...and I am an ethereal girl

Listening to Shawn Phillips pulling sound out of a guitar is one of life's sublime pleasures. I was able to experience this when he appeared at Generations Nightclub in St. Louis on February 6.

He went from chiming bell tones to echoing cascades spilling out too fast to be anything but the work of a magician. These were mixed with unbelievable chords and some other sounds beyond description. I can't adequately describe what he was doing--like five chords in as many seconds, among other virtuoso fingering tricks‹but it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

Going into the concert, I knew Phillips also as an engaging singer‹but I only knew that from the two albums I own, "Second Contribution" and "Rumpelstiltskin's Resolve," where his voice swoops and dives and stretches out notes to impossible lengths. Incredibly, this night's performance lived up to the reputation he'd established on albums now thirty years old. The years melted away as his voice hit its stride.

His music seems to stand a little outside time‹unabashedly hippie-styled lyrics (for example: "And the splendor of the mountains/through the glittering, splashing fountains/Are the things that stop my breath/and make me weep") would seem to date him, but there's a strand of his inspiration that hearkens back to medieval ballad writers. He cut the figure of a bard, with his wavy hair falling to his waist and resonant singing voice, but when he opened his mouth to chat between songs, a Willie Nelson twang came out. It spoiled a bit of the magic, but was entertaining in its own way, especially when he told stories like the one about Neil Armstrong's other famous quote from the moon (for details on that, you'll just have to see his website at www.shawnphillips.com).

He played Steel Eyes early on as a gentle meditation, his voice so soft the whole room was straining to hear. He paused for several long beats of silence after every verse, but the audience was familiar enough with the piece (and his look of concentration was so intense), no one clapped before the final, ringing chord. And then he grinned like a little kid, unselfconsciously pleased with a job well done. The grin would return many times during the evening.

He switched guitars for the next number, strumming it once and happily exclaiming, "God, I love it when they're in tune!" That's a good summing-up phrase for Phillips‹a man more totally "in tune" with his guitar would be hard to find.

There were times when words no longer served the song, and then he'd just sound out wordless notes, playing his voice like a duet instrument for the ubiquitous guitar. His range is such that when he hit low notes, my friend Diane heard the windows rattle. And though he complained about catching the flu in California, his high wails seemed nearly unaffected.

It's rare to see anyone so obviously delighted with the process of making music, and being so talented at doing so. On one song, he managed to go from finger-picking to employing a pick without skipping a beat, and on another, he exhibited his incredible lung capacity and vocal precision with a slow slide up the scale.

For an encore, he gave us a song that drew applause as soon as he began the familiar melody. It is, however, a song with one of the more improbable titles in the music world: "She Was Waitin' For Her Mother At The Station In Torino And You Know I Love You Baby But It's Getting Too Heavy To Laugh." It started elegaic, but he launched a full-on feedback attack by song's end. Then he let us hear a song in progress called "The Man," to be featured on "The Craft," a CD Phillips promises will be out in eight months or so. If his work in this concert is any indication, this CD of nonstop music--"unless of course the music calls for a space," being engineered for the audiophile in THX sound, will be a work of stunning artistry by one of the great musicians of our time.