10 albums 10 days, day 6: Doppelgänger, Daniel Amos

1983

I struggled choosing between this album and its precursor, ¡Alarma!. Both are installations of a four-album(!) cycle that elevates “high concept” into the heavens.

The albums chronicle a surreal Pilgrim’s Progress through late-20th Century Evangelical culture, albeit a pilgrim who quotes T.S. Eliot, William Blake, Czesław Miłosz and other luminaries estranged from the Christian Bookstore. As an earnest kid experiencing the first pangs of disaffection within the Evangelical fold, I found the first album terrifically inspiring. I encountered the second album as a Bible College failure. It felt like an encouragement. Shake the dust off your shoes, kid — there’s quality to be discovered!

That’s not quite the message DA frontman Terry Taylor meant to impart, of course. But this album’s admixture of gimlet-eyed gut-checks and bizarre-o hijinx, all bent purposefully to a lofty theme, laid the groundwork for my appreciation of They Might Be Giants, Timbuk3, Steven Wilson, Devin Townsend and many, many others.

Female equivalent: are you kidding? Do you think a robustly chauvinist industry and its milk-sop constituents, who subsequently piled-on everything Taylor applied himself to from that day to this, would EVER permit a woman to explore the perimeters on their watch?

At the time a talented young woman named Leslie Phillips took a stab at it.

1984

Her CCM catalog shows flashes of edgy brilliance, only to be horse-whipped into reassuring banalities by CCM A&R hacks. Still, her voice steadily gained confidence, as did her sense of thematic direction. Then she landed T Bone Burnett as a producer for an album she called The Turning — which proved to be a turning-point, alright.

Burnett became a husband, then not; she changed from Leslie to Sam; said goodbye to CCM and home permanents; and continues to build a catalog that has become exceedingly impressive indeed.

1987

Other words: I enjoyed Jed Ward Keyes' snappy take on Doppelgänger, over here.

And on the Seventh Day...