The spirit of Sam Phillips’s sublimely resigned new album is summed up in the chorus to the first song: “No explanations / No more explanations.” Phillips here offers a glimpse of life on the wiser side of the romantic-
existentialist divide (this is her first album since her divorce from the producer T-Bone Burnett). While the latest songs are as raggedly tuneful as ever, there’s a new, rigorous economy to them that, considering their deeply confessional nature, is to be admired.