K Phillips

"Texas native K Phillips has been one of America's best kept secrets for the last half decade.. This summer the storyteller moved to Nashville - to a place in which people understand excellence. There, his ramshackle, country vibe comes off exactly as intended.. Cautiously perfect. Righteously cool..

K Phillips is one of my top five live acts in America and we're delighted (of course) to have him back with us in New York this week. Not hip to the jive? No worries, most of us aren't judgmental - but the fact remains, this diminutive character is one of the very best making music.

K Phillips moved to Nashville this summer. He travels north to New York this week and plays the grand finale of our set on Friday 10/16. Tell your friends, tell your neighbors (warn you sisters and your daughters) this is rock & roll." - Ryan's Smashing Life

"As if Lou Ann Barton, Stubb’s Bar-B-Q and SXSW weren’t enough reasons to get you all whipped up about Austin, here’s one more. K Phillips debut, American Girls, is a greasy mix of Delbert McClinton, The Fabulous Thunderbirds and the Stones, fronted by Paul Thorn. Phillips described his feelings about the musicians assembled for this session as akin to attending rock and roll fantasy camp. That’d include Stones saxman Bobby Keys, Joe Walsh drummer Rick Richards, bassist Jimmy Pettit from the Flatlanders and Soulhat’s (think Allmans and the Dead in a head-on crash with Metallica) guitarist Kevin McKinney. With his band, The Concho Pearls, and as a sideman on piano, Phillips has been tearing around Austin for awhile, but this is his first solo exposure.

Phillips got in touch with his dark side for this outing. American Girls is not a tribute to apple-cheeked Miss America candidates. The females he’s dealing with here are among deadliest of the species. He’s calling these songs character studies, but most of the characters displayed here seem to be lacking any. It’s a dip in the deep end of the white trash gene pool.

“I will kill your boyfriend if he shows up here,” he promises on Rambler, which sounds like an outtake from Exiled on Main Street.“I know it’s his house, but I just don’t care”

“Sheriff’s Wife” is as dark a piece as Steve Earle ever drug up out of the backwoods. “Whar u goin’ tonight?” he slurs in his role as the backwater sheriff interrogating his unfaithful wife before he goes to work. “Sure be a shame if that drug lord found you while I was on patrol,” he whispers menacingly, as the guitar fidgets nervously behind him. “It’d take more than prayers to save your soul.” Woof.

The music, like bar band music with soul, is as uplifting as the lyrics are hellbent. Keys displays a soulful side here he never exposed while blatting out punchlines for the Stones. Check out the King Curtis-style ride he takes on “Kat’s Song.”

“I know that I am still young, and possibly, dumb enough to play the exact kind of undefined music I want to play,” Philips wrote in his blog last year. “I don’t know how my life is going to work out, but I do know I’m going to do exactly what I am passionate about, and nothing less.” Thanks for sharing. Keep it coming." - No Depression