.

It was easy for secular critics to make Grant the central comparison because she was the most recognizable name in the genre, but the differences were vast. Grant’s ambition to co-exist in mainstream pop music meant that her music had to carry a degree of commonality with other pop artists. It couldn’t belabor spiritual matters, but rather, incorporate them discreetly. Phillips’ lyrics didn’t share that ambition at all. Her writing all but centered on spiritual concerns and unabashedly spoke to issues confronting teenagers in the church: premarital sex, body image, and peer pressure. She balanced the edgier sounds and subjects with radio-ready ballads like “By My Spirit” and “Strength of My Life,” worshipful, scripture-based songs that shot to the upper regions of the CCM charts. While Phillips’ music and performance style were edgy for Christian audiences, they weren’t intended to crossover.

Not unlike Sheila Walsh’s "Don’t Hide Your Heart," the subject of last week’s newsletter, the album softened the rougher edges of her prior work. Black and White in a Grey World was set to surpass the success of Dancing with Danger, and it did. Produced by Dan Posthuma and peppered with some of Los Angeles’ finest session musicians and singers, including Dann Huff, Rhett Lawrence, Nathan East, Paulinho da Costa, and Táta Vega, the album was engineered to hook listeners. With radio hits like “You’re the Same,” “When the World Is New,” and “Your Kindness,” she established herself, just behind Amy Grant and Sandi Patty, as part of the trinity of the most successful women in the genre.

Much of the album appears absolutist on the surface, but the songs reveal the cracks. The title track’s call for an uncompromising “either/or” value system gets challenged by songs like “Smoke Screen” which critiqued the hypocrisy behind fundamentalism (“When someone is wrong you write them off/never give a second chance,” while “You look so holy/but you’re struggling inside”) and “The More I Know You” which apologized for the dehumanizing aspects of proselytizing (“You’re not just a notch in my belt/hunted by religious ego/A conquest for the narrow-minded blind.”).

The dichotomies of the album weren’t just lyrical. Trite praise and worship tunes like “Psalm 55,” “You’re My Lord,” and “You’re the Same” were musically and lyrically out of place, seemingly like bottom-shelf offerings for an audience happy to accept them instead of Phillips’ intellectual challenges. Contemporary Christian Music magazine’s critics agreed when reviewing the album, seeing the worship tunes as moments when the album “falters,” contending that “there are dozens of songstresses out there crooning undistinguished tunes like these.” But, not unlike the more accessible tunes on Walsh’s Don’t Hide Your Heart, these songs were placed on the albums for a reason—the average Christian consumer would gravitate to them.

from the God’s Music Is My Life archive

The album earned Phillips her first Grammy nomination, alongside Amy Grant’s Unguarded, Sheila Walsh’s Don’t Hide Your Heart, Debby Boone’s Choose Life, and Sandi Patty’s Hymns Just For You, and scored six charting singles on the CCM Adult Contemporary and Christian Hits Radio charts, with two hitting the #1 position. She embarked on a national tour with her labelmate, CCM pioneer Randy Stonehill, and recorded two additional tracks, “Larger Than Life” and “Love Is Not Lost,” for the compact disc release of Black and White in a Grey World. “Larger Than Life” helped clarify what some of the ideological conflicts between the lines seemed to be about, as it ruminated on the pressures placed on Christian artists: “You know it’s hard to keep living the things that we say when they’re making us larger than life.”

In a promotional interview that year, Phillips elaborated:

“At times, I feel the stress, strain, and loneliness of being a single performer out on the road, under a magnifying glass—I have to beware of just getting numb, of becoming insensitive to the people and to the Lord. I think that, particularly in Christian music, you tend to feel like you’re being paid to be a Christian or to be spiritual. That can be unnerving at times, and the pressure can be hard.”

In a 1987 interview with Contemporary Christian Music, she revealed some of the backstory to explain the lyrical tension on the album.

“There was definitely pressure with the last album…Basically, I let the pressures get the best of me and some of those songs are sell-outs. I didn’t do what I knew I should do. But I’m grateful I came to that point because I had to take a good hard look at why I was doing this, who I am, and what I should be doing. I needed to go in a different direction.”

In a 1996 interview with the Dallas Observer, her A&R executive at Word, Tom Willett, said of Black & White, “She showed up and did what the producer told her for the third record, which is not how I like to have an artist work. I sensed she was unhappy, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. The contemporary Christian format wasn’t holding her back, but [when] we talked about the next record, I sensed all this intellectual, spiritual, and musical growth.”

That growth, most clearly reflected in the two bonus tracks for Black & White, marked the beginning of a reinvention. T Bone Burnett was enlisted to produce her next work, which was essentially a debut album, given how distinctive it was from her prior works. Burnett told reporter Robert Wilonsky that he listened to Phillips’ albums and found them “diabolical…the production was terrible. There are some really beautiful songs on those records—standards in a certain area of Christendom—but they’re beautiful, spiritual songs covered in this chocolate syrup.” (Phillips would reimagine three of the album’s tracks, “Walls of Silence,” “Your Kindness” and “You’re the Same” on 1987’s best-of collection, Recollection).

With 1987’s The Turning, hailed today as one of the greatest contemporary Christian recordings of all time by critics, she transitioned out of the genre. She reintroduced herself to the general market as Sam Phillips, beginning a second chapter as a critically acclaimed singer/songwriter, earning a Grammy nomination for “Circle of Fire” from 1994’s Martinis and Bikinis.

Why revisit Black and White in a Grey World? Because it is a window into the beginnings of a faith deconstruction. It begins with very certain beliefs and then slowly begins to take itself a part to become something else—something stronger, something broader. The Christian music market was presented with the opportunity to reinvent itself when Phillips’ left in 1987. Phillips’ critique detailed the challenges that artists faced, the interruption to their spiritual and creative paths by both spiritual leaders and industry gatekeepers, and offered an alternative, possibly less economically lucrative path forward. Instead, it recoiled and withdrew from the inroads it had made “in the world,” and chose to preach to the choir. As the still-unfolding Michael Tait scandal rocks another generation of artists and listeners, another opportunity is being presented to reimagine the purpose and methodology of it all. Whether anyone will answer the call is still to be determined.

Listen to Black and White in a Grey World here.